RALEIGH – Gov. Mike Easley today announced that his administration would form a “transition team” to oversee the merger of the Department of Transportation’s embattled Division of Motor Vehicles Enforcement Division with the Department of Crime Control and Public Safety.
DMV Enforcement, a uniformed corps devoted primarily to enforcing trucking regulations and traffic safety laws, has long been a problematic backwater in state government. It’s been where politicians have stuck their needy political operatives, where up-and-coming officers were expected to contribute to political campaigns to get ahead, and where cozy relationships between employees and regulated industries have led to charges of bribery and corruption.
Easley says that merging DMV Enforcement with Crime Control could result in savings of at least $4 million a year. That’s welcome in a time of budget deficits, anyway. But the key concern seems to be to professionalize DMV, and the thought is that Crime Control is the right place to do it.
So, finally, some action on the DMV mess. And yet, there’s still something that puzzles me about the governor’s announcement. In merging DMV enforcement into Crime Control, does he actually mean to say that the enforcement branch would be merged with the North Carolina Highway Patrol? That would make sense, from a policy standpoint, and stands to reason since the vast majority of the Crime Control Department is actually the Highway Patrol itself.
But in a release today announcing the move, Easley’s office neglects to mention even the words “Highway Patrol.” How come? Is there some reluctance on the part of the patrol to assume responsibility for the failed enforcement branch?
Perhaps it is just an oversight, or a failure to make clear what is actually going on. Surely we won’t, after this reform, still have a Highway Patrol and a separate DMV Enforcement Branch.