Despite more than seven hours of testimony before the Joint Committee on Transportation this week, the two Massachusetts legislators in charge of investigating problems at the RMV say significant questions remain and there is a lot of information they are still waiting for.
During a hearing Tuesday, RMV employees testified that there had been multiple warnings about thousands of notices that should have resulted in drivers’ licenses being suspended, but which sat unopened for months. At least one of those notices was about 23-year-old Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, who was arrested after failing a sobriety test in Connecticut in May and then, according to prosecutors, crashed into a group of motorcyclists in New Hampshire one month later, killing seven of them.
“Oftentimes during that hearing … my mouth was agape and I couldn’t believe the answers that were coming out,” Sen. Joseph Boncore told Jim Braude when he and fellow committee co-chair Rep. William Straus appeared on Greater Boston Thursday to discuss what Straus called the “variety of ways the agency was not functioning.”
“Our sense right now — and we have more work to do — is there’s more information out there and it’s hard to believe that this was contained just in the Registry of Motor Vehicles,” said Straus. “We don’t know yet, but we intend to find out.”
Straus added that they are still waiting on several documents to give a clearer picture of exactly what went wrong. But among the new documents the committee did receive this week was a copy of a letter sent directly to then-RMV Registrar Erin Deveney, dated April 29, 2019, which read:
"I am a psychologist … who has specialized in treating addictions for the past 30 years. I am alerting you to a problem where my Massachusetts patients who have had DWI’s [sic.] in New Hampshire are not having their MA licenses revoked. They have ALWAYS been revoked in the past, but there has been a change for the last 8 months, or roughly since the new licenses have been instituted. This is a dangerous situation. I have called the Registry and sent emails with no response. This is a serious problem as I have many people driving in MA without penalty or caution. Please advise me if there has been a change in the law."
The committee also received several inter-agency documents dating back to 2016 indicating there was a significant backlog of notifications, which were flagged as a public safety issue.
“That went up the chain,” said Boncore, “and for no action to be taken, it’s just negligent.”
“Even if the information didn’t go beyond the RMV, it should have,” Straus added.
“If paper were processed the way it should have been and there was some responsibility in people doing this work ... things might have been different,” said Boncore.
