Regardless of labor concessions, the Department of Motor Vehicles announced Wednesday that it will be scaling back its office operating hours and shifting some services to four centralized locations, beginning Friday.

The changes are an effort to streamline the agency and reduce its operating costs, and are independent of whether or not state employee unions vote to ratify a negotiated concession agreement, a DMV statement said.

“The agency has been reviewing operations for several months with a focus on finding ways to regionalize some services and reduce costs,” said DMV Commissioner Melody Currey. “These new hours will help people conduct their business at the DMV before they go to work, after work on Thursdays, and on Saturdays. We continue to encourage people to do as much of their DMV business online as possible.”

The department’s 10 full-service branches will remain closed on Mondays. They will be open from 7:45 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On Thursdays they will be open from 9:15 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday hours will remain from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

The changes add 15 minutes to Monday, Wednesday, Friday operations but the full-service branches will be open one hour and 15 minutes less on Thursdays.

Some branches will offer fewer services because many will now only be offered at the Bridgeport, Waterbury, Wethersfield and Willimantic offices.

According to the statement the services being regionalized are:

– Road tests (non-commercial driver license road tests only)
– Out-of-state driver’s license transfers
– New non-driver identification cards for non-U.S. citizens
– Vehicle identification number verifications
– Eye tests
– New commercial driver’s licenses
– Adding an endorsement to a driver’s license or commercial driver’s license
– Acceptance of application packets for public passenger endorsements
– All knowledge testing

The hours for walk-in knowledge testing have also changed to:

– Tuesday – 7:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
– Wednesday – 7:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
– Thursday – 9:15 a.m. to 4 p.m.
– Friday – 7:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
– Saturday – 8 a.m. to 11 a.m.

All department offices will process license renewals, identification card renewals, duplicate identification cards and driver licenses, new non-driver identification cards for U.S. citizens only, name changes and the variety of registration and title services, except registration renewals, the statement said.