State Sen. Declan O’Scanlon and state Assemblywoman Serena DiMaso (both R-Monmouth) criticized the reopening of New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission facilities on July 8 following continued reports of massive lines and fighting among people waiting to access the facilities.
“This sort of insanity is just another example of the broad, administrative failures we have seen during the reopenings,” O’Scanlon said.
“Local officials reached out to us with serious safety and traffic concerns over the volume of people wrapped around the building at multiple locations, and serious traffic overflow.
“Happy to see today that the Governor decided to exempt MVC workers from furloughs, but that would not have been an issue if the administration hadn’t dragged their feet months ago when the proposal came up.
“On top of that rollback, there needs to be a more concrete plan in place here; have people in alphabetically on certain days, but also we clearly need longer evening hours to be restored as well,” O’Scanlon said.
“There were weeks upon weeks for MVC to come up with a plan to allow for a more organized reopening,” DiMaso said.
“They could have split up the days for when people were able to come in for certain types of services: licenses, registrations, etc.
“Further, I even introduced legislation with two of my Assembly colleagues to allow private industry to help us increase our capacity to facilitate title and registration from private sales of used vehicles,” she said.
“We all knew there would be a massive influx of people when they first reopened if we did not set up some sort of system to manage that.
“Yet we are still getting calls from our towns concerned their police cannot handle these crowds.
“To add insult to injury, we are still charging people an online service ‘convenience fee’ when many cannot actually go to the physical location due to massive lines,” DiMaso said.
“If we are trying to maintain proper social distancing while we reopen, we cannot do that with hundreds of people packed on top of each other in lines wrapped around buildings and parking lots.
“We certainly don’t want more inane micro-management of reopenings, however, that does not mean we should forgo a system for reopened government facilities that ensures efficiency and safety for residents, workers and local law enforcement,” O’Scanlon concluded.