MORE RMV INFO DEMANDED
Legislators want records in registry license scandal
Two legislators investigating the records scandal at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, voicing “frustration and deep concern,” say they’re giving the Baker administration one last chance to cooperate before they issue subpoenas for records they’ve been requesting for three weeks.
In a scathing letter sent to Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack Tuesday, Transportation Committee chairmen Rep. William Straus and Sen. Joseph Boncore said “this is the last time,” they will “respectfully request,” documents they asked for three weeks ago, and that they are “losing confidence in the administration’s willingness to cooperate fully.”
“This letter really, from myself and Sen. Boncore, is and should be a signal to the secretary’s office that when we’ve said all along that we are determined to learn what is out there on this, we mean it,” Chairman William Straus told the Herald. “More than enough time has gone by.”
Straus said he has heard “nothing” from MassDOT about the requested records since July 29, the day before the committee’s seven-hour hearing last week where legislators uncovered a decades-long practice of completely ignoring out-ofstate notifications and convictions. The issue came to a head in June after Massachusetts-licensed trucker Volodymyr Zhukovskyy was accused of killing seven motorcyclists in a fatal crash in New Hampshire, when his license should have been suspended for a May 11 OUI arrest in Connecticut.
MassDOT spokeswoman Jacqueline Goddard said in response to the legislators’ letter, “the Department is gathering additional documents to comply with the committee’s request while working to correct deficiencies at the Registry of Motor Vehicles.”
In their letter, the chairmen specifically refer to an email obtained by the Herald, in which a supervisor at the Merit Rating Board sounded the alarm on a lack of staffing in May 2016 — just before that office was handed responsibility of processing out-of-state driving violations. In over 10,000 documents MassDOT has said they sent the committee, that email was not one of them. They also point to other documents that they believe exist, based on testimony from the oversight hearing, that have not been provided to them.
“It has to raise the question of whether means other than a written request are going to be required,” Straus said, “and anticipating your next question, the only way that that could be accomplished would be after a grant of subpoena power.”
The chairmen expressed their “serious, overall frustration and deep concern,” with the administration’s lack of cooperation. Just three out of seven people the committee called for its first hearing on July 22 showed up to testify, and a fraction of the requested documentation was sent over the Friday night before. For the second hearing last week, all the witnesses showed up, but hundreds of records were still being sent to the committee hours after the established deadline the night before.
The letter expands the scope of the legislative investigation, as well, adding requests for documents including both work and personal email correspondence for 15 RMV workers and nine non-RMV employees such as vendors and contractors.