Legislature eyes RMV problems
The House oversight committee chairman says he’s looking into the fatal problems at the Registry of Motor Vehicles and is considering holding hearings on what needs to be done to address them.
“I am monitoring the situation, and if hearings are appropriate, we will certainly hold them,” state Rep. David Linsky told the Herald. “We’re gathering facts right now.”
The Natick Democrat, who chairs the House Committee on Post Audit and Oversight, said he first wants to hear from members of the Baker administration on what went so wrong in the RMV’s processing of out-of-state violation notices, and what’s happening going forward.
Linsky said he is “troubled greatly” by the reports about the registry’s admitted errors, which led the RMV to fail to suspend hundreds of licenses including that of the trucker criminally charged with striking and killing seven bikers in New Hampshire two weeks ago.
“It’s a serious public safety issue for everyone in Massachusetts,” he said.
State officials began investigating the RMV after it came to light last week that the registry had failed to suspend the commercial license of Volodymyr Zhukovskyy following an out-of-state drunken-driving arrest that happened a month before the fatal June 21 crash in New Hampshire.
Following RMV chief Erin Deveney’s resignation last week in the fallout from the crash, Gov. Charlie Baker and Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack have pointed to two different areas in which the RMV has been systemically dropping the ball on notifications about out-ofstate violations — which both contributed to allowing the 23-year-old West Springfield man to remain on the road. No RMV employees were doing the manual checks needed on commercial driver’s license violations from out of state, and the tens of thousands of notices for infractions on regular Massachusetts licenses from other states had also ended up unchecked, stashed away in 53 bins of paper.
Baker and Pollack, who insists she’ll remain on the job, announced earlier this week that the registry has suspended hundreds of licenses after finding the oversights.