So, Chris Gabrieli has a new ad out about the Big Dig, calling for an end to the “excuses and finger-pointing.” Well, I’m down with him on the excuses, but finger-pointing? Are you kidding? Let’s have more finger-pointing.
As I’ve written before, blame is the currency of accountability. Because accountability has been so diffuse with the Big Dig, we haven’t had one person to blame, and so nothing got fixed. My list of Big Dig villains was a first attempt to try to get a hold on who should be held accountable. But Chris, you can’t just chuck your thinking cap at the Big Dig, on either a political or practical level. You’re going to have to piss people off. And if this is a swipe at Reilly, it’s pretty darned circumspect.
Other Big Dig thoughts:
- sco took the words right out of my mouth: What’s taken Romney so long to be the stand-up, take-charge point man on the Big Dig? I have absolutely no problem with him hogging the spotlight these days, wielding a magic marker like an avenging sword; That’s his job. Good on him for doing the “I Saved the Olympics” thing. But look, it ain’t January 2003. Where the hell has he been?
- Also count me as absolutely down with Marian Walsh’s independent investigative commission. Let a thousand subpoenas bloom.
- What’s Marc Pacheco hiding?
State Senator Marc R. Pacheco, a Taunton Democrat who has led past Big Dig inquiries, said he supported Walsh’s ideas but thought the timing may not be right now.
“I don’t think we want to send the wrong message, that we are interfering with the investigations that are going on,” he said. “I want to see how these existing investigations play out.”
But Pacheco wondered aloud why Romney has not been more critical of Bechtel/Parson Brinckerhoff, which has overseen the Big Dig project. “I’ve heard nothing about what the governor plans to do with Bechtel. I want see how that will play out.”
False choice much, Marc? Let’s do both. “Not now” clearly means “never”, in case you needed a translation from insiderese.
- Barney Frank is off his rocker if he thinks the federal gub’mint is going to help us out with the new costs of this thing. Come on. It’s a failure of our political culture in MA, and our public works culture. I don’t want to pay for a Bridge to Nowhere; why should anyone else pay for our homegrown foolishness?
I don’t want to pay for a Bridge to Nowhere; why should anyone else pay for our homegrown foolishness?
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Two reasons:
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1. The Bridge to Nowhere provided virtually no economic benefit to anyone; the Big Dig provides massive economic benefit to all of New England. I’m not talking about the economic stimulus of building the damned thing, I’m talking about a more efficient economy — people can live farther from Boston and still work here, the Interstates that go through Boston allow for much faster travel (and hence, efficient shipping of goods) through town, etc.
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2. Public safety. The tunnels must be fixed, in the interest of public safety. The Bridge to Nowhere provided no additional public safety.
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So, given that we’re in the mess we’re in, I don’t think additional Fed Gov’t money is unreasonable. I would hope it would come with additional oversight (and perhaps control) of the project, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable. A properly working Big Dig doesn’t just benefit MA. It has tangible benefits for ME, NH, CT, and RI (and to a much less extent, VT). That’s why the Fed Gov’t has an interest, and should help.
“Put down the crack pipe, and step away from the mushrooms…”
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We’ve become a national laughinhstock over the Big Dig, most of which was funded by the feds ($13 of the $15 billion … is this right? Or is it $15 on $17 billion?)
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It’s totally unrealistic to think anyone in Washington is in a mood to send any more money whatever the soundness of the logic. It’s the Massachusetts taxpayers who are going to get stuck with the bill, again, small as it might be, for the repairs.
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As I’ve commented before, I think the Big Dig fiasco will have far-reaching implications for future large-scale public works projects in the Commonwealth.
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That means everyone’s pet surface-rail project likely won’t happen, forget most of the T extension plans if they haven’t been green-lighted and funded, and get used to seeing a perpetual construction site where the Rose Kennedy Greenway is supposed to go. Trying to get these projects funded will be very, very hard politically, if not impossible, irrespective of their merit.
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I might be wrong on this, but I think Matt Amerello’s vision for a monorail to Springfield and points west is going anywhere.
Though I agree we’re not getting any more federal money, federal contributions for the Big Dig were capped at $5.9 billion. We paid all the rest.
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There is a legal concept called disgorgement–forcing a party to repay illicit profits. Big Dig contractors made a killing on the project. Funding repairs on the tunnels, as well as paying for future projects, will depend on getting negligent contractors to cough up huge sums of money.
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Somehow, I don’t think “go-to” Romney–who rushed to the microphones right after the accident to praise his fellow consultants at Bechtel–is the man for that particular job.
I don’t think that Congress will be coughing up any more dough for the Big Dig. I just don’t see what’s wrong with asking, since I think that it is a legitimate request. As I posted, I also think it’s legitimate for the Feds to demand more oversight in return.
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I am worried about future funding of major projects, and suspect that leadership from both the leg and the corner office will be necessary to make significant enough changes for MA to have a credible “we cleaned up our act” claim.
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On a side note, I wonder if corruption/waste is usually measured in dollars or in percentage. After all, the project was really big and really complex, and even if waste was $0, it still would have come in with massive change orders because in many cases they didn’t know what they’d find until they started digging. We sense that this project had unusually vast waste and corruption, but if the Big Dig had been divided into ten “Little Digs” would we have noticed? If not, it suggests that the percentage is on par (and par may certainly be too high), but the mere size of the Big Dig just makes it too big a target to ignore.
