Editorial: Unfinished business in Schoharie limo crash

Last year, the state’s Stretch Limousine Passenger Safety Task Force — tasked with recommending regulatory changes in the wake of the 2018 Schoharie tragedy — was in a bind. Some members of the panel wanted to delay making recommendations until they could read the Inspector General’s pending report on the state’s culpability in the limo crash. But Department of Motor Vehicles Commissioner Mark Schroeder pushed the panel to wrap up its work before the report came out — and he assured the holdouts on the task force that they’d have a chance to talk about its findings in the future.

That promise fizzled out last week as Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed a bill that would have extended the task force’s operations through the end of 2024.

That’s a mistake. Ms. Hochul’s decision not to extend the panel’s work is a blow to both government accountability and public safety, because that IG report — along with an earlier analysis from the National Transportation Safety Board — found that failures in oversight and gaps in policy at the DMV and the state Department of Transportation had caused regulators to miss multiple chances to take the decrepit limo off the road.

Those failures deserve as much public scrutiny as the actions of the limo company operator who rented out the vehicle despite knowing that it had been ordered off the road for serious safety violations. They deserve as much censure as the repair shop that gave the limo an inspection sticker it never should have received.

But again and again throughout the five years since catastrophic brake failure sent the limousine barreling down a hill, through a crowded parking lot and into a ditch, killing 20 people, New York has failed to take a meaningful, transparent accounting of its own errors. Now, we may never get such a reckoning.

Extending the task force’s work would have corrected the error made last year in rushing out its own report before the Inspector General’s work was done. Considering how many delays the limo safety panel had suffered up to that point — the state was tardy in seating members and starting the panel’s deliberations — it made no sense to be hasty in finishing up. It makes even less sense now, when we know the IG’s findings.

Ms. Hochul did throw her support behind a package of limousine safety laws that passed the state Senate last year but never made it out of committee in the Assembly. The bills are worthy of support — indeed, they should have been passed five years ago. That would have shown a sense of urgency in acknowledging the loss these families sustained. Backing them now is fine, but it’s no substitute for a public accounting of agency failures.

To give the limo task force a chance to point fingers at everyone except the government plays into cynical narratives about bureaucracies caring more about covering their own backsides than serving the public. Part of the responsibility for the Schoharie tragedy lies with state officials. They need to own that. More importantly, they need to fix it.