NORTHAMPTON — After Tuesday’s hearing on Beacon Hill uncovered that the Registry of Motor Vehicles knew for years of a backlog of notifications from other states of infractions by Massachusetts drivers, local legislators on the oversight committee are calling for a review of the office’s operating procedures.
One lawmaker on the Joint Committee on Transportation, Sen. Eric Lesser, D-Longmeadow, has gone so far as to call for the resignation of Thomas Bowes, director of the RMV’s Merit Rating Board. Testimony from Brie-Anne Dwyer, an auditor with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, revealed that Bowes, who is responsible for entering these infractions, was aware of almost 13,000 unprocessed electronic citations in March.
“He acknowledged he knew about the issue and he is still in his job,” Lesser said of Bowes. “I think he’s lost the confidence of the public.”
The revelation of the backlog came earlier this month after it was found that Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, 23, of West Springfield, had been arrested in Connecticut for drunken driving weeks before he caused a crash in June that killed seven motorcyclists in New Hampshire. Zhukovskyy’s commercial driver’s license in Massachusetts should have been suspended because of the drunken driving arrest, but this citation was lost in the RMV’s backlog of out-of-state infractions.
Registry officials acknowledged that tens of thousands of out-of-state notices had gone unprocessed for years, piling up in a state office. They also said an internal review prompted by the deadly crash has resulted in license suspensions for more than 1,600 Massachusetts motorists since.
The Merit Review Board has been responsible for assessing these out-of-state notices since 2016, when then-head of the registry Erin Devaney placed the responsibility on the office.
While some progress was subsequently made in addressing the backlog, glitches during the installation of a new computer system at the registry in March 2018 prompted a decision to focus on the handling of in-state violations at the expense of out-of-state notices, because the board could not “fix it all at the same time,” Devaney said.
Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, D-Northampton, said she was concerned that state bureaucracy had muddled the process of attending to these infractions. But she said she wanted to see the conclusions of an ongoing independent audit before making any final decisions on who was culpable for the backlog.
Bowes claimed that his office was understaffed, Sabadosa said, which may have led to the Merit Review Board’s inability to process the citations. But Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack provided conflicting testimony when she said neither funding nor staffing led to these issues, she said.
“I want to see the full report before I say ‘This person should resign,’ or ‘That person should resign,’” Sabadosa said. “With such conflicting testimony, I find it premature to call for someone’s resignation.”
State Rep. Natalie Blais, D-Sunderland, said she was also concerned over the apparent conflicting testimony regarding staffing. Blais said she wanted to hear more testimony from RMV officials who did not come to Tuesday’s proceedings.
“The failure of the RMV was unacceptable, despite multiple employees literally sounding the alarm on this backlog of suspension notices,” she said.
Blais also said that there may be unanticipated federal consequences regarding the issuance of commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) if a state fails to adequately notify the home state of a driver convicted of disqualifying offenses.
According to regulations by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the federal government could decertify a state’s CDL program if the state does not transmit these convictions. It was revealed during testimony Tuesday through a document dated from 2017 that Massachusetts did not, at the time, send notices of convictions to other states.
“It could have federal implications,” she said.
Blais called for a continued inquiry into the registry’s operating procedures to make sure those accountable for the backlog are held responsible.
“We need to take a look at who is making these decisions,” she said.
Sabadosa and Lesser both echoed these sentiments, saying that they hope these queries will result in a more streamlined policy for handling infractions at the registry.
“My great hope from the oversight hearing is that there are better processes in general,” Sabadosa said.
“There needs to be a top-to-bottom review,” Lesser said. “There needs to be a better understanding on how decisions are made from the chain of command.”
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Michael Connors can be reached at mconnors@gazettenet.com.