HELENA — On Friday Nov. 20, State and County motor vehicle service offices in Montana will be closed for most services as Montana Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) begins significant upgrades to their system.
MVD has been working the past couple years to get the driving records moved from a 1990’s database to the same system that manages vehicle registrations.
“Having both databases under one roof will help our customer base, our staff and our partners,” said MVD Driver Services Bureau Chief Rebecca Connors. “We’re really looking forward to this to have everything consolidated in one program.”
In order to accommodate the database merge many services offered by MVD and county motor vehicle offices will be unavailable beginning Thursday at 7:00 p.m., including online renewals for driver’s licenses and vehicle registration. Customers will still be able to schedule appointments or use mail-in renewal options.
County offices will also able to process temporary vehicle registration next week, and plan on using the time to get caught up on backlogged work.
“We are going to be able to process those temporary registration permits, so hopefully we’ll be doing a lot of that work and then there’s a lot of office work, and letters that we need to get caught up on and mailed out.,” said Lewis and Clark County Treasurer/ Clerk and Recorder Amy Reeves. “We’re hoping to get caught up on some of that work and get those responses out to some of our customers while we’re waiting for the system to get back up and running.”
Reeves thanks everyone who has been patient with them during COVID.
“We’re trying our hardest. We have people working nights and weekends just trying to get caught up,” added Reeves.
MVD will be doing a soft launch of the new system beginning Monday Nov. 23. If everything goes according to plan, the new system will be fully up and running by Monday Nov 30. Some offices may resume full functionality even sooner, depending on how the system update goes.
