Beverly Scott is resigning as general manager of the MBTA.
Scott had come under fire from Governor Baker for the performance of the system during recent storms.
In a letter of resignation to the MassDOT Board of Directors, Scott did not give a specific reason for the resignation, and said “it has been an absolute pleasure and honor to serve with and lead this dedicated team of transit professionals and public servants.”
John Jenkins, chairman of the MassDOT Board of Directors, said that he was “stunned” by Scott’s resignation.
“Be clear, this Board has had no discussions at any time about her tenure as General Manager,” Jenkins said in a statement. “We hoped and expected that she would fulfill her three year contract, which ends in December of this year. I want to thank Dr. Scott for her skillful and committed leadership over the last 26 months, and wish her the very best as she moves on to her next challenge.”
Christopher says
She said she can’t control the weather, but more importantly she can’t control the lack of investment. To close budget gaps, the General Court has gone along with Baker’s plan to cut another $40 mil from transportation:(
progressivemax says
It is a very strange and abrupt change. Do you think Scott might have been coerced to leave? Who can have that impact within such a short time?
Donald Green says
if I outlined that you can not get blood from a stone, and the legislature turns around saying, yes you can. She was being set up, and Gov Baker is to blame.
chris-rich says
I decided to pull up the article stream on this and checked out the usual suspects, Glob, Hairoil, Dubybeezee and so on and the only entity a with reasonable commentariat was the Boston Business Journal.
The rest was wall to wall vicious uncouth suckfish oafs bellowing to beat the band with shrill screeches and cacophonous dog whistles about her race, her qualifications, her moral character, you name it.
And as I scrolled through these supposed long haul media pillars of ouah fair region, it dawned on me… of course DeLeo is sandbagging. Massholes are vicious and it’s best to not rile them.
This little place is like an innocent bubble where the visiting conservatives are pretty genteel. Now you could argue that right wing oaf swarms in those venues are mainly party minions doing sock puppet stunts, but still.
judy-meredith says
Genteel most of the time, but then Porcupine is a lady …
SomervilleTom says
So long, Green Line extension. So long, commuter rail. So long, Cape Cod flyer. So long, Red, Orange, Blue, and Green line. I guess we’ll all drive to the Casino.
The moron running the House just helped Charlie Baker kill Massachusetts as we know it.
chris-rich says
A big factor in current indifference may be the gas price. If it cost more to drive people might take the T.
And I really was taken aback by how shrill and mean local comment pumpers are out there in the major media watering holes. I don’t normally pay that much attention to local opinion patterns as my focus is engaging people in the rest of the world.
It would be interesting to get a statistical sense of Masshole support for various progressive things. Is there data?
You have to assume DeLeo and others do internal polling as it isn’t plausible to conclude that they just flail away like Boss Hogg in this day and age.
paulsimmons says
From Gallup’s annual State of the States (released on February 6), here is a breakdown of Massachusetts residents by ideology:
Conservative: 25.7%
Moderate: 38.1%
Liberal: 30.03%
More germane to specific transportation-related issues are the results of the ballot question to repeal indexing the gas tax to the consumer price index:
Yes: 52.97%
No: 47.03%
I mention in passing that the winning side spent $97,557 and the losers spent $2,619,840.
So much for the definitive role of money in politics.
I think that it could be argued that a majority of Massachusetts voters are abstractly center-left and operationally conservative on revenue issues.
chris-rich says
They don’t care who you sleep with and will probably be okay with a different skin color, but stay the hell away from their money.
nopolitician says
Massachusetts is one of the most heavily segregated states in the country. The liberalism here is OK with other races as long as they don’t live in the same town.
chris-rich says
My childhood best friend’s mom was a realtor who was destroyed in Reading for selling Bill Russell a house. That’s why I put ‘probably’ in there but ‘might’ would do as well.
