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Miami Herald
30-04-2025
- Automotive
- Miami Herald
A huge Miami DMV office is closing — but just for one day for upgrades
The county agency promising to fix Miami-Dade's DMV lines announced a one-day shutdown of the driver's-license office at the former Mall of the Americas as part of a technology upgrade. On Saturday, May 3, the DMV office at Midway Crossings, formerly known as the Mall of the Americas, will close and then reopen with its regular hours on Monday, May 5, the Miami-Dade Tax Collector's Office announced on Wednesday. The closure is one of the last steps before the Tax Collector's Office takes over the Midway Crossings DMV office, which is one of the largest in Florida and currently part of a state-run agency. People often have to wait hours in line at DMV offices across South Florida to get a walk-in appointment, while online scheduling portals are booked out for weeks. Even showing up before the doors open doesn't mean you'll get in, with some people camping overnight for spots. The DMV offices are mostly state-run operations in South Florida, but that's changing. Florida is turning over all of its DMV offices in Broward and Miami-Dade to the counties' recently elected tax collectors. While Broward is waiting until 2026 to take over the state DMV offices, Miami-Dade Tax Collector Dariel Fernandez said he's pushing to get control of the 10 in his county as soon as possible. His staff already runs the Northside (15555 Biscayne Blvd. in North Miami) and Central (3721 NW Seventh St. in Miami) DMV offices. He also added DMV windows to the existing Tax Collector's Office (200 NW Second Ave. in Miami). Next on his takeover list is the Midway Crossings office (7795 W. Flagler St. near Westchester), the largest in Miami-Dade. 'There will be more people working over there — every single window will be open,' Fernandez said Wednesday. 'The state is open on Saturdays until just 1 p.m. [at Midway Crossings]. We'll be extending the hours of operation to 4:30 p.m.' Both the Central and downtown offices will be open this Saturday. Daiana Rocha, spokesperson for the Tax Collector's Office, said the Midway Crossings site was not taking appointments for Saturday, so the closure only affects people who were hoping to show up that day. Fernandez said technological upgrades at the offices include credit-card machines at each checkout window, appointment software designed to foil driving schools from scooping up hundreds of appointments in a single day, and virtual line-waiting options that notify people when their walk-in slot is approaching so that they can wait in their cars or visit a nearby store. Fernandez, a Republican elected in November to an office that had previously been an appointed position within county government, said people needing driver's-licenses should see big improvements soon at the Midway Crossings location. 'Give me two weeks,' he said.
Miami Herald
21-04-2025
- Automotive
- Miami Herald
Lines at Miami's DMV offices stretch for hours. What's being done?
Kimberly Pichardo, 27, took a spot in the DMV line around 9 a.m. on a cloudless Wednesday afternoon, back when her phone was fully charged and she wasn't worried about the afternoon pickup time at her son's school. But as 2 o'clock approached under the Miami sun, a couple dozen people still stood between Pichardo and the Miami Central DMV office inside a shopping center off the Dolphin Expressway. Teachers had dismissed her son's class about a half-hour earlier, leaving Pichardo to scramble for a plan B while her phone's battery remained alive. 'I called my mom to pick him up right before my phone died,' Pichardo said. 'What can I do?' For people like Pichardo needing a driver's license issued or updated in South Florida, there's no easy answer to that question beyond the obvious one: get in line and wait. Online portals for the 15 DMV offices in Broward and Miami-Dade routinely show no openings available — even eight weeks out. Lines for walk-up slots at the offices start forming hours before the doors open — and sometimes even the night before. While the staff did eventually open their doors to everyone in line the day Pichardo arrived, waits lasted hours. 'It's a mess,' Tax Collector Dariel Fernandez said as he approached the afternoon line outside the Central office, an operation he recently inherited from the state. 