Merit Rating Board Director Thomas Bowes, who came under fire in the wake of a deadly New Hampshire crash, was fired Tuesday afternoon a three-member panel overseeing the unit met for the first time in years.
Acting Registrar Jamey Tesler, Glenn Kaplan of Attorney General Maura Healey’s office and Commissioner of Insurance Gary Anderson met for the panel, also named the Merit Rating Board for the first time in 2015. Their first order of business was to terminate Bowes, who has served as director of the backlogged unit for the past three years.
“Clearly there needs to be some new leadership and a new path going forward,” Tesler said at the meeting Tuesday afternoon.
Bowes is the second senior Registry of Motor Vehicles official to lose his job in the wake of the fiery crash that killed seven motorcyclists in Randolph, New Hampshire. The first was Registrar Erin Deveney, who was replaced days after the crash by Tesler.
At the center of the investigation of the crash is how the driver charged in the incident, West Springfield resident Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, was allowed to keep his commercial driver’s license after the RMV received a notice of a May 11 OUI arrest in Connecticut.
Bowes spoke to the three-member panel before his termination was announced, saying he regretted that notices were not processed in a timely fashion. He left the meeting room without responding to reporters’ requests for comments.
His attorney, Leon Kesten, said the Massachusetts Department of Transportation should be taking responsibility across all levels “from the bottom up,” rather than terminating Bowes.
“There are multiple failures, which took years to happen, that’s been going on for years,” Kesten said. “This board hasn’t met, and everybody should as Mr. Bowes did [accept responsibility]. Mr. Bowes accepted responsibility for his role.”
Bowes is a city councilor in Braintree and is running for mayor; the current mayor, Joseph Sullivan, is not seeking re-election. When asked whether Bowes will continue his mayoral campaign, Kesten said he did not know.
Bowes was one of several RMV officials called to testify before the Joint Committee on Transportation, which is investigating how the agency ignored out-of-state notices of Zhukovskyy’s violation before the June 21 crash.
Authorities said Zhukovskyy’s pickup truck, which had an empty car carrier attached, slammed into a group of motorcyclists affiliated with Jarheads MC, a motorcycle club made up of former U.S. Marines and their spouses. Seven died, including a couple from Massachusetts.
A federal inspection report released earlier this month suggests that Zhukovskyy was high and was reaching for a beverage when his pickup truck hit the motorcycle group.
Zhukovskyy now faces charges in connection with the crash. Immigration and Customs Enforcement placed a detainer on Zhukovskyy, who was born in Ukraine.
The crash triggered a review of the RMV from the Joint Committee of Transportation and MassDOT. The MassDOT contracted a private consulting firm, Grant Thornton, to conduct a forensic audit following the crash. A preliminary report released by the firm last week detailed major systemic deficiencies at the Merit Rating Board and a host of other problems.
Bowes came under scrutiny during his legislative testimony because he failed to answer several questions about the backlog that under his purview. Records submitted to the legislative committee show that he had been aware of a backlog as far back as 2016 but failed to address the unprocessed paper out-of-state records.
The Merit Rating Board became responsible for the backlog between late 2016 and early 2017. They were previously overseen by the Driver Control Unit, but Director Keith Costantino said he wasn’t aware of the unit’s responsibility over the paper records and asked Deveney to make the Merit Rating Board deal with the backlog.
The backlog didn’t subside under Bowes. When the RMV launched its ATLAS computer system in March 2018, Bowes said his employees became overwhelmed with the transition and stopped processing the out-of-state paper notices altogether. Instead, they focused on combing through the backlog of in-state notices that had grown following the switch to the computer system.
An internal auditor told lawmakers she raised concerns to Bowes and Deveney about unprocessed “open tasks” in the computer system in March, months before the fatal crash.
Bowes told lawmakers he reached out to an IT employee after meeting with the auditor, Brie-Anne Dwyer. When the IT employee couldn’t help him, he said, he didn’t follow up.
Sen. Eric Lesser, vice chair of the committee, called for Bowes to be fired the day after the oversight hearing. He told MassLive Tuesday afternoon that Bowes’ removal was a positive first step.
“It’s always hard to make decisions like this, but it was absolutely the right thing to do,” said Lesser, a Longmeadow Democrat. “It was important for him to leave to begin to restore public confidence and to begin the process of moving forward.”
Attorney General Maura Healey has also come under scrutiny as a harsh critic of the RMV who is tied to the Merit Rating Board.
Emalie Gainey, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s office, said the last record of a meeting was in 2015 and that since then the Attorney General’s office has made repeated requests for the board to meet.
Gainey also said that Kaplan, chief of the Insurance and Financial Services Division, was never asked to vote on the appointment of Bowes even though a vote is required.
After the hearing, Healey said in a statement Bowes’ removal was a step in the right direction.
”We are dedicated to appointing a qualified and experienced new director as quickly as possible," Healey said. "However, it’s clear that the Baker administration must make systemic changes at the RMV and in its oversight of the agency.”
The board’s meeting lasted under an hour with the members voting on a place to appoint an interim director for two months while a replacement for Bowes is found. The members did not say who the interim director would be.
“It was time for us to focus on getting the right leadership to address the issues that we have been identifying over the last few weeks,” Tesler told reporters after the meeting.
Tesler left without responding to questions from reporters about when the last time the Merit Rating Board met and when the next meeting would be.