Let The Waiting *REALLY* begin ...

[baylor]

I copied this from another thread in another topic ...

Yesterday, April 16th, Chairman Joe Driver of House Law Enforcement Committee asked DPS to a meeting regarding complaints from Texas CHL licenses and renewals that licenses are running well beyond the length of time listed in statute.

TSRA collected information over the weekend from members responding to an email alert sent out on Friday. A large number of responses supported the problem.

Information gathered went well beyond finger print problems. Most of these folks had returned perfect packages to DPS and were running as much as 100+ days. The time allowed for a renewal is 45 days and original applications have 60 days.

Jan Coffey, Valerie Fulmer, and Chief Burton Christian represented DPS. Chief Burton was the highest ranking DPS person attending.

Former Senator Ken Armbrister attended at Chairman Driver's invitation. Ken Armbrister is currently Governor Perry's Legislative Director.

In December 2007 a large and unexpected spike occurred in new CHL applicants. The bottle neck was blamed on this sudden surge in applications plus a litany other problems: 5 data processing jobs unfilled, flawed licenses due to a new license fabrication process, fewer applications on line than expected causing more data entry by staff, finger print rejects, incomplete packages returned, etc.

TSRA brought up the fact that we have this meeting with DPS on late CHL applications every two years and asked what could be done to help the situation so it would not happen in the future.

We were told that currently 25% of the all applications and renewals with perfect packages (good pictures, good finger prints, and everything correct) are running beyond statute.

It appears that the entire DPS process is broken at least for now. By this we mean, there is something wrong at every step.

The universal complaint from DPS, which may be justified, was more money and authorization to hire more employees. They have added 12 temps to the 40 full time employees working only on CHLs. We were also told the number of employees has not increased since the beginning of the program in 1996.

For now, Chairman Driver will be receiving a weekly status report on the CHL backlog problem.

We appreciate Rep. Joe Driver and his staff taking the lead on this problem and for Ken Armbrister gathering information for Governor Perry.