NC DMV delayed for 4 years a change meant to help drivers because of a lawsuit
Nearly four years ago, the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles considered changing a routine notice that it sends drivers in danger of losing their licenses, potentially helping thousands of people avoid having their licenses suspended.
It didn’t. The reason: the division was worried about losing an ongoing lawsuit on the issue.
That lawsuit was settled last week, with a federal judge signing off on an agreement meant to help people with unpaid traffic tickets avoid revocation—a step that can contribute to a cycle of debt and struggle.
In that settlement, the DMV agreed to send drivers more complete notices of their rights, explaining a long-standing North Carolina law: If they can’t afford to pay the ticket, they can avoid a suspended license by filing with the court to say so. In the past, the division simply told people who were about to lose their licenses that they must “comply” with the citation, leaving it to drivers to look up the law.
After the case was settled, a DMV spokesman said the division was willing to make the notice change shortly after the case was filed in May 2018, if the groups that sued would drop their lawsuit. The plaintiffs rejected that offer, and then the state declined to change the notice, “because it was uncertain how the legal case would be resolved,” spokesman Marty Homan said in an email.
The DMV largely won in the lawsuit at the District Court level, though Judge Thomas Schroeder acknowledged the notice wasn’t sufficient unless it was read in concert with state law. He also said it was “not so affirmatively misleading as to destroy the sufficient notice provided by the statute to which it directly cites.”
The plaintiffs appealed to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the case was settled while on appeal.
It’s not clear how many people could have been helped by the notice change over the past four years, but the settlement agreement estimates 150,000 people have had their licenses revoked for nonpayment since 2015. The DMV estimates 57,000 people in North Carolina have revoked licenses right now solely because they’ve failed to pay a traffic ticket.
It’s also not clear what the DMV, which had different leadership in 2018 than it has now, stood to lose, even if changing its notice policy hurt its argument in the case and led to a court loss. The lawsuit filed by the ACLU of North Carolina and the Southern Poverty Law Center didn’t ask for a cash award, other than to cover attorney’s fees. Neither side was awarded attorney’s fees in the final settlement.
WRAL News asked several times about specific concerns the DMV had that prevented the change of notice four years ago and why, if the division decided it could better serve the public with a more explicit notice, it didn’t simply do so.
“We were serving the public by resolving the lawsuit,” Homan said in an email.
Homan said the final settlement lays out “the same conditions the state offered not long after the lawsuit was originally filed.”
The ACLU of North Carolina disputed that through its spokesman, saying that doesn’t account for the DMV agreeing more recently to not only change the notice going forward, but to notify drivers whose licenses were revoked in the past, and to pay $30,000 for a website to help educate impacted drivers.
