Three car-tag offices will close and a new one will open in Sedgwick County

Two weeks from now, you’ll have a new place to get car tags, renewals and title work done.

The Sedgwick County Treasurer’s Office will shut down its three current satellite tag offices and move the staffs and equipment to a new and larger location in east Wichita.

The new tag office, at 5620 E. Kellogg, will open at noon on Dec. 10, County Treasurer Linda Kizzire said.

When that’s done, Wichita will have two large tag offices — the new office and the main office in a former Dillons store at Meridian and Douglas.

The stations to be closed are in Derby, the Brittany Center in northeast Wichita and the Chadsworth Center in northwest Wichita.

The closures will happen at 5 p.m. Dec. 7, the Friday before the new office opens. Employees and movers will work through the weekend to get the new office up and running on that Monday, Kizzire said.

Kizzire said she recognizes that some people will have a problem with the change, but the new office will be able to process the work faster, leading to overall shorter wait times.

“I’m not doing this to make everybody in Wichita upset,” she said. “I just think it will actually be better. It’s for efficiency and the well-being of our employees.”

Spreading the work across four offices — one large and three small — was hard on the staff, she said.

Under the current system, employees have to be sent from the main tag office to cover vacations and sick calls at the satellite offices. That can mess with their personal schedules, especially parents who have children in day care near the central office.

Plus, satellite station employees often have to work long overtime days, because they can’t leave until they finish all the transactions for everyone in line when the doors close at 5 p.m.

On busy days when there are long lines, employees regularly wound up working from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Kizzire said.

The new office will have 25 clerks assigned, compared with 29 for the main office. The treasurer’s office will hire four new clerks for the east office.

Kizzire is also working toward deploying self-service kiosks in the offices for routine transactions such as renewals that don’t require staff attention.

Regardless of which tag office you use, a $4 service charge will be added to transactions at the offices. Kizzire said that’s necessary because the offices are self-supporting. The tag charges that make up the bulk of car-license revenue are set by the Legislature and can’t be changed, she said.

To avoid the extra fees now, customers have to either use the mail or a state website, https://www.ksrevenue.org/.

Kizzire said she is talking with contractors about what services she could offer through self-serve kiosks and expects to put out a request for proposals soon. She said she hopes to have the kiosks up and running as soon as possible next year.

This story was originally published November 26, 2018 at 1:34 PM.