Well, the CA DMV has like 70 offices across the state. Even if you just calculate the portion of the cost for processing driver license management, registration, etc, it'll easily eat those 50 million USD + whatever the total driver license etc fees are.
I hate interacting with the CA DMV with quite some passion, but I don't see how those 50 million USD are really the problem. If anything, the DMV seems under staffed / financed. Partially that's management problems, sure, but I don't think that's all.
It was a great experience. show up, someone ( no waiting!) asks me what I'm there for and hands me the appropriate form (circling the actual areas I needed to answer) and gives me a ticket. in 5ish mins I was called up, handed in my form and papers, and they processed my new ID, sending me to a second area for a pic and to get my ID. Total visit time: less than 15 mins.
Several years later, after a new governor and the inevitable budget cuts, most of this was gone. Still had the intake, but no one helped me decipher the form, and the wait was much longer. The atmosphere was similarly dour, with a big crowd of people that just wanted to get this errand done but had to wait. Total visit time: over 1 hour.
But the basic contrast showed me how much of complaints about govt slowness is just a matter of funding/staffing.
That’s the DMV in San Francisco —Daly City in this case because I can at least find parking.
I recently had to figure out how to register a vehicle bought out of state: rather than research online it was quicker and more pleasant to just walk in and ask.
Given that the fees don't cover things like offsetting the impact of a car’s CO2 emissions, you might even ask why are your fees so damn low?
National average for property tax revenue growth is ~4% YoY [2].
TLDR, California sees a bigger Property tax revenue growth then the national average.
[1] http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2019-20/pdf/BudgetSummary/RevenueE...
[2] https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/property-tax-rates-us/
> But California’s effective tax rate is even lower. The effective tax rate is based on the market value of the home, and the most recent property tax bills for the county. In 2018, the state had an effective tax rate of 0.76%, according to Irvine, California-based ATTOM Data Solutions. California’s effective tax rate ranked 36th in the country, with the average property tax bill coming out to $5,354, according to ATTOM’s data. That lower effective property tax rate is because so many properties do not change ownership for decades or for generations, while property values have posted healthy increases, Mr. Soroy said.
Always running the government lean means that service cuts will be much worse during hard times because there's no money saved up.
if not, 40m people in CA -> this is $1.25/person/year. or 14m estimated cars; this is $3.57/car/year.
1) email + snail mail registration reminder 2) accept digital payments 3) maintain database of registered vehicles
So if the new California privacy legislation is being abused by certain government institutions, that's not an unavoidable situation, and the voters should keep pressure on their representatives to amend these laws and change that.