The Joint Budget Committee on Wednesday reached a compromise on a 2014-15 spending bill that would allow the state Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to clear off a backlog of requests for driver’s licenses from people in the country illegally.The supplemental bill has been on the legislative docket for more than six weeks, an unusually long time for a bill that seeks to finish out the spending year for a state agency.

But Senate Bill 15-161 was controversial even before it was introduced.

In mid-January, the JBC twice deadlocked over allowing the DMV, within the Department of Revenue, to use $166,000 in cash funds it collected from unlawfully or temporarily-lawfully present immigrants to issue the licenses.

Currently, just one of the state’s 56 driver’s licenses offices can process appointments for the driver’s licenses, down from the five originally set up under SB 13-251. The DMV closed down the other four offices when the JBC could not resolve the impasse in January. The DMV announced it would only process appointments already applied for. There is a current backlog of 5,351 appointments, according to DMV spokesperson Sarah Werner. The Division can process about 31 appointments per day per office, according to the supplemental information presented to the JBC in January.

Once the bill passed the Senate and reached the House, at the end of February, the House took action to put the $166,000 back into the Department of Revenue’s budget. The Senate rejected those changes and the bill languished for two weeks while the JBC, acting as the conference committee for the bill, worked with legislators to find a compromise.

The compromise reached by the JBC today, which will be voted on by both chambers in the coming days, allows the DMV to re-activate three offices around the state to process the backlog of appointments for driver’s licenses for a total of four operational offices. In addition, fees will increase for the driver’s licenses being sought by those in the country illegally; Republicans claimed that those license costs were being subsidized through fees paid by those in the country legally.

The last part of the compromise is to reduce the full-time equivalent staff sought by the DMV to process the appointments. The Department of Revenue had requested it be allowed to convert 13 temporary full-time employees to permanent positions; the compromise lowered those FTE to 7.5.

Sen. Jesse Ulibarri, D-Westminster, who had championed the fight to restore the DMV funding, said in a statement today that “[t]his is a step in the right direction, and I’m glad the committee members recognized the critical public safety benefits of having more licensed and insured drivers on the roads.”

– Marianne@coloradostatesman.com