House Transportation Committee Co-Chairman Rep. William Straus says he has evidence that Gov. Charlie Baker's administration is withholding documents related to the Registry of Motor Vehicles' backlog of unprocessed out of state road violations like the one connected to the fatal crash in New Hampshire that claimed seven lives.
A spokesperson for the state Department of Transportation disputes Straus' accusation and says the two emails in question were not formally requested by lawmakers.
"These are documents that are absolutely on all squares relevant to the oversight and investigation into what caused the tragedy in New Hampshire and its relationship to management failures at the Registry of Motor Vehicles," Straus told WGBH News. The omission provides "indisputable proof,"there are documents that MassDOT officials have not handed over to Beacon Hill that are within the scope of what was requested by lawmakers who are investigating the RMV, he added.
MassDOT spokeswoman Jacquelyn Goddard said that the two emails were not included in the nearly one million documents produced for Straus and the committee because they did not fit the criteria of which records were requested by lawmakers.
"MassDOT has not been contacted by the committee regarding this production and again has learned of this question through the media. MassDOT will continue to work with the committee on any requests to assist their investigation," Goddard said. According to MassDOT, Straus has not come to the department to ask why the emails were determined not to be germane to the Joint Committee on Transportation's records request.
In the two emails provided to Straus and the committee by outside sources, Baker's Deputy Chief of Customer Service and Constituent Affairs Mindy d’Arbeloff replied to a mostly technical discussion of how software tracks out-of-state violations.
"This is not an email conversation. We will gather a meeting." d'Arbeloff replied to an email with the subject "Scanning and OOS Processing," dated July 16, 2019, just weeks after it was revealed that the RMV had ignored thousands of alerts from other states. d'Arbeloff's email was in reply to a message sent four minutes earlier from an RMV employee with technical questions about software problems related to the RMV backlog.
An example drawn from the email thread describes questions the RMV employee had about processing driver violations from other states and technical differences between speeding tickets and texting-while-driving violations.
Straus told WGBH News he cannot think of "a benign reason why the governor's office would be ordering RMV employees to do that," and that the brief email from d'Arbeloff was not included with the documents provided by the RMV to lawmakers for their investigation
"I would leave it to those who hear it or read it to draw their own conclusions as to why somebody would order state employees to stop writing e-mails on what was the most horrible tragedy imaginable, for a management failure within the Registry of Motor Vehicles," Straus said.
