‘We’re talking about people’s lives:’ California lawmakers grill DMV director on deadly failures

DMV Director Steve Gordon told lawmakers that he didn’t know if his agency had the ability to speed up license suspensions, didn’t know if he could get data for lawmakers on how often the agency takes action against dangerous drivers, and wasn’t familiar with numbers – that his agency provided CalMatters just last week – showing the DMV rarely investigates motorists who get in crashes seriously injuring or killing people.

Gordon did, however, assure lawmakers at various times that the seeming lack of details or direct response to questions was because the DMV’s operations are “complex,” “very inside baseball,” and “extremely nuanced.”

“I can follow up in detail with your office,” he told one senator.

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

Sen. Dave Cortese, a Democrat from San Jose, cited CalMatters’ License to Kill series as the inspiration. The project has found that the state of California – led by the DMV – routinely allows dangerous drivers with horrifying histories to continue to get behind the wheel, where they go on to kill. The series also revealed that California has some of the nation’s weakest DUI laws and courts across the state failed to report vehicular homicide convictions to the DMV.

Legislators this session have so far introduced a dozen road safety bills aimed at addressing the issues and cracking down on dangerous driving. Tuesday’s hearing was an opportunity to press officials, researchers and advocates on these and other possible solutions. For close to four hours lawmakers talked to road safety and legal experts including a judge, a police chief, a prosecutor, a defense attorney and an advocate with Mothers Against Drunk Driving whose own son was killed.

But the senators saved their most pointed questions for the director of the DMV.

During an extended back-and-forth with Gordon, Cortese repeatedly asked why it was so hard for his staff to get basic data from the DMV as lawmakers weigh new DUI laws. Sen. Caroline Menjivar, a Democrat from Van Nuys, wanted to know how drivers with 15 offenses can keep their licenses. Sen. Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas, questioned why the agency can move quickly on things like road tolls, but “puts up a wall” on potential life-saving measures, such as expanding in-car breathalyzers to block drunk driving.

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

Gordon has avoided talking about the issue in the nearly year since the series launched, declining repeated interview requests and showing no signs publicly that it’s a top priority. In his first public comments, he often dodged questions and said the DMV’s work involves juggling multiple antiquated 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 that wasn’t the first team we attacked, because we were worried about lines and Real ID and a bunch of other things that were occurring,” Gordon said. In the three years since, he said the department has begun to update its processes but that “there’s still much more to do.”

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

Menjivar, who last month proposed a bill to lengthen suspensions for reckless driving, zeroed in on drivers who “slipped through the cracks” while amassing horrifying histories of reckless driving.

Since state law says the DMV “may conduct an investigation” after a fatal crash, she asked why the department told CalMatters it opened only around 3,300 “negligent operator cases” from 2022 through 2024, when state data shows nearly 55,000 fatal or serious injury crashes. Would it help, she asked, if legislators changed the law to say that the DMV “shall” investigate major crashes?

“It’s not a question of a ‘shall’ or a ‘may,’” Gordon said, adding that he could not recall specific investigation numbers on the spot. “I believe we have the capacity we need to investigate every case that comes to us.”

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

“The case that was in CalMatters yesterday, you know, a toddler lost their life because we didn’t flag this earlier in the process and this 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 that his agency is conducting a review to make sure the unit responsible for driver safety is getting all of the information on drivers that it needs to act from other parts of the agency. However, he offered no details and when approached by a CalMatters reporter as he left the hearing Gordon would only say, “we’re not doing press today,” before exiting the building.

In the hearing room, lawmakers continued to listen to horror stories.

Napa 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 virtually the same amount of time as if he’d killed one. Proposed legislation would address these issues, adding prison time for repeat DUI offenders and drivers who kill multiple victims in a crash.

“This isn’t 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 currently the situation that we have.”

Other witnesses at the hearing pushed back on the need for stronger criminal sentencing, focusing instead on ways to redesign roads or encourage more proactive substance abuse treatment. Ramping up jail time or other punishment, they argued, may have disproportionate impacts on first-time offenders or poor defendants.

For Tara Repka Flores, none of this is theoretical. She lived through the horror one day in 2019, when she got a call that Alec — a magnetic 13-year-old athlete, meal prepper and her beloved son — was run down on his way to school in Sutter County. He was hit by another school parent who was driving her own three kids 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 interlock? Yes. Stronger sentencing? Yes. Accountability for hit and run drivers? Yes,” she said. “Yes to all of it. Stop other people from getting killed.”

This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.