And it seems to be a special animosity for Hispanics and African Americans. The newer waves of immigrants from East Asia and the Subcontinent generally are held in higher regard by old school masshole shadow bigots.
centralmassdad says
We are quite thoroughly New Left liberals.
ChiliPepr says
… is that it is self-identifying.
I have friends that have moved to the South and now complain that their candidates running on the Democratic ticket are more conservative than any of the Republicans running in Massachusetts.
I wonder how many Republicans here would be a Democrat in Louisianna, and how many Democrats in Louisianna would be a Republican if the moved here.
paulsimmons says
…which is why I included data from the Massachusetts gas tax referendum as a real-world qualifier for political semantics.
That said, Southern Democratic politicians (out of political self-preservation, if nothing else) are seldom likely to self-identify as “liberal”.
ryepower12 says
finally someone stands up for the MBTA, finally the media actually covers it, finally we have a conversation about how much blood is expected of the stone… and then she resigns?
Now Charlie Baker is going to get to put some stooge in at the MBTA who will blame everything on the workers who have been killing themselves to make this thing run, and dump whatever other burdens he can on the system, while simultaneously demanding steep budget and service cuts — and huge fee hikes to keep the thing running.
Because when Baker and Deleo say they’re not going to increase taxes or fees, there’s an asterisk — increasing taxes and fees on working stiffs doesn’t count.
I really, really hate to say this… but right now I’m feeling a lot like SomervilleTom has been feeling for months or years.
Stick a fork in the MBTA, it’s done.
judy-meredith says
Governor Baker will be accountable for managing an independent agency he can’t control anyway.
Trickle up says
per the Pottery Barn Rule, among other things.
SomervilleTom says
It already IS embarrassing for both Charlie Baker and Bob DeLeo.
Governor Baker will have to hire somebody, and without funding that person will fail the Groucho Marx criteria: No person qualified to do the job will take it.
It seems to me that both Mr. Baker and Mr. DeLeo are going to have to walk back the “no new taxes” statement. The state has to find funding someplace, and that will require new taxes.
progressivemax says
Rufus T Firefly has been appointed the General Manager of the MBTA
Peter Porcupine says
Does BAKER hire the new GM? Or does the Board?
chris-rich says
The commuter rail upgrades got a lot of post recession stimulus money. There has been fairly extensive repair work on the Haverhill line, the Fitchburg line, the Worcester line and the Lowell line.
They had to make special steel inserts to repair old stone bridges in Andover and I still haven’t found out if the Bottle Gentian at Pole Hill survived.
That’s another aspect. There has been a lot of infrastructure work done on the commuter rail system, it just isn’t that noticeable to people within the 128 doughnut.
ryepower12 says
For him to ‘own’ the MBTA as a public policy issue, there would have to be a downside to harming the system.
People care about the MBTA today because it’s been a complete disaster.
Tomorrow it’ll be a new news cycle and no one will.
Remember, this is the guy directly responsible for dumping nearly $2 billion in debt on the MBTA – which is one of the chief reasons the system is where it is — and he got elected Governor without the media or Martha Coakley even raising that as an issue.
He can go on taking an ax to the system all he wants, then appoint people who will carry their MBTA axes two at a time. He knows if ever he receives a bad day’s press over it, all he has to wait is until the next news cycle and he’s okay.
There’s no one to make him pay, because there’s no organized opposition in the legislature or in the public that can force the Governor, Speaker or Beacon Hill as an amorphous entity to invest in the system. It just doesn’t exist, sadly.
Even though the system is in a death spiral, all the Governor, Speaker and Senate President have to worry about is if it can be kept on life support long enough so that the next guy or gal is holding the bag.
The only elected leaders who will ever truly be blamed for the MBTA’s death will be the elected leaders there when the music finally stops — even if the elected leaders there at that time actually were willing to at long last prioritize public transit.
Because at some point, if you neglect a system long enough, it’ll cost as much to fix it as if you were starting from scratch, and maybe even more. At that point, it’ll be too late to ever fix it — and that point isn’t all that far off.