'We've got to fix it.' For now, Florida still controls all five driver's-license offices in Broward and seven of the 10 in Miami-Dade. Until January, those were the only two counties in Florida that still had appointed tax collectors, meaning they were also the only two counties to have state-run DMVs. A constitutional amendment passed in 2018 now requires all counties to elect their tax collectors. In November, Miami-Dade voters elected Fernandez, a Republican software company owner, and Broward voters elected Abbey Ajayi, a Democrat and veteran of that county's Tax Collector's Office. Those elections also triggered the slow-moving end to the state running DMV offices in South Florida. State rules require elected tax collectors to run licensing offices in their counties, and now Broward and Miami-Dade fall under that mandate. While an Ajayi spokesperson said the Broward Tax Collector's Office plans to take over state DMV offices next summer, Fernandez is adding them to his portfolio already. Last month, he took over the Northside Justice Center DMV office (15555 Biscayne Blvd. in North Miami) and said he expects to take over the DMV's Mall of the Americas location (7795 W. Flagler St. near Westchester) sometime in May. He also brought driver's-license services to the Tax Collector's Office headquarters in downtown Miami (200 NW Second Ave.). The takeover comes as DMV offices are overwhelmed by demand in South Florida, with visa crackdowns spurring more immigrants to secure government identification and a May 7 deadline looming for the federal Real ID program, which requires U.S. citizens to have up-to-date licenses or a passport if they want to board a domestic flight. (In Florida, a Real ID-compliant license has a star on the upper right corner.) Fernandez promises major improvements on wait times and says progress is already underway in the three DMV locations his staff now runs. 'We inherited a crisis,' he said. A representative for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles was not available for comment this week. Andrew Lopez, director of motorist services under Fernandez, said the Tax Collector's Office has expanded staffing at the Central office in the past few weeks. On the day of Pichardo's visit, there were 33 windows open inside, up from about a dozen when the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles turned it over to Fernandez earlier this month. With more windows open, more people are being seen — Lopez said the average daily count is now about 700 customer visits on an average day, up from about 450 when the Tax Collector's Office took over. Fernandez said he added credit-card scanners to each window, saving a trip to the cashier's section for customers who don't want to pay in cash. He also says Central is seeing a reduction in no-show appointments after improved scheduling software eliminated the ability to book unlimited time slots with a single phone number. Fernandez said the old software his office inherited allowed driving schools to tie up hundreds of time slots a day for students, even though most of the appointments were never used. Fernandez backed legislation recently approved by the County Commission imposing fines on anyone caught 'scalping' a DMV appointment. He's also predicting more appointment availability as Central and the other former state-run offices shift fully to appointments made under the new system. Fernandez said Central each day has about 400 appointments made under the state reservation framework — time slots the Tax Collector's Office inherited. He said the last of those state-made appointments — which Fernandez said tend to mean lots of no-shows — should be retired sometime in May, and he thinks it will be easier for people to make an appointment after that. He expects his office's booking software to also utilize AI technology to steer people to their closest DMV office, as well as speed the processing time at windows by helping staff inspect the documents required for new or modified driver's licenses. Whatever improvements may be coming, Pichardo's experience highlights the current struggles for getting a license issued, updated or renewed in South Florida. Here are some tips to make the process a bit less frustrating: Beat the early birds in DMV lines This is easier said than done, with some people camping out overnight to secure their slots in line. A 72-year-old Broward resident named Harvey told the Herald he arrived at the Sunrise DMV office at 3 a.m. to wait for the 8 a.m. opening. 'I was No. 77 in line,' he said. Harvey, who asked that his last name not be published, said the people in the front of the line had arrived at 9 the night before. Nina Dape drove the 20 miles between her home in Hollywood and the Miami-Dade Tax Collector's main office in downtown Miami on a recent morning, arriving around 3:30 a.m. 