County Executive P.J. Wendel and Greg Carlson, County Clerk-Elect are pictured Tuesday at the Chautauqua Harbor Hotel in Celoron. P-J file photo by Michael Zabrodsky

In December, Chautauqua County had to close its Department of Motor Vehicle Mayville branch two days a week due to a staffing issue with supervisors. The newly elected county clerk has a plan to prevent this from happening again.

Greg Carlson, who took office Jan. 1, appeared at a couple of county legislature committee meetings regarding a resolution to set the salary for the Senior Motor Vehicle Representative.

“This is a newly created position that would provide both frontline customer service and operational supervisory support and the daily operations of the DMV,” he said.

Carlson explained that the commissioner of the state DMV office set the standard of a minimum of two staff members and one supervisor.

“We only have three supervisors, one at each location. One in Jamestown, one in Dunkirk and one in Mayville. So any time someone was absent, on vacation or sick, it would create problems,” he said.

Because of the supervisory issue, last month the county closed the Mayville DMV branch every Thursday and Friday.

According to the resolution, the Senior Motor Vehicle Representative will work as an active member of the service team while also performing delegated supervisory duties, such as training new staff, monitoring transaction accuracy, addressing routine operational issues and reporting unusual occurrences to the Motor Vehicle Office Supervisor or Motor Vehicles Administrator.

Carlson explained that this won’t create new positions, but rather would take current existing positions and upgrade them to the Senior DMV representative position.

The salary range would be $21.62 – $27.62 per hour.

Carlson said the plan is to have two Senior DMV reps in Jamestown, two Senior DMV reps in Dunkirk and one Senior DMV representative in Mayville.

Carlson said while there will be additional costs for the new Senior DMV representative, he said the move would be “budget neutral” this year because they have identified some savings in the operations of the DMV to cover the costs.

The resolution was approved in committee meetings and will before the full legislature for final approval.