His passion and vision — transporation — was the subject of Lt. Gov. Tim Murray's chat with Left Ahead! today. He had reason for pride to, as some of the most progressive accomplishments of the current administration have been in that field under his lead.
Even before the financial meltdown, even as mayor of Worcester before running for his office, Murray spoke of the role of commuter and freight rail in our economic development and jobs creation.
Click the player below the jump to hear the whole show.
Murray covers the trends and specifics of his administration's actions. To Gov. Deval Patrick's credit, he has let Murray have his head and accomplish more than any Lt. Gov. I can recall. In transportation, that includes:
- The CSX freight and commuter lines deal that will enable expansion of service and terminals far beyond the Boston area. (Support here from our state and federal lawmakers.)
- $95.5 milliion in TIGER funds from the feds to couple with MA bonds. Together, this will finance three major rail projects here. (This is a grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which we were in for because we had done the planning and study.)
- Massachusetts Transportation Reform Law, including total compaction and reorganization of the bureaucracy from number of agencies down to pension benefits. (We'd been muttering about the need for this for decades.)
In very practical terms, Murray also addressed the necessity never to fall back into delaying infrastructure maintenance and development. That only makes the projects more expensive, puts people at risk and likely means replacing rather than simply maintaining bridges and roads.
Murray spoke a bit wistfully of some transportation and related projects that are a ways out — like infrastructure to support high-speed trains and even WiFi in exurban areas. He's still working.
Discuss
5 Comments . Comments are closed.Not to mention quietly enabling regional 911 centers
A fine example of making better use of scarce resources. Regionalization address by Lt. Gov. Murray - a fine example of common sense, well, uncommon sense.
New Web site
Thanks for posting this, massmarrier!
Check out Tim's brand new Web site at http://www.timmurray.org/html
The site has more info on the many transportation projects Tim has spearheaded, and tools for people who are interested in organizing for the campaign.
(Full disclosure: I work for Tim Murray's committee)
New Web site
This is the link to Tim's new Web site http://www.timmurray.org/index...
Great job!
Tim has done a great job pushing for the rail deal that will increase the number of trains going between Worcester and Boston each day.
While the administration is clearly in support of commuter rail expansions, I wonder if this will be a big issue in the election.
It could hurt Baker and co. if they are out across the state telling people that they're against rail investments in their areas and instead want to use that money to give to big business tax breaks.
I look forward to hearing more of the Left Ahead podcasts in the future. Keep up the good work!
We have Gov. Dukakis on next Tuesday,
State Senate candidate for Brown's old seat, Democratic candidate Peter Schmulowitz, is on the Tuesday after. You can check out our archives for recent shows with the Governor, State Democratic Party Chair John Walsh, etc. etc.
Glad you enjoyed the show.
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