The director of California’s DMV has condemned the agency’s approach to deadly drivers

from Lauren Hepler and Robert LewisCalMatters

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The man in charge of the California Department of Motor Vehicles finally had to face tough questions Tuesday about what his agency is doing to address the increase in road deaths in recent years.

Although he didn’t give many answers.

DMV Director Steve Gordon told lawmakers he didn’t know if his agency had the ability to expedite license suspensions, didn’t know if he could get data to lawmakers on how often the agency takes action against dangerous drivers, and wasn’t aware of the numbers — which his agency provided to CalMatters just last week — showing The DMV rarely investigates drivers who get into crashes that seriously injure or kill people.

However, Gordon has assured lawmakers at various times that the seeming lack of details or direct answers to questions is because DMV operations are “complex,” “very inside baseball” and “extremely nuanced.”

“I can contact your office in detail,” he told one senator.

Gordon’s grilling came at a state Senate hearing held jointly by the public safety and transportation committees. It appears to be the first such legislative hearing focused on DUI, traffic laws and road deaths in decades.

Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, cited CalMatters License to kill series as inspiration. The project found that the state of California—run by the DMV—routinely allows dangerous drivers with horrific histories to continue to get behind the wheel, where they continue to kill. The series also revealed that California has some of the nation’s weakest DUI laws, and courts statewide did not report vehicular homicide convictions to the DMV.

Lawmakers this session have so far introduced a dozen road safety bills aimed at tackling the problems and combating dangerous driving. Tuesday’s hearing was an opportunity to press officials, researchers and advocates about these and other possible solutions. For nearly four hours, lawmakers spoke with road safety and legal experts, including a judge, a police chief, a prosecutor, a defense attorney and an advocate for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, whose own son was killed.

But senators reserved their sharpest questions for the DMV director.

During a lengthy conversation with Gordon, Cortese repeatedly asked why it was so difficult for his staff to get basic data from the DMV as lawmakers weigh in on new DUI laws. Sen. Carolyn Menjivar, D-Van Nuys, wanted to know how drivers with 15 crimes they can keep their licenses. Sen. Katherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, asked why the agency can move quickly on things like tolls, but “puts up a wall” on potential life-saving measuressuch as the expansion of car dragsters to block drunk driving.

“The DMV, when they think it’s important, they can act quickly. But there are other things that seem to be really stuck in the molasses,” Blakespear said.

Gordon has avoided talking about the issue in the nearly year since the series began, declining repeated requests for an interview and showing no public signs that it is a top priority. In his first public comments, he often dodged questions and said the DMV’s job involves juggling multiple outdated technology systems.

Gordon said the agency’s driver safety division was not his first priority when he was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019, but that it has since emerged as an area of ​​focus.

“I’ll admit it wasn’t the first team we attacked because we were worried about the lanes and Real ID and a bunch of other things that were going on,” Gordon said. In the three years since then, he said the department has begun to update its processes, but that “there’s still a lot more to do.”

Multiple lawmakers pressed Gordon on specific ways DMV systems fail to hold deadly drivers accountable.

Menjivar, who last month proposed a bill to extend reckless driving suspensions aimed at drivers who have “slipped through the cracks” while accumulating horror stories of reckless driving.

Since state law states that the DMV “may conduct an investigation” after a fatal crash, she asked why the department told CalMatters found only about 3,300 “cases of negligent operators” from 2022 to 2024, when state data shows nearly 55,000 fatal or serious crashes. Would it help, she asked, if lawmakers changed the law to say the DMV “must” investigate major crashes?

“It’s not a matter of ‘should’ or ‘could,'” Gordon said, adding that he could not recall specific numbers of the field investigation. “I believe we have the capacity we need to investigate every case that comes to us.”

Sen. Jesse Arreguin, an Oakland Democrat who chairs the Senate Public Safety Committee, focused on the case of Kostas Linardos, who rammed a three-ton pickup into the back of a sedan at high speed in late 2022 after years of collecting speeding and reckless driving tickets.

“The case it was at CalMatters Yesterday, you know, a little kid lost his life because we didn’t note that earlier in the process and that person was allowed to drive,” Arreguín said. “We’re talking about people’s lives. That’s what we’re trying to protect here.

Gordon told lawmakers his agency is conducting a review to make sure the department responsible for driver safety is getting all the driver information it needs to act from other parts of the agency. However, he offered no specifics, and when approached by a CalMatters reporter as he left the hearing, Gordon said only “we’re not going to do press today” before exiting the building.

In the hall, the deputies continued to listen to horrific stories.

Napa County District Attorney Allison Haley recounted a recent case in her office where a driver had 13 DUIs. In another, she recalled, a driver killed two people but served nearly the same amount of time as if he had killed one. The proposed legislation would address these issues by adding jail time to repeat DUI offenders and drivers who kill multiple victims in a crash.

“This is not Costco. We don’t want a system where you can kill one person and kill another person — or more — for free,” Haley said. “And that’s the situation we have right now.”

Other witnesses at the hearing dismissed the need for harsher criminal sentences, focusing instead on ways to redesign pathways or encourage more proactive substance abuse treatment. They argue that increasing prison or other punishment could have a disproportionate impact on first-time offenders or bad defendants.

For Tara Repka Flores, none of this is theoretical. She was horrified one day in 2019 when she got a call that Alec — a magnetic 13-year-old jock, cook and her beloved son — had been run over on his way to school in Sutter County. He was bumped by another school parent who was driving his own three children to school drunk.

She urged the assembled senators to do absolutely everything in their power to try to save as many families as possible from a similar fate.

“Ignition interlocks? Yes. Tougher sentences? Yes. Liability for hit-and-run drivers? Yes,” she said. “Yes to all of that. Stop other people from getting killed.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.