AUGUSTA – Mainers are waiting too many hours at regional Bureau of Motor Vehicle offices to complete routine tasks such as vehicle registrations, prompting some lawmakers to consider looking at the private sector to deliver what the state apparently cannot.

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap was grilled by members of the Legislature’s Transportation Committee for nearly an hour Thursday about the lengthy delays at the state’s 13 regional BMV offices. Dunlap told the panel that on average BMV customers are waiting more than an hour to register new vehicles or obtain new licenses, but he also acknowledged that in some urban areas such as Bangor, the wait can last for “several hours.”

“We’re in a pretty horrific situation … ,” Dunlap said. “It’s news to nobody that we’ve had a pretty tough situation in the branch offices this summer with extended wait times and a greatly heightened number of complaints about those wait times and inability to obtain services. Earlier in the summer, that [wait] was ascribed largely to some failures within our computer system to remain stable.”

Dunlap said that while major advances have been made toward resolving the computer problems, his department continues to suffer from a personnel shortage. The situation was compounded, he said, when the Legislature failed to approve his request for extending the employment of several temporary workers who lost their jobs when the last fiscal year expired June 30.

Dunlap had hoped the new computer software program would offset the loss of the temporary employees, but glitches in the system only exacerbated the shortage earlier this summer. Dunlap told the committee Thursday that his department worked with the governor’s office to come up with a solution that involves hiring 14 new temporary workers at a cost of $374,000. The money for salaries, he said, would be found by making reductions or revisions elsewhere in his department’s budget.

Lawmakers were understanding, but not particularly sympathetic to Dunlap’s dilemma. Both Democrats and Republicans on the committee agreed that if the state can’t get the job done, it may be time to see whether there is interest in the private sector to deliver the same services.

“Mr. Secretary, I’m a little disappointed that all the thought process in this branch office problem that you have centers on the branch offices,” said Rep. Terrence P. McKenney, R-Cumberland. “In this day and age, you would think there are other solutions to providing BMV services other than branch offices. I don’t understand why all these services can’t be done at someone’s town hall or can’t be privatized as they have done in North Carolina. Maybe I’m alone in my thinking, but I think the branch offices are an anachronism.”

Even Dunlap had to admit there might be some merit to exploring alternatives to the BMV branch offices.

“Privatization is not off the table,” Dunlap said. “We’re looking at that, and we’re looking at our past experience and how willing the private sector is and how feasible it is for it to be done. The private sector is doing this to make money, and it would be a little more expensive than what people are used to paying for.”

But Sen. Bill Diamond, a Democrat from Windham and a former four-term secretary of state, said the state already had a fairly successful track record with the private sector in the 1990s when it allowed several Rite Aid drugstores to provide registration services.

“They might have charged a dollar, but anyone would have paid the buck as opposed to waiting for several hours,” Diamond told Dunlap. “You might want to look again and see why that was stopped because they really took a lot of pressure off the branch offices.”

In describing the difficulties Bureau of Motor Vehicle workers have experienced this summer, Dunlap said customers were becoming increasingly angry when they would walk into a state office only to find out they would have to wait four or five hours before being served by the next attendant. Ultimately, he said, he wound up closing the branch office doors an hour earlier, at 4 p.m. instead of 5 p.m., so workers could process customers already in the office and still get home at a reasonable hour.

“We were killing people,” Dunlap said. “They were coming in at 8 a.m. and leaving at 8 p.m. and dealing with surly, angry people all day long and the stress was just really [too much]. We knew it was going to get to people, and we knew we had to act before people started quitting and walking out. Then we’d have one less person with a great deal of expertise who could be helping but would not be.”

Not particularly gratified by Dunlap’s promise that waiting times would be down to a half-hour by the end of the year with the integration of the new temporary workers, Democratic Sen. Dennis Damon of Trenton, co-chairman of the Transportation Committee, said all lawmakers for several months had been fielding constituent complaints about the long waits at BMV.

“If in fact resolving the problem involves getting some more people in there, then reluctantly, I go along with that, and I hope that will bring them back in line,” Damon said. “I’m kind of encouraged by the discussion of alternatives, including privatization. All of that seems to be on the table, and it ought to be.”