Insider says longer waits at DMV to come

Assembly Bill 60, which permits undocumented workers to get driver's licenses, went into effect on January 2 of last year. The bill had passed in 2013, allowing the Department of Motor Vehicles time to bulk up its workforce. It added a thousand full-time but limited-term employees and in a year and a half issued more than 700,000 licenses to people gaining eligibility under the new law.

Now, however, the rush has slowed down, and those workers have received termination notices saying they will lose their jobs on June 30.

According to the DMV, 235 of the original 1000 hires are being dismissed, including 32 from San Diego County; another 22 San Diegans will get other jobs within the DMV or elsewhere in state government. That's true of the 765 who are not getting termination letters; many are going by attrition (resignation, retirement, etc.), while others are taking other state jobs. (Many of them already had state jobs when they took the temporary DMV positions.)

One DMV employee thinks the terminations are overkill. "The waits in the field offices will substantially increase, and the processing times for everyone will increase," he says. The DMV denies that.