DEVENEY: REGISTRY MESS DATES TO ’15
Officials detail how job got batted around
Former Registry of Motor Vehicles chief Erin Deveney admitted in a legislative hearing Tuesday that she knew out-of-state violations weren’t being processed as early as 2015 — four years before a Massachusetts trucker who should have been off the road was charged with killing seven motorcyclists in New Hampshire.
Deveney, who resigned last month over the RMV’s failure to suspend trucker Volodymyr Zhukovskyy’s license, told members of the Joint Committee on Transportation that she was not aware of “any prior effort” by the RMV to process outof-state notifications, an issue she said was identified in 2015 as “an area that needed to be addressed.”
Driver Control Unit director Keith Constantino, who was hired in June 2015, testified that he discovered a three-year backlog of about 10,000 out-of-state notifications stored in 72 boxes. He said he became aware of the “extent and magnitude” of the issues with out-of-state notifications in 2016 and recommended that the process be transferred to the Merit Rating Board.
Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Boncore held up a black-and-white photo of the 72 boxes from an email Constantino sent to Merit Rating Board Director Thomas Bowes that same year. In another email exchange between Bowes and Constantino in February 2017, Bowes said they would be processing only six months out of the three-year backlog, but that they were waiting for approval from the governor’s legal office and the MassDOT to proceed.
But Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack
claims they have “located no record” that email was sent, and that appeared to be a draft.
“It is unacceptable that the senior leadership of the registry failed to address these known problems with processing out-of-state notifications or to elevate those problems to my office,” Pollack said.
Chairman William Straus told reporters after the hearing that the committee was skeptical that the problems were contained within the RMV.
“I think you could see in our questioning, and certainly from many members of the committee, a skepticism if you will or surprise that this level of procedural and management failures within the Registry was pretty much unknown to anyone else in state government,” Straus said.
Bowes had requested additional staff after going from 68 to 62 employees at the Merit Rating Board, but was told he couldn’t fill the positions because of a “headcount freeze” at MassDOT.
Brie-Anne Dwyer, who works for MassDOT’s audit operations, was assigned to a special project to audit the Merit Rating Board, which was ultimately left with the responsibility for processing the out-of-state notifications. Though Dwyer was not able to complete the audit before the scandal unfolded, she produced a preliminary report on April 3 identifying concerns, including an “open queue” of 12,829 out-of-state convictions in the ATLAS computer system.
Deveney said she approved the transfer of responsibility to process the license suspensions from the Driver Control Unit to the Merit Rating Board in 2016 and requested a previous audit in an attempt to address the issue. She said she also decided to prioritize Massachusetts violations because there is no backup for them.
Deveney also identified a new group that holds some responsibility in the issue, the State Pointer Exchange Services team, which is supposed to process out-of-state notifications through an electronic mailbox.
Deveney became emotional when discussing her decision to resign, saying, “Seven families experienced an unimaginable tragedy and they didn’t deserve explanations or excuses, they deserved someone to be accountable and to acknowledge that the service that the RMV provided was unacceptable and that’s why I submitted my resignation.”