Shaking my head … Just to pile on David’s post from last week, you have to wonder what rock our House leaders have been under. Bob DeLeo and Ron Mariano act as if they have no idea how the MBTA spends its money:
“Well, giving the T more money right now is kind of crazy,” [House Majority Leader Ron] Mariano told reporters after a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce breakfast, where Speaker of the House Robert A. DeLeo delivered a speech. “I think they have to begin to demonstrate that they can use that money effectively. … There seems to be no one looking at long-term maintenance or any maintenance. So until we can figure out what’s going on over there … I think it might be a little crazy to be spending money.” …
Speaking to reporters afterward, DeLeo was cool to Baker’s initial plan to boost state funding.
“I think we have to try to make sure the house is in order, in terms of the T structure and whatnot, before we talk about additional funds,” he said.
Do these words inspire confidence? Or does it sound like a bunch of ad hoc word salad?
They haven’t figured out “what’s going on over there.” Um, “in terms of the T structure and whatnot.”
Isn’t it their job to know what’s going on?
Do those words inspire any confidence that they’ve been paying attention to a major public resource, one that their constituents use every day? I mean, Ron Mariano is from Quincy — the end of the Red Line. How many of his constituents have been grievously impacted by the T’s failure?
Look, I am all for considered analysis, and certainly I look forward to the Baker committee’s appraisal of the state of the T. But at some point our legislative leaders simply have to act. Every indication says that it’s going to require more money — a lot of it. If they need to seem reluctant to raise taxes, that’s a political dosido for them to figure out.
But the rest of us have to get to work. A transit system has to work in winter. And for years DeLeo and Mariano have shown no interest in the T, when it was their job to protect and invest in it.
I honestly don’t know how our self-professed progressive caucus in the House can vote for these guys. All set with that.
Trickle up says
is some kind of governmental body with the power to write laws and budgets that determine all that whatnot.
Maybe elected by city or district or something, I dunno.
sabutai says
You don’t like the overpaid Electoral College for Speaker that we’re saddled with?
whoaitsjoe says
Braintree, Weymouth, Randolph, Holbrook….Heck, abington even, they need to get involved.
People who live in these communities and park at Braintree, Quincy Adams, etc etc and take the T into Boston. I lived in Abington and parked at Quincy Adams for 2 years.
The T doesn’t just effect the cities and places the T physically go through. Not by a longshot.
cos says
At my workplace, some of the people most hit by this winter’s transit outages were the ones who use the commuter rail to get to work. Many of them missed days because they’d spent a couple of extra hours trying to get in to work before giving up and going home, until they learned not to try, and just work from home. Some people who’ve been commuting by commuter rail for a long time, started looking into getting parking passes and switching to car commuting. This trend could undo decades of progress in reducing traffic and pollution around here.
cos says
We lost our chance to do something when Governor Patrick proposed a good start and the legislature killed much of it. Now we have a Governor who’s not even going to ask the to try. Seriously, I called Baker’s office and the staffer lauded his budget proposal for adding $50 million. He has no clue, or he’s pretending.
He also brought up the idiotic “first we need reform” canard, same thing the House leader is saying. They love being able to use this vague excuse to shrug off responsibility, and the predictable result is that the T won’t be fixed, year after year. It’s not like any of them – the Governor, or the legislature – are going to deliver a “reform” that’s *sufficient* for them to stop saying “we need to reform”. They can keep saying it forever, and that’s what they want.
In the meantime, reform isn’t going to replace 30 year old trains and engines, or build bypass tracks so disabled trains don’t block entire lines. Money is needed to do that. They just love to pretend that we somehow can’t fix anything even if we budget for it, because “reform”. They have to know they’re lying, they have to know we actually can fix things if we spend the money to do so.
Trickle up says
likely, a better chance than any we’ll get again, because delay = more expensive.
I’m not saying the stupid will end, but it could.
Peter Porcupine says
Since 2010, the Legislature has no oversight of the MBTA or MassDOT. It is overseen by a 5 member commission. Transit monies are no longer part of the state budget which legislators DO work on, as they are independently bond funded.
There is an excellent chance that they DON’T know what is going on over there.
Mind you, Mariano was part of the cabal giving away authority with both hands 5 years ago, and bears responsibility for that bad choice.
whoaitsjoe says
He voted to change the org structure so that when the impending failure turned into regular failure, he would have documented plausible deniability for why it failed?
Shit, maybe he’s not a moron. Totally a coward, but absolutely not a moron.
Christopher says
…that an agency of the government can operate with absolutely no oversight from the elected bodies of said government? It makes no sense and I would think possibly unconstitutional. I understand commissions to manage the day-to-day operations, but they need to be ultimately accountable to the people through their elected leadership.
David says
of “independent authorities” – to remove them from day-to-day control of elected leaders. It was an idea very much in fashion for a while, but it’s fallen increasingly out of favor as the results have tended not to be very good. As I wrote back in 2007:
Christopher says
…to insulate an agency from political whims, but not also legitimate oversight.
SomervilleTom says
Where I grew up, around Washington DC, this was the role of civil service.
In MD state and county government, for example, the library administration was staffed primarily through civil service roles. As I recall, the director was a political appointee, but the organization itself was relatively well protected from political whim.
whoaitsjoe says
I know what it is, but wouldn’t someone who is a public employee still at the mercy of political whim?
Christopher says
There are civil service protections below the political appointee level. For example, a new President gets to choose a new Secretary of the Interior, maybe even a new Director of the National Park Service, but that does not mean that there is a wholesale purging of the ranks of Rangers you see when you visit a National Park because they are of the wrong political party.
SomervilleTom says
At least, through the 1980s.
My mother retired from the Montgomery County MD library system, in the highest rank possible within civil service. She intentionally chose not to pursue any of the political appointee roles.
David says
the question seems to me to be to whom the leadership of the agency is accountable. If the leadership serves at the pleasure of the Governor, then clearly the answer is the Governor, and by extension the people who elected the Gov. But if the answer is “nobody,” then we have a problem. I’m really not sure how a halfway measure (“insulate an agency from political whims, but not also legitimate oversight”) would work – that, I’d say, was the intention behind creating independent authorities, but it hasn’t gone well.
judy-meredith says
Public authorities have always been torn between loyalty and autonomy
sigh — We have met the enemy and he is us and he’s not us and he’s sorta us.
progressivemax says
We don’t have to choose between investing more money in the T and making it more efficient. We need to do both. No matter how much “waste” you get of, you are still going to be in the hole.
Lets pass legislation that fully audits and “reforms” the T, and commits to making improvements by investing in infrastructure.