Field trip to DMV

Regarding “The DMV is the problem” (Editorial, July 16): The editorial is spot on diagnostically. It makes me appear slightly less crazy to have driven over 250 miles from Mill Valley to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Eureka to renew my license earlier this month because I could not get an appointment any time soon in the Bay Area. The folks at the Eureka DMV were professional, nice, helpful and efficient — so much so that, during my appointment, I told them as much, repeatedly, and e-mailed friends and colleagues about having “discovered” what may be the DMV’s bureaucratic unicorn. But while your editorial nails the diagnosis, it is woefully short on the prescription/treatment, only calling for the governor and the Legislature to “be paying at least as much attention to the regrettable result as enterprising Bay Area entrepreneurs are.”

I suggest a field trip to the Eureka DMV to interview the committed, customer-focused and friendly professionals working in the office to learn from them how they put the lie to the claim that government agencies are constitutionally incapable of providing good customer service. Hopefully, the lessons learned could then be exported to and implemented in not just other DMV offices throughout the state but other metastasized and sclerotic state agencies as well.

Chris Carr, Mill Valley