Every first Thursday of the month is DMV Day in Gilliam County.

It’s the only day each month that, for five hours, the fewer than 2,000 residents of this east-central Oregon county can line up to take a driving test, renew a driver’s license, or, like Tim McDonald of Rock Creek, retitle a trailer.

The Condon DMV has no full-time staff, but on a recent foggy Thursday morning, the small waiting room was packed with people who otherwise would have to drive up to 85 miles one way to access DMV services as far away as The Dalles or Hermiston.

“We learn to deal with it living rurally,” he said, adding that’s just how small-town life goes. “Things are a little slower, so you learn to cope.”

Gilliam County residents are not alone. Rural DMV offices across Oregon are having trouble keeping their doors open.

DMV closures were once rare, but data from the Oregon Department of Transportation confirms the pattern: Temporary DMV closures due to staffing shortages have ticked up in recent years.

DMV staffing has been flat for the past quarter-century as Oregon’s population has grown, and the COVID-19 pandemic left 25% of positions unfilled, said Administrator Amy Joyce.

Some locations, like the one in Milton-Freewater, have been closed for months. Others, like John Day or Baker City, were closed for only a day or several days while staff were unavailable.

And DMV officials are also bracing for the impact of potential budget cuts. Oregon is grappling with a $297 million transportation funding gap, an issue further complicated by a ballot measure that will ask voters to approve or reject transportation taxes previously approved by the Legislature.

If transportation cuts end up being too deep, then field offices around the state might see permanent closures or further service reductions, Joyce said.

Not a blip, but a trend

Every morning, leaders at Oregon Driver and Motor Vehicles headquarters engage in what Joyce calls “morning Jenga.”

They look at all the daily staff absences across nearly 60 offices and figure out how to move 409 field office staff around to keep the whole operation from toppling over.

But playing that game has grown more difficult in recent years, especially with the department’s rural offices.

“We do that every day, and then at some point it … doesn’t make sense to try to do that Jenga that morning, because you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she said.

Rather than robbing Peter, the DMV is shutting things down.

Altogether, DMV locations were unexpectedly closed for 79 days due to a lack of staffing in 2022, according to data the state provided to OPB.

That number ballooned to 126 days in 2023, and although it fell the following two years, it remained elevated.

This is not a blip, Joyce said. It’s a trend. Limited hours and closures mean rural residents sometimes have to drive an hour or more to the next nearest office, or forgo DMV services altogether.

And the uncertainty surrounding the state’s transportation budget means some locations experiencing “temporary” closures might stay closed.

Rural DMV offices have been hit harder than offices in urban parts of the state because of Oregon’s vast geography, Joyce said.

If there’s an absence at the DMV office in southeast Portland, it’s not too much of a hassle to ask the Beaverton office, the largest in the state, to send in a substitute. But if a DMV worker in Burns calls in sick, the next closest office is 70 miles away in John Day, which has only a single employee.

Milton-Freewater’s extended closure

While ODOT’s data accounts for short-term closures, it doesn’t include offices that have been closed for an extended period of time.

Milton-Freewater, an Eastern Oregon town of 7,000 a few miles south of the Oregon-Washington border, is one of two offices that’s been closed for months. The other is the Mall 205 location in Portland, which the DMV permanently closed because of facility issues and is still looking to replace.

The DMV announced the indefinite — though not permanent — Milton-Freewater closure in August, after one of the office’s two employees retired.

Milton-Freewater Mayor Michael Odman said it was a significant hit to the community.

Critical services and amenities are at a premium in Milton-Freewater.

Odman, a commercial contractor by trade, said he ran for Milton-Freewater mayor in 2024 because he thought the city was suffering from a declining quality of life.

His campaign resonated with voters, who helped him beat a long-time incumbent in a blowout victory.

The community is still fighting to keep vital services, Odman said. The town was without a clinic that accepted Medicaid for about two years before a new provider moved in last year.

In 2023, Milton-Freewater was left with a single pharmacy after Rite-Aid enacted widespread closures. The building that once housed Rite-Aid now features a Dollar Tree.

With the Milton-Freewater DMV now closed, residents must go to the office in Pendleton about 30 miles south.

Odman said he has a growing list of DMV errands he needs to run but hasn’t had the time to do.

The Milton-Freewater office previously shuttered in 2022. When it reopened after that closure, Odman said, service was shortened to one day per week.

Service from the workers remained excellent, he said, but the reduced hours meant demand went up and wait times increased.

This time around, the DMV won’t commit to reopening the Milton-Freewater office until ODOT gets some clarity on its budget, Joyce said. “Everything’s going to slow down, take longer, that sort of thing, if we get into that worst case scenario,” she said.

Defending the Condon DMV

With only one person on staff, things already take a little longer at the Condon DMV.

Hours passed by amicably in the waiting room on Thursday, the only day of local DMV service that will be offered in February. There were never more than a dozen customers in the lobby on Thursday morning, but that was plenty of work for the sole DMV employee.

Most people were on a first name basis with one another and happy to shoot the breeze. As they waited, residents razzed a teen over what his listed height should be on his driver’s permit and discussed the glory days of the ghost town of Kinzua in neighboring Wheeler County.

Michael Durfey, a worker in the Gilliam County Weed Department and a Condon city councilor, was one of those waiting to register a used pickup he’d just bought.

Durfey was especially talkative, starting up a conversation with everyone who walked through the door — but he got serious when he spoke about what would happen if the DMV closed its Condon branch.

“That would be every single person who’s here — eight already and there’s at least 10 sitting here — have a full day of driving out of our community, taking money out of our community because we do shopping and everything everywhere else, to get a service that we could have gotten at home otherwise,” he said, noting those waiting for services.

With only one worker on staff, it took some people an hour or more to get their DMV business done. But no one left early because of the wait.

After all, at closing time at 3:30 p.m. on Feb. 5, the waiting time automatically reset to the following month. Next available appointment: March 5.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/02/12/rural-dmv-closure-oregon/