Eye On Illinois: Appointments for driver’s license services an overdue update

A personal story, if you will:

Our second child turned 15 in March and starts driver education at the high school next month. Under strict instructions to obtain a learner permit within 30 days before classes, and with his crazy summer schedule finally abating, I logged on to ilsos.gov.

The “most popular services” option includes six buttons, one of which is the confounding “Find a DMV Facility.” There is no Department of Motor Vehicles in Illinois, apparently we’ve nonetheless adopted the colloquial shorthand common elsewhere. It continues a thread from current Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias who, early in his campaign, tried to fundraise on election security despite his office having very little involvement in that arena, unlike his colleagues in other states. (We have a State Board of Elections.)

But the “make an appointment” button was more important than semantics. That leads to a page explaining “This service allows you to make an appointment at select DMV facilities for driver’s license/ID card transactions.” It’s not clear anywhere on the site that taking the vision and written test for a learner permit falls under this umbrella, so we made the appointment on faith.

The site recommends scheduling the appointment up to 10 days in advance. On July 15, I scheduled our time at 11:20 a.m. July 26. The 40-plus options range from Aurora to Woodstock, although how many are available at a given attempt is fluid

We arrived a few minutes early. An employee stopped us outside to ask if we had an appointment. Saying yes wasn’t enough, we had to prove it by showing him the text message confirmation. Three steps inside, we supplied a phone number and the attendant found our appointment in the system, checked us in and directed us to wait.

Everything went as expected. He passed the vision test within 30 minutes of arrival. We were back outside by 12:07 p.m., posing for a picture but keeping the adult in charge of getting back on Interstate 94. As a family, we’ve had faster and slower experiences – and remain salty the state stopped making lease payments on the facility five minutes from home – but Wednesday’s visit was entirely reasonable.

Later we learned Giannoulias planned a Thursday announcement of a broad “skip the line” expansion set to launch Sept. 1, a plan that preserves walk-in services at the lower-volume offices making up the majority of locations. The release is at tinyurl.com/SkipTheLineSOS. Perhaps better, all offices are extending hours and 16 will be open six days each week.

Hopefully, the state can deploy the new system effectively. There’s no private sector alternative forcing innovation, but fumbling this overdue update would be a significant disappointment for many hopeful Illinoisans.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.