Expired Driver's License: You've got trouble

MOORE — Kenneth Pricer just wanted to renew his driver’s license.

Pricer, 81, was shopping with is wife Tuesday, when a clerk pointed to his license said it had expired.

“No big deal,” Pricer thought. The last time he renewed his license, the trip took about 15 minutes; and because he was retired, it didn’t cost him a thing.

So Pricer and his wife, Marlane, finished their shopping and traveled to the Moore Tag Agency for, what they thought at the time, would be a quick errand.

Six hours — and four trips later — Kenneth Pricer got his license.

But the process required traveling from the tag agency to home, then to Norman, then to the bank, then to Oklahoma City and, finally, back to Moore.

“It was crazy,” Pricer said. “I had no idea.”

Pricer was one of hundreds of residents caught in a web of problems caused by the state’s new immigration law, House Bill 1804.

The law, authored by state Rep. Randy Terrill, R-Moore, went into effect Nov. 1.

Terrill said the bill is supposed to curtail illegal immigration and prevent undocumented residents from obtaining state-issued identification.

To prevent undocumented workers from receiving state benefits, state and local agencies are required to verify the citizenship status of applicants before authorizing benefits and public employers are required to enter job applicants into an electronic immigration database to verify legal status.

Those rules also include drivers licenses.

And the changes apply to any resident — lifelong or not — who lets that license expire.

“We went to the tag agency, but they said, ‘because of the new law you have a problem,’” Pricer said. “They said ‘you have to go to the Department of Public Safety and take either your passport or birth certificate and get it okayed to get a drivers license.’ Then they said to ‘bring it back and they would issue the license for you.’”

For Pricer, the new law meant traveling a total of more that 100 miles and spending about five hours to get his license renewed.

“We couldn’t find our visas,” he said. “So we went home and got a copy of our birth certificates. We took them and went over went to Norman. We finally found the place, but they said, ‘sorry these are not notarized and we can’t used them.’”

Frustrated, Pricer and his wife drove from Norman back to their bank, where they retrieved certified copies of the same birth certificates. From there, the couple went to another DPS testing station — this one in Oklahoma City — to prove their identity.

“We went back to get different, certified, copy,” he said. “Then we went the testing center on I-240. We got there about 3 p.m., got a number and sat down. We were about the next to the last one. The place closes up at 4:45.”

The Pricers were the 154th in line.

The experience, he said, was “real stupid.”

“I guess what bothers me is there was nothing out that warned a person about this. We thought the bill was all about immigration, we didn’t think it applied to us.”

Under HB 1804, Oklahoma residents must prove their citizenship before they can get their driver’s license upgraded — or in the case of an expired license — renewed.

Previously, an expired drivers license could be renewed at a tag agency without the extra documents or a visit to a DPS driving examiner.

But residents, Pricer said, “didn’t know” about how the law would effect them. “Everybody thinks it’s just about immigration. Well, it’s not.”

According to a Department of Public Safety message e-mailed to state tag agents — on Nov. 2, the day after the law went into effect — “any individual whose driver’s license has expired (even one day) must appear before a driver’s license examiner” to show proof of legal presence.

The message said the tag agent’s computer “will not prompt you to send them to the examiner at this time. You will have to look at the expiration date on the license. Computer programming will be in place on Monday with a prompt which will read ‘this license has expired and driver must see a DL examiner.’”

DPS officials confirmed the new policy, but added that most residents will only have to show their citizenship proof one time.

“If a resident has an expired driver’s license, they will need to go to a DPS examining station,” Department spokesman Captain Chris West said. “The will need to see the examiner and let the examiner look at their forms, then they can go back to their tag agent and get their license renewed.”

West said the law “wasn’t that complicated” and only required residents to provide documentation one time.

“Once they’ve shown their documents to a driver’s license examiner, that’s the last time they are going to have to do that,” he said. “DPS now maintains that data on file.”

That may be so, but tag agency officials say the law is confusing residents, and causing agents major problems.

“We are turning people away by the dozens,” said Cindy Virgin, the owner of the Moore Tag Agency. “On Saturday, we had about 15 people we couldn’t help and yesterday it was probably 30 to 40.”

Along with upset customers, Virgin said in many smaller towns, there are no DPS testing stations. And those stations are not open on weekends.

“The stations are understaffed; the lines are incredible. They are not open on weekends so our customers just have to wait and in many places the testing station is in another town.”

The end result, Virgin said, is a “very upset customer.”

Kenneth Pricer agrees.

“It was very inconvenient,” he said. “It was frustrating. We were lucky we were retired. It would be almost impossible for someone who has a job.”

Still, even with all the difficulty, Pricer said he did learn something from the process.

“I’m gonna make sure every knows. I’m gonna make sure all my kids and grandkids check their driver’s license. I want them to be legal.”