Massachusetts State Senator
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.
“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.
