In 2022, lawmakers created Service Oklahoma to improve the slow and antiquated systems used by state-contracted private operators to deliver driver license services. The change came after the decentralized system caused major backlogs in processing new and renewed driver licenses over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Service Oklahoma was meant to consolidate fragmented state licensing and vehicle registration services, reduce wait times and expedite REAL ID implementation.
Earlier this year, the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency (LOFT) launched an evaluation to determine whether Service Oklahoma has met the expectations set by lawmakers.
LOFT staff presented findings to a joint oversight committee of lawmakers last week.
"Contrary to legislative intent, citizens' experiences vary between state and private operators," Economist and Fiscal analyst Jeromy Knapp said.
Those varied experiences, he said, stem from inconsistencies in how regulations are enforced in the state's public-private partnership with private tag agencies.
State law sets fees and establishes rules about hours of operation for those businesses. But the businesses decide who gets hired, what additional services they offer (notary stamps for example), and the actual hours services are provided.
The setup, Knapp said, allows for access to state services in rural areas without having to encumber tax dollars with large investments in physical infrastructure. But it comes with drawbacks too.
"LOFT attempted to measure the average wait times of customers at licensed operators and Service Oklahoma facilities," he said. "However, licensed operators are not required to track these times."
There are 234 private operators and 31 state-run locations delivering driver license services in Oklahoma. And because much of the technology is consistent across both types of providers, LOFT instead was able to track how long the average "transaction" takes and compare it to before Service Oklahoma was created.
"Transaction times were measured as the amount of time it takes the customer service agent to complete a transaction after the customer has been called to their workstation," Knapp said. "Service Oklahoma reports transactions are being completed 38% faster."
Wait times — how long people spend in the lobbies waiting their turn — have been reduced from an average of one hour and eight minutes to 24 minutes at state-run locations since they've been open, according to the report.
The LOFT report also found that Oklahoma offers more access to driver's license and vehicle registration services when compared to similarly sized states like Louisiana and Oregon.
But that access may come at a cost: Oklahoma has the tenth-highest driver's license fees per capita in the nation, at a cost of just over $10 dollars a year.
The full report, which also includes policy recommendations from LOFT, can be found here.
What Service Oklahoma officials and lawmakers are saying
Jay Doyle is Service Oklahoma's Chief Executive Director. He said he partially agrees with the LOFT report's findings, pointing to the improvements as a sign of more to come.
"We do agree that the customer experience does vary between both state-run facilities, licensed operators, and even between licensed operator and licensed operator," Doyle said.
But, he continued, improving that is the whole point of the agency. It remains a work in progress, he said, especially in urban areas where there's a congestion of providers with inconsistent services.
"We inherited about 250 total licensed operators that were all operating in their own methods…their own business practices," Doyle said. "And so I think trying to drive those into a consistent pattern is something that we've really focused on."
LOFT oversight committee co-chair Rep. Trey Caldwell, R-Faxon, said the data doesn't match his experience."Maybe ya'll are okay with 24 minutes, but I've never waited more than five minutes at a tag agency ever in my life." Caldwell said. "And so I'm really confused about where we were tracking this data. Maybe that's the norm up here in the city. Maybe that's the norm for Service Oklahoma. But that's not the norm in southwest Oklahoma."
He also took issue with the direct comparison between private operators and state locations.
"You're comparing apples to oranges," he said to LOFT officials. "It's my understanding that the SOK locations only provide driver's licenses...not writing tags, not transferring titles or anything like that, whereas these other facilities are. This is only making up about 10 or 15% of the work they do."
One possible solution proposed by LOFT was to reduce the number of operators and consolidate services further.
Caldwell and his co-chair in the Senate, Chuck Hall, R-Perry, both hesitated to accept that idea. Hall is also the co-creator of Service Oklahoma.
"I'm for the long term viability of the licensed operator," Hall said. "But it's got to be a business model that is successful."
