The Department of Driver Services announced today that they would be opening a facility in Bainbridge at the former Bainbridge CVB building sometime in 2015.
In late 2013, the City of Bainbridge hosted a Hometown Connection meeting with Senator Dean Burke and Representatives Jay Powell and Darlene Taylor. At that meeting, city officials toured the group through various city facilities, one of those being the Bainbridge CVB. It was then that City Manager Chris Hobby pitched the idea of turning the building into the Driver Services facility.
“When we closed the CVB, we knew we had to do something with the building. I had received a lot of feedback from our citizens that they were upset because they had to go out of town to get a driver’s license,” said City Manager Chris Hobby.
Once Hobby proposed the idea to the legislators, they carried the idea to Atlanta and were able to secure money in the FY15 budget.
At the same time, Hobby began conversations with DDS Commissioner Rob Mikell about the possibility of using the building. Mikell began an internal analysis and found that roughly half of the people using the Colquitt facility were from Decatur County.
“I felt it was important to try to recruit a state agency to that building because the state built that building. There was no local money used for the construction of that building,” said Hobby.
According to Commissioner Mikell, the facility will be fully operational no later than May 2015.
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