Massachusetts State Senator
“It’s hard for me to accept that the minimum $3,500 subsidy — which became law … upon the date of the governor signing the DRIVE Act— is still not available to my constituents and to other people in Massachusetts,” Senator Mike Barrett, who helped craft the climate law, said at a Senate sub-committee meeting this week. “Why is that?”
“In the climate front, despite all the dire circumstances we are confronted with, we should have hope,” Barrett said last week in an interview. Barrett, whose district includes Bedford, pointed out that recently-signed federal legislation “seemed dead in the water. And then we have a new state climate bill that seemed destined for a gubernatorial veto but is now law.”
“Two last-minute rescues have resulted in a lot of opportunities for Massachusetts,” Barrett said. But many of those opportunities are competitive, he added.
Beacon Hill has a clear transit to-do list for the coming legislative session, centered around setting the MBTA up for long-term success. First, testimony at last week’s State House hearing investigating the MBTA’s safety overseers at the Department of Public Utilities showed and as state Sen. Mike Barrett identified, we need a dedicated body within state government to handle transit safety supervision.
Each state has a designated agency to oversee rapid transit safety, conducting on-the-ground audits in consultation with the Federal Transit Administration. In Massachusetts, that agency is the DPU, which also oversees electric and gas utilities. Co-chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy, Senator Mike Barrett, said a separate transportation commission may be better suited to oversee T safety.
“I am very concerned that the safety division historically has been an afterthought at the agency,” he said. The primary focus of the DPU needs to be climate change policy, Barrett said, and the T safety crisis is a “fire drill situation” distracting from that effort. The hearing comes just over a month after the Federal Transit Administration released its safety management inspection findings about the T.
That prompted Sen. Michael Barrett, chair of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy, to ask about creating a separate agency that would allow better hiring incentives.
“If the Transportation Oversight Division were an independent commission,” he wondered, “let’s say it might well be able to pay hiring bonuses like the MBTA.”
State Sen. Michael Barrett, co-chair of the Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy, put DPU chair Matt Nelson on the spot after Nelson defended his department’s efforts on T safety.
“So we should be quiet and just let the status quo continue?” Barrett asked.
Co-chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy, Senator Mike Barrett, said a separate transportation commission may be better suited to oversee T safety.
“I am very concerned that the safety division historically has been an afterthought at the agency,” he said. The primary focus of the DPU needs to be climate change policy, Barrett said, and the T safety crisis is a “fire drill situation” distracting from that effort.
After he and his colleagues spent several hours grilling current and former DPU officials about their work to ensure the MBTA is safe, Sen. Mike Barrett said the Baker administration agency has not done enough in recent years to demonstrate that it can handle those responsibilities, even if it “means to do well.”
“I’m thinking the sand in the hourglass has probably run out,” Barrett, who co-chairs the Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy Committee, told reporters after the panel’s oversight hearing. “Bottom line is, people have used the system at their risk. The current oversight supplied by the Department of Public Utilities is a part of that mass failure, and I think it’s time, probably, to try a different institutional arrangement.”
“The division seems stuck,” said Sen. Michael Barrett of Lexington. “Safety seems to have been submerged, seriously, within the DPU.”
Sen. Michael Barrett, who co-chairs the Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy Committee, said lawmakers wanted to allow any municipality “to use that language to go all-electric in new construction.” Baker’s Department of Energy Resources ultimately took a more limited approach in the final code, which did not give cities and towns the ability to mandate all-electric heating in new buildings, as his team raised concerns that banning fossil fuel infrastructure could drive up costs amid a potent housing crunch.