Registered Utah divers will no longer receive a postcard reminder from the Division of Motor Vehicles about car registration renewal.
In September, the DMV discontinued the use of the courtesy postcards reminding drivers to renew their car registration.
Monte Roberts is the director of Utah’s DMV. He said the department had been discussing discontinuing the postcards for years, but the pushing factor was when the state asked them to make budget cuts due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We weighed our options, a lot,” Roberts said. “Ultimately, it came down to whether or not we needed to continue to provide this courtesy notification to customers, or we had to think about cutting full time employees that staff our offices to serve the public.”
By cutting the postcards, Roberts said, this fiscal year alone, the DMV will save just under a million dollars.
And he said in the long run they’ll be saving even more.
“That's just for one year,” he said. “As registrations continue to increase each year — with our population growth and things like that — and registrations going up the cost well, and with mailing costs, it only has a propensity to increase and not decrease this way.”
Not to mention, Roberts said oftentimes money was completely wasted on the postcards because many of them were never delivered.
“My best estimation is anywhere from 15-20% a month would get returned because people had moved...or various other reasons,” he said.
That’s why the DMV is moving to emails instead. Roberts said even if they don’t get delivered, it doesn’t waste any money for the department.
You can sign up for an email reminder at dmv.utah.gov.
