In January, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) launched a one-stop shop for digital drivers’ services.
The Online Registration and Identity Operating Network, or ORION, was meant to be the crowning jewel of the department’s Motorist Modernization initiative.
Instead, in the six months since, chronic ORION outages have hampered tax collectors’ abilities to serve as DMV agents.
In Pasco County Tax Collector Mike Fasano's view, FLHSMV leadership isn’t considering how these breakdowns affect their constituents.
“I can’t seem to stress enough to those in the department that what goes on trickles down to this front line,” Fasano said. “They hide up in Tallahassee, and they put the onus on us to explain everything to the public.”
Tax collectors told WUSF the state’s vague communications mean they know very little about when service will return to normal.
Earlier this week, Hillsborough County residents waited in the heat for two hours to enter the University Square tax collection branch.
With ORION down, agents couldn’t process new tickets and turned some customers away at the door. An email notice to tax collectors said “an unusually high volume of requests” had entered their cashiering system.
Laura Sorrell came in to renew her concealed carry permit, but walked away empty-handed.
“I didn’t get it done, because their system is down,” Sorrell said. “They are just having trouble.”
Sorrell had met an elderly woman who had to renew her driver’s license by midnight, but she wasn’t physically able to wait in line for two hours.
An overhead announcement directed customers to the MyDMV website for certain driver’s licenses services. Meanwhile, staff showed customers how to use drop-off boxes for other needs and took down their information when computers failed.
However, as Reddit users complained, the MyDMV portal is also riddled with bugs and glitches.
One user posted a screenshot showing Djibouti listed 30 times as an option for origin country — but no United States.
“The phone service is useless,” a commenter wrote. “There is no reason for this except willful and malicious mismanagement.”
“The state won’t give us the tools”
Tax collector’s offices allow Floridians to renew driver’s licenses, register mobile homes, and pay property taxes under one roof.
A former state representative, Fasano said he likes being a tax collector because it emphasizes direct, hyper-local service. When he’s not at his office in Land O’Lakes, he works as a front desk attendant at Pasco’s other four branches.
SEE ALSO: Pasco County's tax collector questions the effect of property tax reform
The Pasco County Tax Collector helps over 50,000 customers a month, but motor vehicle services are not a money-maker for the office.
With most revenue earmarked for FLHSMV, Fasano estimates his office's registration, tag and title operations loses $4 million annually.
“I’m not complaining," Fasano said. "I just need to let people know that we can’t provide good service because the state won’t give us the tools to do it."
Joe Tedder, Polk County's tax collector, said outages complicate what's supposed to be a straightforward, efficient process for Floridians.
“Let’s say that you’re an elderly couple buying a mobile home park,” Tedder said. “You flew in from Michigan to transfer that title. Our system is down and we’ll go, ‘We don’t know, it could be back up in 10 minutes, it could be back up in 10 hours.'”
Before the outages, Tedder says his office largely met his goal — no wait times over 20 minutes.
Hillsborough County Tax Collector Nancy Millan's office saw 12 outages in the past two months.
She said the state should answer for the ORION outages, explaining that her frontline staff bears the brunt of customer frustration.
“Our reputation carries a lot of weight,” Millan said. “When things go bad, people remember that, and it’s always something we have to explain — that this is completely out of our hands.”
A May 27 social media post stated FLHSMV “is aware of ongoing performance issues,” but they haven’t put out any additional media releases. Gov. Ron DeSantis' office did not respond to a request for comment.
Millan emphasized her staff remains dedicated to customer service, which she sees as the heart of a tax collector’s mission.
“We do it well, and that’s why agencies have entrusted us to do that at the local level — being good stewards of taxpayers' dollars and providing service and convenience,” Millan said.
The ORION breakdowns coincide with other recent pressures on Florida tax collectors’ work.
The new English-only driver’s test policy stretched wait times and increased staff workloads at some offices.
Now, with voters set to decide the fate of an amendment that would limit property taxes, Millan worries about losing the revenue source that keeps their staff and bills paid.
"We'll definitely see a degradation of services in the future, depending on what that model looks like for those property tax cuts," she said.
