Kentucky county clerks are starting to see fewer backlogs from their changeover to a new motor vehicle registration system earlier this month. But customers are still hitting roadblocks, state transportation officials told lawmakers Wednesday.
The biggest glitch statewide is “bad data,” mostly property tax records, carried over from the old data system to a new one called the Kentucky automated vehicle information system or KAVIS, transportation official Heather Stout told the Senate Transportation committee Wednesday. At least 600,000 outdated tax records on junked, surrendered or transferred vehicles not properly removed from the old system have appeared in the new one as tax owed, causing headaches for clerks and customers.
Thousands of vehicle owners have had difficulty registering or titling their cars, boats, and trucks because the old tax data was never removed from the former state database, which has been in place since the 1970s, lawmakers were told.
Stout said at least half of the outdated tax data is expected to be removed from the new system this week, alleviating the problem.
“We certainly appreciate the patience and willingness of the clerks to take on the challenge they have,” Stout told lawmakers. “They are dealing with the front lines and that is stressful and frustrating. Customers are agitated when they have to wait, and we understand that. We want to do everything in our power to minimize it.”
A few system slowdowns have already been resolved, lawmakers were told. Transportation officials said that overcharged fees for special license plates renewed online have or are being refunded. Difficulty updating car titles, slow system performance and issues impacting car dealers have also supposedly been checked off the state’s to-do list.
Wednesday was the sixth day for full participation of all 120 Kentucky counties in the new system. So far, 250 million state vehicle records – including license plates, titles, tax, and registration of Kentucky vehicle owners– have been successfully moved or “migrated,” Stout told the committee.
“The system is working,” she said. “There are transactions that are not working, there are a lot of transactions that are working. And we’re collecting more, we’re making up the backlog, we’re making progress, and we’re seeing improvement every single day in our collections.”
Grant County Clerk Tabatha Clemons testified before the committee Wednesday about experiences at the local level with the new system. Clemons spoke to lawmakers as the current president of the Kentucky County Clerks Association.
“Overall there have been vast improvements to the system from when it launched the second week of January,” Clemons said. “Each day we are processing more transactions and turning away fewer customers. That’s all good news. However, county clerks are still hitting some roadblocks with KAVIS. There are some transaction types that we cannot process such as some duplicate title issues and some dealer transactions.”
Earlier this week, Clemons said a customer came into her Northern Kentucky office to renew registration on two vehicles. One of the vehicles is a camper that she said was coded as a mobile home when it was added to the old vehicle registration system in the early 2000s. Registration on both vehicles expires this week, Clemons said.
The improper coding under the old system “has presented some issues, and we are unable to renew her vehicles right now because of that camper,” Clemons said. “That takes coding and it takes time.”
Clemons said she expects similar issues to surface throughout this year as clerks get used to the way of doing things.
“I think it’s going to take a full year as we see customers at our counters to fix all of the problematic things that can arise. However these problems are fewer and fewer because of the work of the KAVIS team,” and the state transportation cabinet, she told lawmakers.
The customer in Grant County waiting to renew her vehicle registration has “been very understanding,” said Clemons. That’s a benefit, she said, of working in a “small county with really understanding people at our doors.”
That rapport comes in handy as clerks get used to a new system instead of making quick fixes they learned to make under the old one, she told lawmakers.
“We would figure out a way to make it work (in the old system) because that’s what we do,” said Clemons. “But with the complexities of Kentucky’s vehicle registration laws and the amount of bad data created, and the millions of transactions in (the old system) in the decades it was in existence, it’s not surprising that bugs like this are problematic.”