Massachusetts Liberal has excellent commentary this am on the MBTA. Great post, read the whole thing, but here’s a taste:
MBTA officials have unleashed a tsunami. State leaders had better be listening or they will be swept up by the wave.
It’s almost unheard of — standing room only at public hearings. Yet that’s what is happening at location after location across eastern Massachusetts as transit officials bring their proposal for fare hikes and service cuts out for a test drive.
… Frankly, I don’t think Transportation Secretary Richard Davey is ignoring them: he is playing them like a violin, orchestrating the furor into a crescendo that will force Patrick and lawmakers to act.
And Davey’s the guy to do it. He’s new, young, politically clean and unscathed. He’s the one to point out the dire consequences of past inaction. We can continue the T’s death spiral, or pull out of it with heroic action.
As truncated in OL’s post, DeLeo’s comment that “Right now, I feel like a solution is really a T issue rather than a legislative issue” seems a bit more cavalier than he wanted to sound — more context here — but they don’t quite reflect the level of anxiety and fury that the public feels. I’m pretty confident, though, that Patrick, Terry Murray, and a critical mass of legislators are feeling the urgency of the moment.
There will be a variety of workable ideas to emerge from the legislature or relevant interested parties, think tanks, and the public. The hard part, as I continue to see it, will be ensuring that legislators have political cover and public support to vote for a bold, real solution. They didn’t have it for the gas tax a couple of years ago. They’ll need it this time.
Keep it up!
JimC says
n/t
Trickle up says
This is clearly a problem that cannot be resolved within the conventional wisdom, i.e., that this is not “a legislative issue” and taxes cannot be on the table.
This looks like a job for people power. But how does that play out, since the political leadership and the opposition party both espouse that conventional wisdom? And more fundamentally, since any new taxes are going to be genuinely unpopular with many voters?
I do not think it is just a matter of the grassroots giving political “cover” to legislators secretly yearning to do the right thing here. I think the legislature genuinely likes to unload problems onto entities it controls and say thinks like, Not our problem, Our hands are clean, What’s wrong with these guys?
So there really does need to be a game-changing popular movement. But how does grassroots outrage translate into policy?
seascraper says
Answer: robbing Peter to pay Paul