So, yes, this is completely deflating.
I wish I didn’t understand how politics works well enough to understand exactly where this is all heading, so I could go on being blissfully unaware like the other 99% of the public.
Because the MBTA is dying and our elected leaders are killing it — and it is incredibly unlikely that anything is going to change that.
My grandmother used to wax poetically about how in the good old days, there were street cars in Lynn. If I ever have grandchildren, I’ll be telling them the tales of how we used to have an MBTA with trains and subways that even went underground.
They’ll find it as hard to believe as I did the stories of streetcars taking people Downtown and to the shoe factories.
TheBestDefense says
did not appoint the Board so he will continue to blame the Deval appointees until he has appointed a majority of the members. Then he will blame the lege.
merrimackguy says
Blame Bush for as long as possible and then blame Congress.
Mark L. Bail says
and Afghanistan all started on Bush’s watch. And Congress was a joke by 2010. He has only recently begun blaming Congress as much as it deserves.
Not saying I agree with the way Obama handles everything, but he’s the only president I know of who received a Nobel Prize for not being George W. Bush.
merrimackguy says
It’s now part of being an executive- blame your predecessor and the legislative body for as long as you can.
TheBestDefense says
who blamed Mayor Walsh of the failures of the MBTA and then the state Highway Department for their inability to keep the region open during the first storms? You do enough blame throwing so take your anti-Obama stuff off of this thread and save it for one where it is relevant.
I might even join you on it if it is relevant but clearly your comment here is not.
chris-rich says
The poor guy suffers from a common problem afflicting small business owners who figure their marginal leadership in business is a certificate to pontificate knowingly on all manner of unrelated things.
I just do it without resorting to irrelevant credentials and strive to make the fact that I’m a crackpot and malcontent abundantly clear so those patient souls who put up with me can just weigh the merit of what my yapping contains.
merrimackguy says
But keep it up. I now it makes you feel important.
chris-rich says
In prior visitations you have mentioned owning two small biz facilities, one in the Andover area and one in Indiana where you told us that the power is cheaper and it’s a more biz friendly environment.
I must confess that I never noticed if you replied to my question as to why you don’t just hit the road for Indiana and be rid of this hell hole.
More recently, you have mainly limited yourself to waving pom poms for team Baker with an occasional minor sneer about the perfidy of Democrats in general.
When called upon to come up with something substantive to address the various commonwealth problems in ways aligned to your preferred ideology, you tend to you toss a few well worn platitudes at the thing and call it good.
Watching you joust with an advanced legal practitioner and scholar of the mechanics of masshole governance is rare sport, a sad mismatch but with luck, you’ll learn something from old TBD, I know I have.
TheBestDefense says
(blushing)
chris-rich says
Over in my G plus stream, I have a wonderful bunch and a number are like lore keepers. Vanida is a Khmer woman who teaches science at middle school levels near Udon Thani.
There’s a kid out near Worcester who has hood car lore, a bunch of rail fans and so on, all over the planet. I’ve been finding cool videos for African History month like this great piece on Harriet Tubman from Smithsonian.
http://youtu.be/uQ85z9vggYM
And she used to live up in Andover as a guest of an early soapstone manufacturer named Jenkins. It’s funny to see right wing Swells from such a place now.
Lore keepers are rarer here with all the dong wavers trying to win arguments. I’m surely guilty myself but I think it is valuable to also share lore to buffer my usual heedless slagging.
And if the place had a Dean of Lore, you would be it.
TheBestDefense says
has more history than me in MA core lore. I am just more acidic as a lot of my work has been in war zones and what we in the biz call “post-conflict” zones. I have seen too many empty beds where somebody is never coming home, too many victims of land mines missing limbs, too many people who ask to meet you in a more private space so they can speak the truth, too many guns held by young men who are more afraid than I am so I don’t try to be polite to people who intentionally dissemble here.
