A day past the deadline for renewing his driver’s license, a CL staffer got a ticket for having out-of-date tags and needed to get new ones, pronto, which meant doing it in person. He dreaded the experience, certain he was about to waste a whole morning mired in bureaucratic lethargy. But no. The senior tax technician at the Skyway Tax Collector’s Office in South St. Pete, Kathy Dempsey, was helpful, friendly, efficient and surprisingly fast — the whole process, new license plate, new tag, and all, took about 10 minutes. With all the current talk about centralizing Florida driver’s license operations, we thought it worth noting that the system as it presently stands seems to work very well — especially when people like Kathy Dempsey are involved.