'I was sixth in line,' the 19-year-old student said. The first person there — who didn't want to give his full name — said he'd arrived at 12:30 a.m. Both were let into the downtown office the moment the doors opened at 8:30 a.m. Getting to the DMV early is key, given that the number of slots for walk-in customers at some offices can be quite limited. With only eight DMV windows, the downtown Miami office typically accepts 30 walk-ins at the start of the day but will accommodate more depending on the number of no-shows for appointments, a spokesperson said. Don't wait to hunt for a DMV appointment in Broward or Miami-Dade Appointments on the state and county online booking portals aren't impossible to get — but they're probably going to require some advanced planning. In the middle of April, the state's Miami Gardens DMV office had some morning appointments available — but not until mid-June. Carlos Castillo, 41, was able to get a new Florida license two hours after arriving at the Central office on a recent afternoon, thanks to securing a 2 p.m. appointment he'd made weeks earlier. The Illinois transplant said he went online on Feb. 26 and that April 16 was the earliest slot he could reserve. He said he was stunned the wait was so long to get a license with his new address. 'In Chicago, it's pretty straightforward,' he said. Prepare to camp to get a driver's license renewed For large DMV offices like Central (at 3721 NW Seventh St. in Miami), endurance can make the difference between a wasted day that ends with no license and a long day that ends with getting a license renewed or issued. Anthony Martinez, 27, arrived at Central roughly the same time as Pichardo. By 1 p.m., he said there would have been even more people ahead of him if not for an endurance gap. 'The reason we're here is so many people gave up and left,' he said. 'This is ridiculous.' Like Pichardo, Martinez did make it to the front of the line at the Central DMV office that day after about a five-hour wait. The line on the unshaded sidewalk in the shopping center parking lot grew and contracted throughout the day. It finally vanished around 4 p.m. after Tax Collector staff came out to instruct the last group of people to come inside the air-conditioned office. Jorge Bonet had been there since 10:30 am. Five hours later, his wife drove by to drop off a chocolate shake and McChicken sandwich from McDonald's. 'I haven't eaten anything all day,' he said.
Miami Herald
17-03-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
Scalpers ‘hoarding' and selling appointments at Miami-Dade DMVs, tax collector says
Appointments are a hot commodity at DMV offices across Miami-Dade County — and apparently are for sale. On Monday, the county agency in the process of taking over driver's-license services in Miami-Dade declared it had 'uncovered a network of appointment scalpers' who have been 'hoarding free appointments and reselling them for a profit.' 'We know who they are and how they operate,' Miami-Dade Tax Collector Dariel Fernandez (R) said in a press release, promising a crackdown. 'We will not accept any appointment obtained through system abuse.' Lines outside the state-run DMV offices can form the night before for walk-in slots, and people report having to wait months to get appointments. Fernandez's office put most of the blame on driving schools in Broward and Miami-Dade, which appear to be securing appointments under random names and then selling customers the coveted time slots. The appointments sold for as low as $25 and as high as $250, the office said. 'We are still investigating, but it appears that many of the people scalping appointments were part of driving schools in Miami-Dade and Broward County, which has been collapsing our system,' the Tax Collector's Office said in a written response to questions about Monday's release. 'Some of the residents on the list never showed up to their appointments, possibly because they were simply placeholders for individuals to whom they resold the appointments.' In the three weeks since Fernandez's office opened up a downtown Miami office for driver's-license services, a suspected 200 appointments came through suspected scalpers, his office said. The scalpers got the time slots through the online appointment system, utilizing bots, fake accounts and other means to secure appointments, the office said. While DMV locations in Miami-Dade are mostly run by the state, the county Tax Collector's Office is in the process of taking them over under a change mandated by state law. Most Florida counties already run their license offices, but the change in the Florida Constitution that mandated Miami-Dade elect an independent tax collector in November also requires the office to take over the state's DMV operations. The practice of reselling appointments does not appear to be illegal, according to Fernandez, who said he'll be urging changes in laws to ban appointment scalping. 'We believe this type of activity has been happening for a long time at other DMV state-run locations. We are taking action to make this illegal and enforce the law to stop the fraud,' Fernandez said in a statement. 'I'm here to fix it, and in the coming days, we will be working with our local and state partners to find a solution to this problem.'
