County computer systems back up to full speed

City information technology employees fixed a nagging computer problem Thursday morning just as driver’s licensing and satellite city hall offices were opening across Oahu and in Hawaii’s three other counties, ending a three-day problem that all but crippled the municipalities’ ability to process routine transactions.

All terminals at each of the driver’s licensing centers at Kapalama Hale, Ka­polei Hale, Waianae, Wahiawa and Koolau were tested Thursday morning and were found to be working normally and at regular speeds, city spokesman Andrew Pereira said.

Officials with Hawaii, Maui and Kauai counties all confirmed that their operations were back to normal, as well, Thursday. Under a contract with the state, the City and County of Honolulu maintains the statewide database used by all the counties for driver’s licenses, vehicle registrations, state IDs and other services.

City officials, who first noticed problems Monday, blamed incompatibility between the city’s new mainframe computer hardware and old software as the root of the problem. Data processing slowed to a crawl but never actually stopped during the week, city officials insisted.

Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell praised city employees and vendors for working overnight to fix the problem. “We found a configuration problem in the system that impeded the activity of the security software,” he said in a statement. “After correcting the configuration, the security software worked and the performance of the system returned to normal.”

Issues involving motor vehicle registration processing appeared to have been cleared sometime Wednesday, but other services, including driver’s license renewals and state ID cards, continued to be extremely slow. Caldwell told reporters Wednesday that the goal was to get everything back to normal by Friday.

But customers arriving at the licensing centers and satellite city halls Thursday morning were being serv­iced at a regular pace, and no new problems surfaced during the day, Pereira said late in the afternoon.

Department of Information Technology staffers took part in a five-hour conference call involving technicians from as far as Bulgaria and Paris, from about 7 p.m. to midnight, Pereira said.

The city will proceed with an earlier plan to open the driver’s licensing center at Kapalama Hale, at Alakawa Street and Dillingham Boulevard, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday to deal with a backlog of driver’s license renewals, Pereira said. No other transactions, including road testing, will be conducted.

The city is granting a one-time extension, through July 7, for vehicle owners with registrations expiring June 30 who were affected by the service interruption. To avoid incurring penalties, however, vehicle owners need to make a payment at a satellite city hall office in person or by mail, postmarked no later than July 7. No extension or penalty waivers will be granted for any online vehicle registration payments.

Kauai County, like Honolulu, is extending the time for vehicle registrations expiring June 30 to July 7.

In Hawaii County the Vehicle Registration and Licensing Division extended its renewal deadline for vehicle registrations and driver’s licenses through July 7.

In Maui County the Police Department was asked to allow motorists a grace period through July 7 to get their paperwork updated.