NC budget would let driver licenses expire in 16 years, not 8. DMV says that’s a problem
Tucked into the 625-page state budget bill is a provision designed to reduce the number of visits people must make to a Division of Motor Vehicles office.
The problem, according to the DMV, is that the measure contradicts federal law and wouldn’t work.
Under the version of the bill introduced Wednesday, licenses granted to drivers age 18 to 65 in North Carolina would not expire for 16 years, twice as long as the current renewal period of eight years. In addition, drivers would be able to renew their licenses online every time, rather than being required to visit to a DMV office every other renewal as they must do now.
Starting at age 66, drivers would still need to renew their licenses every five years, as they do now. The renewal period for commercial drivers licenses would remain at five years, or three years for school bus drivers.
The provision was part of the House version of the budget last spring. Rep. Frank Iler, a Republican from Brunswick County who chairs the House Appropriations Committee for transportation, said at the time that leaders in the House and Senate appropriations committees came up with the idea to benefit both drivers and the DMV.
In theory, drivers wouldn’t need to worry about renewing their licenses as often and would be less likely to need to stand in line at a DMV office when they do. Meanwhile, the DMV wouldn’t need to process so many renewals and would face smaller crowds in its offices.
But in practice, the law wouldn’t work that way, according to the DMV, because it would run afoul of the REAL ID Act, the law Congress approved in 2005 to tighten identification standards after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Nearly 3.7 million licenses and IDs in North Carolina are now REAL IDs, meaning they meet those tougher standards.
The law says states should not issue any licenses or IDs that are valid for more than eight years. All but two states — Arizona and Montana — comply with that requirement now, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research and education organization supported by the insurance industry.
If the budget bill passes, North Carolina would have the longest renewal cycle for drivers licenses in the country and twice as long as allowed under the REAL ID Act.
In addition, the REAL ID Act requires that the photo on licenses and state IDs be replaced at least every 16 years. That requires an office visit, contradicting the budget bill provision that says they could be renewed online.
While well intentioned, the provision in the budget bill has other problems, says DMV Commissioner Wayne Goodwin. DMVs across the country update their license designs every few years to make the cards harder to counterfeit. Cards that are good for 16 years won’t benefit from those updates, Goodwin said in an interview.
“The longer a credential is out in public use, the greater the opportunity there is for counterfeiters to discover and replicate the embedded security measures,” he said. “And believe me, there are many measures that the public isn’t aware of.”
Even if the provision didn’t violate federal law, the DMV says it would be years before it would start to reduce the number of people seeking renewals. That’s because the law wouldn’t change the expiration dates on current licenses. In other words, everyone with a license now would still need to get it renewed in less than eight years.
Goodwin said DMV officials told lawmakers about the problems with the proposed changes after they were introduced last spring and asked that they be taken out. He said he was surprised to learn they were still in the budget bill that surfaced this week.
“This is an issue that seems simple on the surface, but it is incredibly complex,” Goodwin said. “We would have liked to have the opportunity to be heard more on it, but we weren’t.”
The final version of the budget bill was negotiated for weeks behind closed doors, so it’s unclear if the license renewal provision was discussed. Rep. Iler did not respond to requests for comment.