To be more blunt, I can be a real pr*ck when I write.
I will be passing through Udon Thani later this year so I may look up your friend Vanida.
chris-rich says
The structure.
I haven’t seen as much of Judy’s stuff yet but I like her pragmatic sense of the social dynamic in the lege and I share an outlook that seeks to be holistic rather than this Boston versus whatever stuff
And it’s pretty clear that her sense of things is informed by a lot more legwork and experience than many a glib opinion flogger, including me.
Vanida seems to be a refugee from the horror days. She was probably just a girl then. She has a great interest in life sciences and math so the photos of Mass open space parcels that I upload fascinate her.
She is also very knowledgeable of her culture and the various highland people so that when I showed her a you tube of a khaen player, she knew what the tune was and its position on the local hit parade charts.
The Thai crew in general is great. I have a friend from some ethnic Han banking family that seems to have substantial contacts with Myanmar. She’s a fierce royalist and has been getting into anti Shinawatra demonstrations. Their economy is about the same size as Massachusetts, oddly enough.
People here have it easy. You may as well pound em. They can’t even manage robust derision for the hilarious moral bankruptcy of the GOP nor are they about to inspire the rank and file of the public to march in step with their concerns.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. The work it takes to make them happen is beyond price.
TheBestDefense says
then you need to understand that she has been THE progressive lobbyist on Beacon Hill since the early-70s. I do not always agree with her on tactics (as previously noted I have more piss and vinegar in my body) but she is invaluable and our current politics will not likely replace her and we are instead given paid hacks who tilt to the left but who are more interested in being a “player.” Think Doug Rubin, a good tactician but a man with little soul. Judy got soul, big time.
Our current state of politics does not create people like her, or Monica Halas of GBLS, or that generation of legislators like McDonough, Jehlen, Demakis and Marzilli who are smart and intensely principled even when they took slightly different directions. All of them came from activist backgrounds. Three of those four have removed themselves from state politics.
Our last best shot, Deval Patrick was a corporate attorney who came in for a decade and started dropping his progressive allies as soon as he won the Democratic nomination (thanks Doug Rubin!).
We need to build from the ground up in places that are not liberal bastions. My neighbors on the South Coast are getting crushed in our economy, as are the people in the other gateway cities. I am not around MA that much and most people do not want advice from older white men but I do check in every once in a while, and send what little money I can afford to people like Hecht (everybody, write a check today during the snow, even if it is only ten dollars and send it to one of the truly worthy ones!).
chris-rich says
They mainly seem to have credentials in a time where such matter more than when Tip O’Neill walked the earth.
It’s a yuppie polity with yuppie gutlessness and yuppie accommodations with glibertarianism and yuppie self immersion. It is hilariously and flagrantly corporate but the people are shallow and dim. There just isn’t much correlation between credential gathering and actual leadership.
George B McLellan had bitchin’ credentials as the smartest man in the room of his day but he sucked at winning battles. He has been reborn a thousandfold in our time and no doubt beams from on high at his creation.
The townie ward heelers who make monkeys out of the credentialed Patrick brain trust and the parade of GOP corporates before them are more like Grant, only sleazy and craven.
It’s as if there was a decision to just write much of the state off through some crappy internalized Grover Norquist logic in bed with MBA expedience.
And we can’t really fix the whole place until we get serious about finding out how broken it is. But that will involve hitting the bricks, asking the people useful questions and listening to the answers. Then there’s the leadership requirement.
SomervilleTom says
It is sometimes hard to remember that the overwhelming majority of today’s liberals, progressives, and neo-liberals have never had their head busted by a cop or their body parts ripped at by a cop’s dog.
We carefully avoid teaching our young people how much pain, suffering, blood was invested in our 40-hour work week, time-and-a-half for overtime, and all the other things our “corrupt” unions did for us.
