Johnson County Motor Vehicle Offices were unable to accept additional customers shortly after opening for business Tuesday morning because of the customer backlog from a prolonged slowdown of the new Kansas vehicle title and registration system.

On Monday, the new statewide computer system experienced intermittent outages throughout the day and ultimately was unavailable from 2 p.m. for the remainder of the day.  The Johnson County Motor Vehicle Offices were unable to serve approximately 175 customers in Olathe and 213 at Mission due to the statewide system failure. They were encouraged to return to the Motor Vehicles offices on Tuesday for a separate priority service in processing their transactions. Many did.

Because of the backlog of customers from the previous day and the volume of new customers arriving early Tuesday, both Motor Vehicle Offices had to stop taking walk-in registration renewals and title transactions at approximately 8:30 a.m. in order to process the hundreds of customers already at both facilities by the end of the day.

“This is similar to what we have experienced over the last week, except that we had to begin turning away customers at a much earlier time,” County Treasurer Thomas Franzen said. “We regret the inconvenience being experienced by our customers as implementation of the new statewide computer system continues.”

No backlog of customers is anticipated Wednesday when the offices open at 7:30 a.m. but long wait times and high customer volume are expected to continue in the foreseeable future. The Kansas Department of Revenue and 3M, the vendor for the new statewide computer system, are working on ways to address long wait times and other issues from the new process that went live on May 8.

In order to avoid wait times, Johnson County Motor Vehicle continues to stress that those who have May registration renewals process those transactions using:

• The online Web Tags service at https://www.kswebtags.org; or,
• By mail to Johnson County Motor Vehicle at P.O. Box 29192, Shawnee Mission, KS 66201.

Because of the delays, Kansas is offering grace periods.

Vehicles whose tags expired April 30 (last names starting with C and D) have through May 31; and those that expire on May 31 (last names ending with E, F, or G) have through June 29.

Cardboard-style 30-day permits can be displayed through June 29, and 30-day permits that expire this month have through June 29.

More information about the DMV Modernization Project is available by visiting the State’s website at www.dmvproject.ks.gov. Updates on the status of the Motor Vehicle Offices can be found http://treasurer.jocogov.org/.