Photo courtesy of King TransitMA / CCY BY-SA 4.0
Legislation creating a new MBTA oversight board will not reach Gov. Charlie Baker until at least two days before the existing board expires, but the governor is not sweating the timeline.
Even if it takes lawmakers several weeks to iron out differences between House and Senate proposals, Baker said the soon-to-end Fiscal and Management Control Board positioned the T well to encounter minimal disruptions and that the Department of Transportation Board of Directors is poised to handle responsibilities in the interim.
“The responsibilities around some of those traditional decisions, if there isn’t a new board in the next two or three weeks or something like that, would then fall to the DOT board, which as you know has several members on it who also served on the existing FMCB,” Baker said Thursday when asked about the panel’s impending expiration. “I think they did a nice job of anticipating the possibility that something might not be there right away, and I think they’ll be okay.”
The five-member FMCB, created as a short-term board in the aftermath of the disastrous winter of 2015, is set to expire at the end of the month. Baker, the House and the Senate have all proposed succeeding it with a larger permanent panel to manage the T, though they suggested varying requirements for how often it would meet and how the board would be composed.
Both branches adjourned for the weekend without agreeing to a final version of legislation creating a new board, so the earliest they could send a bill to Baker is when they return on Monday.
With the FMCB set to end, Baker praised its members for their work, which often featured several hours of public meetings multiple times per month to review virtually every aspect of the T.
“Those people put in somewhere between 50 and 60, sometimes 70 meetings a year, since the start of the Snowmageddon,” Baker said. “For six years, those people have been putting in an extraordinary amount of time. They haven’t been paid a dime for the time they’ve put in, and they’ve made an enormous difference in many elements of the MBTA’s operation.”