Miami Herald
27-02-2025
- Automotive
- Miami Herald
DMV offices have long waits — and Miami-Dade taxpayers just got a $171M bill for a fix
With people camping overnight to beat the lines for appointments in Florida's overwhelmed driver's-license offices in Miami-Dade, the county's new tax collector is promising to spend big to cut down on wait times. One problem: His plan to add more staffing and efficiency measures could cost local governments as much as $171 million in property taxes this year. After the last election, Miami-Dade now falls under a state rule that requires elected county tax collectors to issue driver's licenses. For decades, that's been the responsibility of Florida and its nine state-run offices across Miami-Dade where people can renew their licenses, get new ones, take driving tests and access other services. The mandate doesn't come with state funding, so Tax Collector Dariel Fernandez plans to exercise his office's authority to keep 2% of property-tax money from the county and from Miami-Dade's 34 cities, an amount estimated at $171 million this year. The county government's budget will see the biggest effect, with Fernandez's office planning to retain $118 million from the county this fall. Fernandez, a Republican who ran a software company before winning the office in November, has not directly addressed the funding cuts to local governments but said he expects to return a large chunk of the 2% back to those jurisdictions once he gets a handle on how much it will cost to fix the current mess facing people seeking driver's licenses in Miami-Dade. But he said there's no question that effort will be expensive and require some investment of local tax dollars. 'We are delivering solutions, not excuses,' Fernandez said at an event Monday morning opening three new driver's-license windows at the Tax Collector's Office in downtown Miami. They're the first of their kind for a county office, and the debut of what Fernandez said will be a year-long shift as Florida prepares to turn over its nine Miami-Dade DMV locations to the tax collector. (While the Department of Motor Vehicles name was retired nearly 20 years ago in a reorganization, the offices are still known as 'DMV' locations.) Fernandez said that by the end of 2025, he expects his agency to take over all of Florida's state-run driver's-license offices in Miami-Dade. Fernandez also plans to expand beyond that, with the Tax Collector going from an agency with a single location in downtown Miami to offices across Miami-Dade, ideally bringing driver's-license services to areas that didn't previously offer them. Fernandez's office says Florida has spent about $40 million a year running its nine Miami-Dade DMV offices, with only $9 million of that covered by the fees that are charged to residents for licenses and other services available there. In addition to taking on that expense, Fernandez said he wants to spend more on staffing and technology to speed up wait times. Miami resident Roopesh Reddy, 40, said he and his wife had been to most of the state DMV offices in Miami-Dade in hopes of getting an appointment for her learner's permit, without success. Reddy said that included an overnight visit to the state-run Miami Gardens office, where they hoped to get to the front of the line, only to be shocked by a crowd already in place. 'My wife and I went there at 3 a.m.,' he said. Not only did they already find plenty of people ahead of them already waiting, but some appeared to be there to monetize the situation. 'People were selling their spaces for $150,' said Reddy, a software engineer. Reddy and his wife were among the first people to try out the Tax Collector's Office's driver's-license windows, which launched service Monday morning at 200 NW Second Ave. He said it took about two hours before they could see a clerk and then learned they had to return the next day to sort out a paperwork issue. The office gave them an early-afternoon appointment for Tuesday. 'Not too bad,' he said of the wait. 'At least I got to sit inside a building.' Nicolas Gesnel, another 40-year-old Miami resident, was there, too. He also described a failed overnight arrival at the Miami Gardens driver's-license office but an easy time getting his license renewed in downtown Miami on Monday morning. 'It took 30 minutes,' he said. About half of the driver's-license appointments in Miami-Dade each year are from immigrants who are in the United States legally but who do not yet have a green card allowing permanent residency, according to the Tax Collector's Office. Those appointments often take longer because they involve more complicated rules, such as setting a license's expiration date to the final day a person is allowed to remain in the country legally. Should that date get extended, the person has to return to the office to get a modified license. While license waits have long been a headache in South Florida, chaotic scenes of long lines outside South Florida DMV offices have gotten more attention in recent weeks. Daiana Rocha, a spokesperson for Fernandez, acknowledged that DMV lines are too long but said they have been that way for a while and that Tax Collector staff do not see evidence that people needing driver's licenses today face more problems than they would have a year ago. 