Haines DMV office closed indefinitely until state finds new staff

(Chilkat Valley News photo)

By Rashah McChesney

Chilkat Valley News

Teresa Albecker worked quietly late Friday afternoon in the Alaska Department of Motor Vehicles’ Main Street office. 

It was her last day in the office after 10 years. She’d hung a sign on the door.

The sign notes she’d retired, the DMV is looking for her replacement, and instructions on applying for the job. The local office was closed Monday morning and for the foreseeable future until her replacement is hired. 

Department of Administration spokesperson Forrest Wolfe wrote in an email that the state hopes to fill the position, and train a new person by mid-September. 

However,  the DMV’s hiring website links to a Workplace Alaska jobs database that returns no results, and neither Wolfe nor DMV staff in Juneau immediately responded to questions seeking the location of the job posting or whether it is exempt from the state’s current hiring freeze. 

In the meantime, Wolfe wrote, DMV services — including license and registration renewals — can be completed online. 

The closure is listed on the DMV’s website, and one cannot book appointments for the Haines location online. But many in the Chilkat Valley said they unaware the office was closed. 

Resident Makayla Meyers bought a vehicle Saturday from someone who is moving out of town soon.

“According to the DMV website, the buyer and seller are supposed to go to the DMV together, in case there are any issues,” she said. “I wanted to get it done before he left. 

She found out Saturday evening that the office was closed  and that she couldn’t do it locally. She had to find someone to cover her Monday shift at work, pay about $160 for a roundtrip ferry ticket to Skagway, and then walk about a mile from the dock to the office. 

“Trying to figure out where it was — was an issue. It’s an inside the police station, inside the fire department, inside the jail cell type of situation,” she said. “It’s not well marked. As someone from Haines trying to find the DMV, it was an issue.” 

Meyers said some local residents told her that sometimes the Skagway office was closed. 

“Something to note as Haines residents, because you should call ahead,” she said. 

She wasn’t sure how long the transaction would take, so she’d booked her ferry tickets to spend most of the day in Skagway. As it turned out, she needed that extra time. 

“I was attempting to do the title transfer, and I had all of the paperwork, but there was one piece that was close but not exact,” she said. “There was a strong chance I wouldn’t have been able to get it done.”

Meyers thought at first that she may have wasted a trip and would have to lose another day of work. 

“If you work Monday through Friday, it’s not like you can just pop over there for a lunch break,” she said. 

She managed to resolve the issue after a few hours of attempting to contact the car’s original owner and negotiating with DMV staff.  

Meyers said she wondered why the state didn’t pull someone from Skagway or Juneau to travel to Haines a few days a week to open the local office. 

Wolfe said the state plans to expedite the re-opening of the DMV’s Haines branch. 

“We’re taking a non-traditional approach: rather than having the new employee travel to Anchorage for training, we will send a trainer to Haines,” he wrote in an email. “This change will allow training to begin on-site and enable the office to reopen more quickly.” 

Meanwhile, people won’t be seeing Albecker much around Main Street. She plans to be at home taking care of house projects.  

Retirement is going to take some adjustment though. 

“I liked working here. I liked helping people out and getting their problems solved,” she said. “It’s going to be weird. When I get up [in the morning], my alarm is going to go off and I’m going to go ‘Well, I don’t work anymore, now I’ve got to figure this out.’”

Editor’s note: Department of Administration spokesperson Forrest Wolfe said Wednesday that the notice of recruitment has been sent for posting on the state’s Workplace Alaska website, but that it can take up to a week for it to be available.

• This story was originally published by the Chilkat Valley News.