I can’t agree more. Some people just want to go after the contractors. Some people just want to go after the Governor. But you hit the nail on the head, it is our political culture that is the problem. The contractors need to be hung out to dry and bled of all the resources they gouged from the Dig. The Gov needs to be publicly reminded that he has been gone for three years. And as difficult as it is as Democrats we really need to kick the leg around a bit. Great post Charley.
Anyone who screwed up, skimmed, or produced bad oversight on this project should be hung out to dry. But can we first let an independent investigation determine who it was that did the wrong things?
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Everyone keeps throwing blame around and it’s pissing me off. It was a severely complicated project and a severely complicated amount of work. Companies came in from all over the world and other companies sprang up out of nowhere to take on contracting jobs – that’s not because the whole thing was corrupt, it was because the damn project was that BIG.
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I wish the media had one iota of knowing what the fuck it’s talking about with regards to the Big Dig…but they don’t.
Look, Lynne, there’s no reason to come in here and ruin a perfectly good witchhunt with reasonableness!
for reason, sensability, or rational thinking on a blog! Who do you think you are!
Risk on projects is proportional to size as well as complexity. The Big Dig was one honkin’ big project. (even when it was just the Ted Williams Tunnel it was “only” a billion dollars…
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Of course there will be problems on a project of N billion dollars (where N is greater than 1)
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As I said in my post yesterday, the time for rescue was in 1995 when the budget jumped from $6 billion to $10 billion – not long after major construction and Weld started his second term. (big coincidence there…)
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My earlier Post
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Mark
The Democrats have had a supermajority in the Legislature both during the project’s inception and throughout it’s construction. So your welcome to blame Weld, but at any time the Democrats have had the power to stop the project. In addition, they exercised their supermajortiy powers and blocked Romney from taking over the Big Dig back when Modern Continental was not bankrupt.
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On the subject of corruption spending $15 billion (and counting) on a tunnel that leaks and kills people doesn’t pass the stink test.
How exactly does one “stop” a project involving carving huge tunnels through the middle of the city when it’s, let’s say, a third done? Or two-thirds done?
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It would have been preferable if the Democrats had used their supermajorities to appoint competent, non-corrupt people to the positions responsible for construction and inspection. Oh, whoops – appointments. That’s the Governor’s job. Not a damn thing the legislature can do about ’em.
The legislature doesn’t do anything. Only the governor and his appointed minions do work. That budget comes from nowhere. The operating funds for the executive branch just materialize. Oh woe is the legislature, if only it had some power.
what the ratio of executive branch employees to legislative employees is? I can’t find exact numbers, unfortunately. But each legislator – of which there are 200 – has a staff of maybe 3 or 4 people, on average. Add in a few committee staffers, etc., and we’re talking maybe 1,000-1,500 folks, many of them clerical. That’s as compared to tens of thousands of people whose jobs track directly back to the Governor.
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Obviously, the legislature appropriates the $$, and for that reason and others has lots of “power.” But I continue to be mystified as to why it’s so hard for you to accept that it is actually the executive branch that’s supposed to do stuff. Again, there’s that whole separation of powers thing.
is not that we aren’t in agreement. If I haven’t said it I apologize but I do completely agree with you that the Governor’s office is charged with actually running the government. You are spot on there. For that reason I am more than happy to make every Republican administration of the last 16 years squirm because of investigations and fully agree with you that Republicans are to blame for our predicament – but that is only half the story.
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Where I start to get frustrated with your argument is the sense that the legislature could do nothing, that it was some sort of powerless entity at the mercy of the all powerful governor. This is not the American system of government. Each branch is equal and checked by the other. While the task of “doing” is the job of the gov and his or her officers the task of representing the interests of the people and looking out for their well being is the task of the legislature. I have said ad nauseum that the investigatory and oversight functions of the legislature was its ace in the hole. While ultimately it is up to the governor’s departments to actually make the final decision, the leg branch could have been churning out info that would have shed light on the horrendous practices and policies of successive gubernatorial administrations (nearly all Republican). This is the failure of the legislature and this is why they are equal in complicity to the governors. We send them to Beacon Hill to ask the questions we would ask, most of them did not do so. They have tricks and tools that it would seem were never used. The governor’s office can’t run if it doesn’t have money, the legislature could have shut down government if it really wanted to. I am sure there are one or two creative legislators that could have come up with something that would raised the profile of what was going wrong with the Big Dig.
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If there is anything incomprehensible about our back and forth it is the fact that you seem to feel that the governor alone is repsonible becaue he “does.” Yes, you have acknowledged the hackocracy but you never place blame on it, you never believe it had the power to do anything. There is an inept political culture in Massachusetts and I think we should take this tragic opportunity to perhaps attempt and correct this problem. Yes, the governor’s turn is right now but the legislature won’t get a turn at the blame game if we trick ourselves into believing that only the evil Republican governors are to blame. Such obvious partisanship is precisely why the Big Dig is what it is.
If your saying the Legislature is powerless then you don’t know anything about how many Legislative Overrides have occured under the Democratic Majority. One of those overrides allowed Amorello to stay in power. I digress, perhaps stopping the project is a little excesive, but there were a variety of things that could have been done to save billions. But why save money when you can just raise taxes and point fingers at the Governer when things go wrong.