(Wikipedia/Asterio Tecson)

Saturday night, just hours after news broke that Whitney Houston had died, the District Department of Motor Vehicles paid tribute to the singer with a contest on Twitter, offering a "fast pass" to the first of its followers to correctly answer one of several trivia questions:

At least two of the DMV's followers seemed to find it distasteful. "Really?" John Taylor, a regional Sprint spokesman, tweeted, while @DCProper wrote simply, "Shark jumped."

My reaction was negative, too. How could a government agency turn a pop icon's death into a contest so quickly? I wondered if the DMV's Twitter account had been hacked.

Nope.

Lucinda Babers, the director of the DMV, maintains the account herself, and her tweets were an effort to engage young people. Speaking by phone on Sunday, she described being at Mayor Gray's "One City" summit the day before, where one recurring message was that the government needs to do more to reach younger residents.

"We have 18,000 new residents. They all need to come to us to convert their credentials over, and the majority of them are young," Babers, 47, told me. "They're not our age."

"So I have Twitter up and I'm sitting here, and I'm watching [people] explode and I think, 'Wow, look at this.... We should try to get in on this.'"

But what about the timing? Isn't it unseemly to turn a celebrity death into a contest?

Babers says no.

"What I was seeing was my [Twitter] followers, who were showing their respect by talking about [Houston] and their favorite Whitney songs and her different movies, and who first sang what song," she said. "We had a Michael Jackson day at DMV after he died," and customers "embraced it."

Although one person faulted the agency for giving away government resources, Babers says that's not the case. The "fast pass," she explains, gives visitors a lower "queuing number" — that is, it allows you to jump the line — but doesn't have a dollar value.