'We do not have data to support the idea that lines are longer,' she said. 'The lines have always been crowded, and it's always been a struggle to keep up with demand.' Either way, Fernandez's office is pointing to the long DMV lines as evidence that Miami-Dade will need to spend much more than Florida has been spending to provide services. 'We have a crisis here,' said Andrew Lopez, director of motorist services for the Tax Collector's Office. Fernandez says he's planning to ramp up hiring to boost the number of clerks available to help customers, expand office hours and add locations across Miami-Dade to give residents more options. His deputy says the situation is too fluid to put a firm estimate on what the improvements will cost to implement — and then maintain. 'It would be unfair to commit to a dollar amount,' said Gerardo Gomez, Miami-Dade's deputy tax collector. Who pays for shorter wait times at the DMV in Miami-Dade? Fernandez's planned tax diversion has local governments pushing back and urging him not to spend heavily on driver's-license offices at the expense of city budgets that fund police, parks and transportation. In a statement, Alberto Parjus, city manager of Coral Gables, called the planned $2.6 million cost to Coral Gables a 'financial burden' in an already challenging year for local governments facing a slowing real estate market. 'The City of Coral Gables recognizes that the newly established Miami-Dade Tax Collector's Office will require an investment in infrastructure and operations,' he said. 'However, the proposed 2% fee on municipal tax collections would have a substantial financial impact on our community. … This additional financial burden comes at a time when municipalities are already navigating economic challenges.' The tension comes from a new system of government imposed on Miami-Dade by a constitutional amendment passed in 2018 that required the county by 2025 to create three new elected offices to run agencies that were previously under the control of Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. That meant turning over the Miami-Dade Police Department to a new sheriff, the Elections Department to a new elections supervisor and the Tax Collector's Office to a new tax collector. Only the Tax Collector switch involved a major new cost for Miami-Dade, since Florida law requires counties with elected tax collectors to also take care of issuing driver's licenses. Whatever the final amount that will be allocated for driver's-license services, it's clear the Tax Collector budget under Fernandez will be far more than what Miami-Dade spent on his office in prior years. Under Levine Cava, the Tax Collector's office spent just $33 million. Broward is the only other Florida county also making the transition from state-run DMVs to county-run driver's-license offices this year. That's left Abbey Ajayi, who won the office in November, figuring out how to take over the existing locations she expects the state will stop running by 2026. 'Right now, we have no funding,' said Ajayi, Democrat who was manager of the agency before the 2024 election. 'Which is why we have not taken over those offices yet.' She said her office plans to collect the 2% commission from local governments as well, with an estimated total of about $91 million. Unlike Fernandez, though, Ajayi said her office considers cities mostly exempt, based on an interpretation of state law. Municipalities in Miami-Dade are considering making a similar argument to shield themselves from the 2% collection, according to a source familiar with the discussions. While property taxes withheld from the Miami-Dade County government will account for the bulk of the $171 million Fernandez's office plans to take, about $34 million of that total will come from city governments. That includes $13 million from Miami, $6 million from Miami Beach and $1 million from Miami Gardens. Jason Greene, Miami Beach's finance director, said at a Feb. 21 committee meeting that the city is expecting the Tax Collector plan to increase the city's challenge of balancing its budget in 2026. 'That's really going to make things difficult,' he said. While Fernandez won't say how much his office plans to spend from the $171 million, he promised it won't be close to that number. 'It's insane to think that,' Fernandez said when asked if he needed the full $171 million. 'We are here to spend the money on what we need to spend. … It's just what we need — and that's it.' Miami Herald staff writer Aaron Leibowitz contributed to this report.