Too few young people today have friends and lovers terrorized by anti-abortion crazies. Too few young people today lost friends and lovers to a flagrantly classist draft providing cannon-fodder for a hopelessly corrupt war. Our right wing (aided and abetted by “liberal” Democrats) have bequeathed us a mercenary military. It’s just as classist, but far easier to put out of mind unless you’re a poor family in a poor town where enlisting is the only viable exit strategy.
How many high schools in Massachusetts teach history today? How deeply do those classes delve into Watergate or the reality of the Vietnam experience? The “mobile weapons labs” and other lies of the Iraq invasion were not surprising to those of us who KNOW the truth of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
It sometimes requires patience (which I too often lack) to accept these as the necessary consequences of the many decades of comfort that our predecessors bequeathed us after WWII, and that my generation’s political establishment (I’m thinking of good Democrats like John Kerry here) co-opted after Vietnam.
drikeo says
I don’t think Patrick walked on water, but he expanded public transit, invested in state colleges without gouging middle class kids to do it and pushed alternative energy generation. When the economy went belly up in 2008, he didn’t slash and burn, which let MA recover quicker than pretty much all the other 49 states. Did some really sneaky good stuff with brownfields cleanup and smart growth investment.
One of the problems he ran into, IMO, is there’s some folks who self-identify on the left that seem to love political constipation. They call themselves progressives. Try to expand public transit or affordable housing and they’ll line up on the side of NIMBY. You’ll find progressives lurking behind every hurdle thrown in front of Cape Wind. Try to clean out some entrenched bureaucracy to fund schools or good government initiatives. Progressives will weep for the loss of anachronism. Really, try to build or change anything, which are core liberal tenets, and progressive will find a way to oppose it. Locally, in Brookline, I’ve run into progressives against needed school expansions, the creation of bike lanes and lifting the cap on liquor licenses.
Obviously I’m painting with a broad brush here, but when we play the damn-the-DINOs game, let’s not forget there’s some extremely useless folks on the left. They talk a good game in a coffee shop, but completely absent in a foxhole.
Christopher says
It’s interesting you should bring up transit because at least on BMG it seems the progressives are the ones who are for it. The favorite way to fund it seems to be raising the gas tax. The way I see it liberals who fight for working people are cautious or reluctant to raise the gas tax because it’s more money out of the pockets of that constituency whereas the progressives are more into making the world a better place and IMO sometimes miss the forest for the trees in that regard.
SomervilleTom says
My perception is that here on BMG, the gas tax is supported ONLY because we seem paralyzed to actually tax the wealthy. Faced between screwing the working class by killing the MBTA and screwing the working class by raising the gas tax, some of us reluctantly choose the latter.
The embarrassing fact remains, however, that a great many of us here on BMG were roundly and loudly chastised during the last campaign because of our focus on taxing the wealthy. We nominated a candidate who said “I’m open to considering it”. At the time, you disputed my contention that her response was politico-speak for “NO”.
The obvious and glaring answer to this problem is “Tax the wealthy”. The progressives on BMG support that. My view is that it is our liberals who, while defending our nominees in the name of party loyalty, argue that “now is not the time” (another way of saying “no”). Many of us were berated by otherwise-friendly colleagues because we refused to sign up for team Coakley.
We — liberals and progressives alike — should be enthusiastically lining up to tax the wealthy. That’s the answer that solves the public transportation problem. That’s the answer that improves life for the working poor. That’s the answer that even the working poor will support.
Sadly, that’s also the answer that the financial backers of the powers that be (of our party as well as the other guys) like the least — and so that’s the answer that is avoided like the plague, time and time again.
Repeat after me: tax the wealthy. Raise the personal income tax together with the personal exemptions. Raise the capital gains tax. Tax the wealthy.
chris-rich says
And a bit of claw back is long overdue.
Just getting things back to the age of Nixon, adjusted for inflation, would be amazing. At this point tax policy is just underwriting hoarding.
