It's time for this biweekly meeting of the Finance and Business Committee of Denver City Council.

Join us for the Finance and Business Committee starting now.

Right.

Good morning, everyone.

Um, welcome to Finance and Business Committee.

Today is Tuesday, June 9th.

Uh, my name is Serena Gonzalez Cutiere.

I'm one of your council members at large, and uh glad to be the chair of this committee.

Uh, we're gonna start with council member um and not announcements, what am I saying?

Council member introductions, and then we will go on to our agenda for today.

I'm gonna going to start with any members we have participating virtually and see if anybody's online.

Not yet.

All right, then we'll go ahead and start in the room, and I will start over here to my left.

Uh, good morning, Darrell Watson, fine, district nine.

Good morning, Paul Cashman South Denver, District 6.

Good morning, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4.

Good morning, Chris Hines.

Denver is perfect.

10.

Perfect delivery for Herb and 10.

All right.

And we may have members joining us online.

I'll make sure that we welcome them as they join.

Um, with that said, um, today we have a briefing coming from the Department of Motor Vehicle.

Thank you so much for the folks joining us today.

Uh please introduce yourselves, proceed with your presentation.

I'll be taking uh a cue from council members, and we'll do questions at the end.

Wonderful.

Uh good morning, everyone.

Good morning, council members.

We're glad to be here today.

Um my name is Sophia Hassman.

I am the city and county of Denver Treasurer, and I am joined by our director of motor vehicle, Ted Trujillo.

Uh we really appreciate this invitation to be here and present to you some updates on the DMV and status of things going on in 2026.

Um I'd also like to acknowledge the hardworking staff of the DMV.

Uh they have, you know, continue to serve our constituents day in, day out, and really have been working hard in a high volume and high demand environment and continue to show up with professionalism and engagement and are innovative in ways that we can continue to serve Denver's residents as well as the commercial customers we have.

Um, so today we want to share some information about the DMV operations, our work plans and some opportunities coming forward, goals, and we're really happy to come here and get feedback from the committee for um working together on you know those goals that we can help serve this um entire Denver residents and all the Denverites, and the community of the commercial businesses that interact with all of the business vehicles.

Um we also want to make sure that we uh provide a clear understanding of when and how and how the prep is to come to the DMV versus other opportunities in which a lot of the transactions are made.

Um there is a high volume of transactions from different components of you know, online mail kiosks, and then in-person transactions as well.

Um so I will let Ted start with the slides that we have.

Let me move forward.

First of all, DMB is we are re in statute.

We are identified as uh agents of the state.

State of Colorado by statute is the only one who can um title and register and uh create credentials for uh residents of the state of Colorado.

We are agents of the state, therefore they delegate that authority to us as a county to then facilitate those services.

Colorado also uses the title and registration process to collect many of their taxes.

Um, one of the most common complaints you hear from residents that come from other states to Colorado is the sticker shock initially because uh they may have paid $50 for an annual renewal where we may be in the thousands of dollars based on the taxing sources.

So uh basically that's what we do.

We title and register uh motor vehicles uh for residents of the city and county of Denver.

We do not do driver's license services as that's a uh state function.

Um so for the county and state uh services.

Uh for us, as I said, we do primarily Thailand registration services.

The state and they do uh primarily uh uh IDs, uh driver's license, uh they do a lot of uh the CDL drivers and uh there they also do education uh certification, all of those kind of things for uh the CDL side of the shop and they also are responsible for uh overseeing your driving record and then any administrative sanctions that may go along with that.

So the state takes care of all of all that, and uh the city and county of Denver then titles and registers vehicles so that all residents can uh own and drive and uh have and pay their taxes uh legally each year.

Um we just recently went through a state audit.

We go through an annual audit for to where they oversee our inventory, they are responsible for uh providing inventory and inventory is in everything from license plates, the tags that go on your car, uh the backer boards, uh title paper, all of those things are what we we then, the state sends those to us, and then we are accountable for every piece of that uh that uh inventory.

We treat inventory the same as cash.

Those if those inventory is gets into the wrong hands, uh you can see that people can avoid having to pay taxes, not paying, you know, they can put tags on their cars that they're not actually uh have paid their taxes to have.

Uh title paper can cause a national problem where if somebody were to get uh vacant title paper, they can go in and put information.

Someone can come and say that they can get all the information off your vehicle and then come and say that they're the owner of your vehicle if they were to get title paper, or they can get a vehicle that was deemed in Colorado as not roadworthy, take it to another state and have a clean title, and they could go and try to get it title and registered in another state with a clean title.