Steve Hilton wants to strip the California Department of Motor Vehicles of its stand-alone status, cap annual vehicle registration at $73 and move routine paperwork out of field offices. He laid out the plan on Tuesday outside a DMV office in West Hollywood, saying the state should replace the agency with a leaner system built around county offices and certified local service centers.
The proposal is the sharpest example yet of Hilton's Califordable pitch. His campaign said the flat fee would cut state registration revenue from about $11 billion to $2.7 billion, a drop that would be hard to miss for any Legislature asked to turn the plan into law. That math is central to the fight over the idea: under the proposal, drivers would pay one annual charge, but the state would collect only about one-quarter of the money it now takes in from registration.
Hilton said the DMV would first go through a three-month audit before being eliminated as a stand-alone department. He also said no DMV field office would close until an equivalent or better in-person option was available nearby, a safeguard meant to reassure drivers even as the proposal pushes routine title, registration and renewal work away from state counters. A smaller state operation would still handle driver's licenses, fraud prevention, REAL ID and other records and safety functions, so the agency would not vanish entirely even if its current structure did.
That is the friction inside the plan. Hilton is selling abolition, but his own outline keeps a state role in place for the work that cannot simply be handed off. He said properties no longer needed would first be offered to community colleges and apprenticeship programs for job-training centers, and could otherwise be sold. The lost registration revenue would be offset through a separate proposal called Operation Zero Waste, though the campaign did not spell out in the rollout how that would work in practice.
Jonathan Underland, speaking for Xavier Becerra's campaign, dismissed the idea as a safety risk, saying, “Nothing says `safer roads' like outsourcing driver safety checks to the lowest bidder.” The proposal would require legislative action, and Hilton's campaign called the needed bill the No More DMV Act. Hilton and Becerra are scheduled to debate on Sept. 30 on, where the fight over whether California should keep, shrink or scrap the DMV will move from a campaign promise to a test of political muscle.