Christopher says
I don’t believe I personally have said now is not the time, but I do continue to question your interpretation of Coakley’s comments. Alas, I guess now we’ll never know because we elected a Governor who openly “starts with the premise that people are taxed enough”:(
kittyoneil says
so I’ll just post here. I agree with the majority on here about MBTA investment generally. HOWEVER, we should not lose sight of the fact that the voters repealed the inflationary increase to the gas tax. This is important to keep in mind in this blame game. According to the voters, the legislature did not fail to go far enough, they went too far. Again, this does not represent my view, but the electoral reality.
Trickle up says
Bob Neer says
If she really cared about her job, she would have stayed. She should have stayed. Unless she was forced out.
HR's Kevin says
Perhaps she quit because she *does* care about her job, and simply realized that she was never going to be allowed the resources to do it properly.
waldox says
Was trying to up vote not down vote.
Totally agreed re Scott. Good for her for resigning when she finally realized the people she worked for would not allow her to do her job to her standards.
SomervilleTom says
How many times does she have to say “This isn’t about Beverly Scott”?
She clearly did NOT care about “her job”, and that’s a good thing. She instead cares about the public, the agency’s obligation to the public, and the workers of the agency itself.
When it became crystal clear that she was EXPECTED to fail, that the MBTA was EXPECTED to fail, and most importantly that the MBTA would be actively prevented (by financial starvation) from surviving, then I believe she did exactly the right thing.
When a competent executive is put in a position where he or she cannot succeed, and when that executive is intentionally and actively prevented from taking the steps needed to succeed, then that executive resigns. Immediately.
As progressivemax noted above, our next MBTA GM will be Rufus Firefly.
TheBestDefense says
that she chose to quit after receiving a unanimous vote of support from the board. Now she is not the focus of what went wrong with the T. Listen to Stephanie Pollock on WBUR this morning to see how Team Baker is scrambling to explain her departure. I am reminded of the song by Richard Thompson, “Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed.”
People may now start looking at the Baker-Finneran combined effort to saddle the T with untenable levels of debt that is crushing public transit in MA.
I was once the exec in an NGO job where a board member f-ed up his responsibilities and tried to hang them on me. After I was cleared and he was found responsible, I settled for the favorable finding and a pay raise. It is a shame on my career that I did not walk away after being found to be a “successful” manager (according to the personnel committee). I was too committed to the mission to walk away, even though I should have. Good on Scott for having the guts to give up her job and let our focus return to what is really wrong with the Baker-Finneran MBTA swindle.
geoffm33 says
Or is this just a throwaway line:
Depending on the actual wording of the question one could interpret:
If she never gives up anything, she must have been forced.
TheBestDefense says
to let the public know that the failures of the MBTA over the past few weeks were the result of two decades of failures by the Democratic legislature and both parties in the executive branch, with a special helping of blame on Baker as the former Secy of A&F who engineered the fuckery around MBTA debt, and his partner Speaker Finneran.
merrimacguy has been trying to blame Mayor Walsh for most of these failures by stating that Baker has only been in office for less than two months, but Baker’s culpability goes back more than a decade.
SomervilleTom says
The way I see it, the two messages that were loud and clear this week were:
– No additional investment will happen in the foreseeable future, and
– The DOT board is happy to have somebody to take the heat.
I think she she looked at combination that and said “no dice”.
I look forward to the appointment of Rufus Firefly. The DOT board, Governor Baker, and Bob DeLeo will be very happy with him.
Any changes that we see will be additional pessimizations — huge fare increases, reductions in service, union-busting, and so on. That’s the game that Mr. Baker and Mr. DeLeo want. That’s the game that the DOT board is happy to play. That’s the game that the legislature wants.
That’s the game that Ms. Scott rightfully withdrew from.
petr says
Rufus T. Firefly: You’re a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you’re out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we’ll be in be in here thinking what a sucker you are.