Drilling down on the RMV crisis

From the Herald:

Gov. Charlie Baker is shrugging off complaints that his administration is veiled in secrecy and trying to avoid a paper trail in the RMV scandal, saying Wednesday that his staff did “exactly” what they “should have been doing” when ordering RMV employees not to email about important issues.

“Calling for meetings, creating a sense of urgency and focus in the aftermath of a tragedy like that one is exactly what people in my administration should have been doing and were doing,” Baker told reporters Wednesday, “and that’s why we moved so quickly on so many files and unopened letters.”

“People calling meetings after that thing took place, that was happening all over the place and it should have been,” Baker said, referring to the June 21 deaths of seven motorcycles, allegedly at the hands of a Massachusetts truck driver whose license should have been suspended.

Baker’s Deputy Chief of Staff Mindy d’Arbeloff ordered MassDOT employees not to discuss important computer problems via email on July 16, 2019, and demanded a meeting as RMV employees began to stitch up the aftermath of the June crash.

Transportation Committee Chairman William Straus said Tuesday that the Baker administration withheld that email chain, though Straus said the documents clearly fell under detailed document requests his committee submitted on July 17 and again on Aug. 6.

“If the committee wants documents they don’t believe that they’ve received from us, all they have to do is ask,” Baker said.

Baker noted the MassDOT gave the Legislature almost a million pages of documentation and that Grant Thornton, the outside auditing firm hired by his administration to conduct a costly review of the Registry of Motor Vehicles, looked at more than 4.3 million documents and emails. Baker has also been criticized for withholding 53,000 documents from Grant Thornton, however.

Both emails were obtained by the committee through “outside sources,” Straus said, adding they were not among the approximately 970,000 documents that MassDOT has handed over to the committee as part of an expansive Legislative investigation into the matter.

“The nondisclosure is serious, because it raises the unknown that if some things are not being provided, are there others as well,” Straus said Tuesday. “That’s certainly not possible for me to answer.”

In the controversial emails, RMV Driver Control Unit employee Lucy Spagnuolo informed d’Arbeloff and others within MassDOT on July 16 about technical issues involving computer codes and how driving violations and notices from other states were being handled. Four minutes later, at 3:42 p.m., d’Arbeloff responded, “This is not an email conversation. We will gather a meeting.”

Less than a month earlier, trucker Volodymyr Zhukovskyy was criminally charged with killing seven bikers on June 21 in New Hampshire while high on drugs, according to a federal report. The RMV had failed to suspend his commercial driver’s license after he was charged with operating under the influence in Connecticut in May.