First there were long lines and waits that lasted hours, followed by website glitches, protracted hold times on telephone information lines and extreme difficulty in arranging timely appointments.
The introduction of New York’s much-heralded municipal identification program, one of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature initiatives, has been anything but smooth since it began on Jan. 12, with the surge in demand far surpassing the city’s estimates and overwhelming a system created to handle far fewer applicants.
Officials have scrambled to expand the program’s capacity and to accelerate the application process.
But after nearly four weeks, the city is still trying to catch up with the demand. As of Thursday, the earliest available appointment was on May 18, at a processing center in Manhattan. Appointments in Queens were booked until later in May, and on Staten Island until July. Residents of Brooklyn and the Bronx who sought appointments in those boroughs were out of luck: The calendars were completely full.
Critics have likened the program’s bumpy start to the fraught rollout of the health-insurance exchange website created under the Affordable Care Act, a comparison that city officials, including the mayor, have rebutted.
Still, the problems have frustrated many prospective applicants and even some of the city’s collaborators in the effort.
–
Central to the city’s strategy are the three new enrollment centers, which officials are calling “hubs.” The city first plans to use them to speed up the processing of appointments that have already been scheduled, then will open them to walk-in applicants. There are also the two existing temporary centers — one in Brooklyn, the other in Queens — that may be augmented with up to three more, and the doubling of the program’s staff, which currently numbers just over 100.
Officials are trying to calculate and adhere to an acceptable maximum wait time, while also tempering expectations and counseling patience.
Bertha Asitinbay, 37, an Ecuadorean immigrant, said she was mostly attracted to the discounts to cultural institutions that come with the card, but had been unable to get an appointment before April.
“I’m losing so much important time,” Ms. Asitinbay said. “Can you imagine? That’s three months that I could be taking my daughters to the museums.”
“I don’t think the mayor gave careful enough thought to all the people who wanted an ID,” she continued, adding with a philosophical shrug, “But what can you do?”
