At least one state senator is questioning whether this year’s miscellaneous motor vehicle bill would give the state Agency of Transportation too long of a leash.
The bill, S.99, greenlights upgrades to the Department of Motor Vehicles’ systems and policies that are part of an ongoing “modernization project.” The project is expected to be completed by July 2025 and cost more than $100 million, the Joint Fiscal Office estimated last month — tens of millions of which have already been allocated.
One provision in S.99 allows the DMV to “make reasonable changes” to its processes with only the approval of the Joint Transportation Oversight Committee — a group of six lawmakers, from both the House and Senate, who are responsible for overseeing transportation issues in the state while the full Legislature is not in session.
But on the Senate floor Tuesday morning, Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, said she did not support allowing the DMV to change its systems and policies without the full Legislature present, arguing that could set “a really troubling precedent” for other state agencies.
“I find that really problematic,” Hardy told her colleagues, going on to be the lone senator to vote against the bill when it received preliminary approval Tuesday.
S.99 requires the DMV to give the oversight committee 30 days to decide whether to approve or reject a proposed change in agency policies. The agency also would have to tell the committee how state laws or rules would then need to be amended during the next legislative session so they’re “consistent” with its own changes.
The agency also would have to propose those changes to statute in future versions of the miscellaneous motor vehicle bill in 2024 and 2025, according to this year’s bill.
Sen. Thomas Chittenden, D-Chittenden Southeast, said in response to Hardy on the floor Tuesday that while “your concern is valid,” he and other members of the Senate Transportation Committee — the body in which the bill originated — thought it was important to give the Department of Motor Vehicles the flexibility to make upgrades year-round, and not just during the roughly five months that the Legislature is in session.
He said the changes likely would be limited to information technology upgrades and would be small in nature.
“We saw it as a necessary risk,” Chittenden said, noting that he trusted Wanda Minoli, the DMV commissioner, to use “her good judgment, in consultation with a body of representatives.”
The DMV’s modernization project is split into two phases, the first of which is underway and expected to be completed in November. Agency leaders have long said the project is vital, noting the department currently relies on a 50-year-old computing system to handle many of the services that drivers want to access online.
The project’s second phase focuses on driver services and includes some of the provisions in S.99, according to Michael Smith, the DMV’s deputy commissioner. They include rolling out smartphone-based driver’s licenses in the state and nixing the requirement to put a validation sticker on every rear license plate, among others.
Smith said Tuesday that he wasn’t yet sure what changes, specifically, the agency would seek to make via the transportation oversight committee. But he agreed that the agency does not want to wait for the Legislature to convene in every instance.
“If we have an enhancement that we can make that would benefit the residents of Vermont, we’d like to take advantage of it,” he said. “If we don’t have the authority to do that, we’d have to stop the contractor and say, ‘OK — wait until next January.’”