Gov. Charlie Baker, your transportation leaders need your help.
MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak recently announced the disquieting results of his deep dive into the state of the authority’s human capital. To effectively spend the $8 billion you have rightly touted as one of the biggest investments in the T in decades, Poftak will need to hire as many as 80 people plus a high-level manager.
Essentially, Poftak admitted the T has lost the ability to execute the kinds of transformative projects its future and the future of our state rely on. It’s a sad reflection of just how under-engaged your predecessors, Republican and Democrat, have been with investing in the state’s biggest transit system. With an enormous project like the Green Line Extension being planned on their watch, it’s a damning indictment of how successive legislatures and Govs. Bill Weld, Paul Celucci, Jane Swift, Mitt Romney and Deval Patrick handled this key engine of regional economic growth.
As the Green Line Extension project showed, poor project management stands a good chance of killing projects that at first appear low-risk and sensible. Given that the planned $8 billion in capital spending – part of a now-estimated $10.1 billion needed to bring the T into a state of good repair – includes mission-critical items like new Orange Line cars, a key Commuter Rail safety system and a new fare collection system, this is not a time anyone in Massachusetts can afford any MBTA mistakes.
The other thing the T cannot afford right now is delays in showing real results to its riders.
We are at an unusual moment in Massachusetts politics where the fixing T’s defects is accepted as an urgent action item by those who aren’t regular MBTA riders. Even tax-adverse House Speaker Robert DeLeo keeps saying “all options are on the table” to fund improved service.
In the face of the T’s human resources predicament, Poftak suggested the only reasonable course of action in his power – slow down how fast the authority spends its capital budget to give time to hire a swath of new project managers. However, such a strategy would be a disaster for the T and would set area businesses back by miles as they compete for talent that does not want to have to endure a traffic-choked hell just to get to and from work.
In his urgent, frustrated May 13 letter to the MBTA’s Fiscal and Management Control Board, Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce President Jim Rooney offered a sensible way forward: Partner with expert local firms to outsource some project management functions while the T builds up its internal capacity to run these highly technical projects and key future ones like an electrified regional rail system.
Governor, solutions are out there, but your two highly capable transportation leaders, Poftak and Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack, need you to empower them to take unconventional steps to enact them quickly. You have a talent for taking action when the moment is ripe. Allow us to suggest this is just such a time.
