Massachusetts State Senator
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.
“A state senator is calling for a new safety oversight authority of the MBTA days before he chairs a legislative hearing looking into whether the Department of Public Utilities should continue in that role. ‘I like the model of the semi-autonomous state commission,’ said Mike Barrett, Senate chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities & Energy. ‘I think of the Office of Campaign & Political Finance or the inspector general’s office or the Ethics Commission.’”
In the letter, Barrett and Roy invited Nelson to testify at the hearing, which the committee will conduct to “inquire into the Department of Public Utilities’ discharge of its responsibility to monitor the safety of MBTA operations.”
Questions raised at the hearing will center around whether the DPU has enough motivation, capacity, focus and expertise to carry out its state oversight role of the MBTA, which continues to suffer from a startling number of safety incidents.
The state legislative committee in charge of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities will conduct a hearing into the DPU’s discharge of its responsibility to oversee the safety of operations at the MBTA.
Sen. Mike Barrett and Rep. Jeff Roy, Senate and House Chairs of the Joint Legislative Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy, sent a letter of invitation this morning to DPU Chair Matt Nelson, inviting him to testify at the proceeding, set for early October.
Barrett and Roy wrote, “We’ve been disturbed and disappointed to read the contents of the Safety Management Inspection of the Federal Transit Administration.” The legislators questioned whether “the DPU is motivated enough, independent enough, big enough, focused enough, and expert enough.”
On the question of independence, Barrett and Roy pointed out that the federal report directs the DPU to “examine and ensure its organizational and legal independence from the MBTA” and identifies “shared agency reporting relationships to the Governor” as a potential problem. “We don’t worry about explicit interference,” the legislators wrote Nelson. “We worry instead about a ‘don’t make matters worse’ mentality. ‘After all, we’re all on the same team here.’ Maybe the safety operation, wherever it’s situated, should not be on the same team the T is on.”
As for the size of the safety operation, the legislators said that, as of early September, the DPU’s Transportation Oversight Division has 11 authorized positions. “Our information,” Barrett and Roy said, “is that only nine are filled at present.” The two chairs point out that the DPU’s safety jurisdiction is very broad. “It strains credulity,” they said, “to contend that 11 people – or 13 people, or 15 – can range across the entire state to patrol the safety practices of trucks, railways, buses, household moving companies, towing companies, and hazardous waste companies, as well as the T.”
On the issue of focus, the legislators said the DPU is best known for regulating the monthly rates Eversource, NationalGrid, and other electric and natural gas utilities charge consumers. “Recently, as an outgrowth of these core assignments, the agency has assumed critically important responsibilities for shaping Massachusetts’ response to climate change,” Barrett and Roy wrote. “We wonder whether the state agency that must tackle the increasingly urgent questions of natural gas and electric power in a time of climate crisis should also handle inspections of household moving companies and towing companies. The damage from stretching the DPU too thin could cut in both directions. Either the safety mission could suffer due to the ever-growing concern about climate problems, or the climate mission could suffer due to the fire-drill nature of safety problems.”
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A second legislative committee plans to hold oversight hearings related to the MBTA – this time concerning the role the Department of Public Utilities plays in overseeing safety issues at the transit authority. The House and Senate chairs of the Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy — Sen. Michael Barrett of Lexington and Rep. Jeffrey Roy of Franklin — invited the chair of the DPU to testify at a hearing planned next month.
Relying on a safety report released Wednesday by the Federal Transit Administration that criticized the DPUs failure to carry out many of its duties, the two chairs said they questioned whether the agency is “motivated enough, independent enough, big enough, focused enough, and expert enough” to do its job.