Friday, May 30, 2014
State House Commemorates Missing Children’s Day
Yesterday, family members, law enforcement officials,
legislators, and advocates gathered at the Massachusetts State House for the 14th
annual commemoration of Massachusetts Missing Children’s Day, sponsored by the
Molly Bish Foundation. The event featured touching accounts by family members
and speeches by elected officials, all centering around a common theme of “We
Will Never Forget”.
The ceremony reminds us all of why it’s important
to provide law enforcement officials, families, and concerned citizens with
every possible tool to promote the safety of our children. We need to keep our efforts moving forward to
protect children and prevent these tragedies from happening.
To that end, for many years I have worked with Gary Richard,
Magi and John Bish, and the Molly Bish Foundation to reform the state’s license
plate system. That legislation, named
“Molly’s Bill” in honor of Molly Bish, would simplify general issue license plates
in Massachusetts by reducing the number of alphanumeric characters on each
plate, and utilizing commonly recognizable symbols to improve recognition and
recollection of license plates in times of emergency.
Current six-character plates can yield matches of
approximately 1 in 4,300 vehicles when combined with information about a
vehicle’s color and at least 3 license plate characters, whereas the EZ-ID
system contained in Molly’s Bill has the potential to reduce matches to
approximately 1 in 123 when combined with information about a vehicle’s color,
the symbol on the license plate and at least 2 alphanumeric characters.
Both Rep. Todd Smola and I filed and secured amendments to
our retrospective House and Senate versions of the Fiscal Year 2015 state
budget to create a taskforce to study the EZ-ID system. We will be working closely with the newly
created conference committee to ensure the taskforce remains in the final version
of the spending bill. To learn more
about EZ-ID please click here.
Please click here to learn more about the Molly Bish Foundation.
