DMV Select office in Dumfries to remain closed; Stafford open by appointment

The DMV Select at Dumfries Town Hall will remain shuttered indefinitely.

Town Manager Keith Rogers told members of the Town Council at a meeting on Tuesday, November 17. He plans to keep the center shuttered until the number of new coronavirus cases reported in Prince William County decline.

On an electronic meeting call, Rogers did not provide the council with a target case number that would trigger a reopening of the center. Elected officials failed to press him for specifics.

Prince William has seen 191 new cases as of today, adding 1,627 cases over the past seven days.

The number of people needing to be admitted to a hospital remains extremely low when compared to the county’s population of about 465,000 residents. An average of 0.8 county residents has been admitted to a hospital over the past seven days.

Under normal circumstances, the DMV Select office in Dumfries allows residents to skip the lines at nearby larger DMV offices in Woodbridge and Stafford.

The town opened the customer service center in August 2019 in the lower level of the town hall building it owns, located at 17739 Main Street.

According to its website, residents can process the following transactions at the center:

1. Registration
2. Titling
3. Plates
4. Registration Renewal

Stafford County’s center remains open

The Stafford County also operates a DMV Select office 13 miles south of the Dumfries center, at its government center located at 1300 Courthouse Road.

Like all other regular DMV offices in the state, customers may be seen by appointment only to have a license renewed, get a replacement car title, get a new registration and license plates, obtain a trip permit, driver transcript, surrender license plates, or purchase an E-ZPass transponder for use on the Express Lanes on Interstates 95, 395, and 495.

Each afternoon, the center posts about 60 appointment times on its website, and those appointments are normally spoken for within three hours of posting, said Stafford County Treasurer Laura Rudy.

“The appointments are great because it prevents people from standing in line outside of the office,” said Rudy.

Before the pandemic, a line formed outside the office nearly every weekday, as the center was processing up to 175 DMV-related transactions a day.

Stafford’s DMV Select office also doubles as the County Treasurer’s office, where residents may still come inside in person and pay taxes for Real Estate, personal property, dog licenses, parking tickets — all without an appointment.

Last week, the office was temporality closed and cleaned after an employee tested positive for the virus.

The Stafford Treasurer's Office is closed temporarily due to a confirmed COVID positive in an employee. You may still pay online or via the lockbox outside the Gov. Center. for more info, read: https://t.co/SwgV8hX2wZ pic.twitter.com/l9VL1sIODH

— Stafford County (@staffordvagov) November 18, 2020

The coronavirus hospitalization rate in Stafford County is extremely low, as 0.7% of the county’s 150,000 residents have been admitted to a hospital for the disease in the past seven days.

More DMV transactions are now conducted online. 

At a total of 73 DMV customer service centers in Virginia, residents have been required to make an appointment to be seen in order to conduct business in person.

Potomac Local News asked DMV via email for the number of backlog cases it has accumulated since the change in operations in March and data on the average time it takes for a resident to score an appointment at a service center. The state agency did not address either of those questions.

The DMV responded below via email.

Appointment opportunities are posted 90 days out and depending on the type of transaction and the location, customers may be able to find an appointment as soon as today. We encourage customers to check back regularly for updated availability and newly opened locations; and to cancel appointments when not needed to free up time for other customers who must visit DMV in person.

Over the summer, plexiglass was installed in the centers, and the chairs in the foyer were removed to limit the spread of the coronavirus. In the meantime, the DMV has made it possible for residents to conduct more transactions online, include a just-announced program that allows drivers to renew their driver’s licenses, for up to two years, without having to go to a service center to have a new mug shot taken.

“Virginia DMV was better prepared than many jurisdictions as all front-line employees are cross-trained to do all transactions and we have a robust array of options for customers to get needed DMV services,” said agency spokeswoman Brandy Brubaker.

In September 2019, a total of 74% of vehicle registration renewals were completed in person. Fast forward one year, and 94% of those same transactions were done online, by mail, or at a DMV Select office that remains open.

It’s unclear when or if the customer service centers will once revert to its old format, removing the need to get an appointment before visiting a service center.

“Based on the volume of renewals we are conducting each month through all of our service options (online, mail, appointments) and the number of renewals due to expire, we have the capacity to handle current renewal demand through all of our service channels at this time,” said Brubaker.