RMV fail called ‘incomprehensible’
Oversight board quizzes transportation officials
Members of the state Department of Transportation’s Finance and Audit Committee condemned the “unconscionable” administrative failures at the Registry of Motor Vehicles during a meeting Wednesday, demanding that steps be taken to ensure dangerous drivers’ licenses are promptly suspended.
Committee member Tim King called it “incomprehensible,” that “someone, anyone” would consider it acceptable to let tens of thousands of alerts on Massachusetts drivers’ violations in other states accumulate for more than a year, unprocessed in 53 bins.
“This lack of duty and ultimately, lack of oversight in management, is unconscionable,” King said. “These are the types of things that infuriate taxpayers and rightly so.”
The oversight included a notification from Connecticut on the drunken driving arrest of West Springfield trucker Volodymyr Zhukovskyy — the driver charged with killing seven motorcyclists in Randolph, N.H., on June 21 when his license should have been suspended. Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack acknowledged during the meeting that what should have been a quick suspension, “did not occur.”
“I personally, and everyone involved in this, feels awful about what happened,” said Pollack, who has faced questions about whether she should have resigned along with former RMV chief Erin Deveney. She said they are “committed to making sure it never happens again, and committed to making sure that everyone who works for Registry of Motor Vehicles understands that we are in the safety business, we are in the secure credential business and, of course, we are in the customer service business. There is no reason that we cannot do all three things equally well.”
The members of the Mass-DOT board of directors subcommittee were given the three status reports that have been issued in the past three weeks, the most recent of which showed that the agency has now processed 2,039 belated license suspension orders on violations by 1,607 drivers.
Pollack took notes on their questions, including a request from Finance and Audit Committee Chairwoman Betsy Taylor for an outline of exactly what the RMV is supposed to do and a thread of “best practices,” when it comes to processing notifications from out of state.
King called for a “quick and thorough,” investigation, adding that he is “most interested in preventing something like this from occurring ever again.”
“We understand that we did not keep faith with the public in Massachusetts and that they are genuinely concerned about the safety of our roads and we’re going to win back that faith,” Pollack said, “by taking actions that we need to take to correct the mistakes of the past and to do our job on safety and security going forward.”
The focus over the past few weeks has been on fixing the problem with out-of-state notifications, according to Pollack, but, “that does not mean there will not ultimately be a review of the role of individual people and changes in personnel as necessary.”