Quincy, Canton residents are finalists for RMV job
BOSTON − Two South Shore residents are the finalists for the position of director of the state Merit Rating Board, an office within the Registry of Motor Vehicles.
State officials will choose between Sonja Singleton, of Quincy, the interim director, and Jessica Perez-Rossello, of Canton, a MassHealth official.
The Merit Rating Board's primary purpose is to maintain and update driving records and report driving record information to auto insurers and public safety agencies.
It has cycled through a series of interim leaders since a 2019 scandal led to the firing of its director. The scandal involved a crash in New Hampshire that killed seven motorcyclists, including a former Plymouth police sergeant.
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The Merit Rating Board − the three-member panel that bears the same name as the registry unit that it manages − interviewed the two finalists Wednesday. The board consists of Registrar Colleen Ogilvie, Commissioner of Insurance Gary Anderson and Glenn Kaplan, of the state attorney general's office.
The board was dormant from 2015 until 2019, when it became clear that the Registry of Motor Vehicles department had failed to process tens of thousands of paper out-of-state driver violation notices and therefore allowed thousands of drivers to avoid license suspensions they should have received.
One of those notices should have automatically triggered a commercial license suspension for a West Springfield truck driver who was charged, and later acquitted, in the New Hampshire crash.
In its first meeting in four years, board members voted unanimously to fire then-Director Thomas Bowes. Singleton, then the Registry of Motor Vehicles' director of policy and risk, became interim director in November 2021.
Ogilvie said Wednesday that the board plans to choose between Singleton and Perez-Rossello in January.
Since May 2016, Perez-Rossello has overseen MassHealth eligibility operations as deputy chief operations officer. From 2009 until October 2012, she was chief information officer for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She briefly worked as a vice president at State Street, then as director of quality assurance for Public Consulting Group from 2006 to 2009, and was president of Passio Consulting from late 2012 until joining MassHealth in mid-2016.
Before joining state government, Singleton was compliance manager at the Dimock Center in Boston, where she prepared and managed regulatory applications to federal, state and local agencies, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Singleton worked for 24 years in the finance sector at what was then known as Boston Financial Data Services.
This article originally appeared on The Patriot Ledger: Quincy, Canton residents finalists for RMV job
