MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak. State House News Service File Photo | Sam Doran
The MBTA’s busy hiring teams now have a new post to staff: general manager.
Steve Poftak, who held the role since 2019, told employees Tuesday afternoon that he’s leaving the agency’s top job Jan. 3, 2023 “with mixed emotions.”
Poftak has been under fire for the agency’s handling of the Orange Line shutdown and a severe dispatcher shortage that’s left the T running far fewer subway trains than it would normally, and a scathing safety investigation from the Federal Transit Administration.
Attorney General Maura Healey, the favorite to win next week’s gubernatorial election, has also signaled that she intended to replace Poftak in the T’s top job. If Healey wins, her first day in office will be two days after Poftak leaves.
“As I look back on my four years as General Manager, I take great pride in what we have accomplished together,” Poftak said in the letter. “We kept service going (and made it better) through a global pandemic. In a world where a lot of people stayed home, the MBTA was out there serving our transit dependent customers. And while we know we have more work to do on safety, we have made great strides as an organization, building staffing, expertise, and above all, commitment to making the system as safe as it can be.”
Poftak Leaves Mixed Legacy
Poftak’s tenure at the MBTA began as a member of its Fiscal and Management Control Board, put in place by Gov. Charlie Baker after back-to-back snow storms caused the transit system to collapse in 2015. When former GE executive Luis Manuel Ramírez was turfed out by then-Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack after a troubled single year in the office in 2018, Poftak was selected as his replacement. His time as general manager will last almost exactly four years, marking the longest continuous tenure for an MBTA chief since Daniel Grabauskas in the mid-2000s and the third-longest since 1989, according to records kept by the independent MBTA Advisory Board.
As MBTA general manager – an experience his letter termed “the experience of a lifetime” – Poftak earned praise from multiple corners for his attempts to steady the agency following years of turmoil and a revolving cast of managers at the top. In recent testimony before the state legislature, former federal Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Poftak achieved some success in instituting key safety reforms he and other expert investigators recommended in 2019.
“I believe right up to the point of COVID, he was doing a good job. He was carrying out the recommendations. He was trying to implement the safety culture that I’ve talked about. And then COVID put an end to all of that,” LaHood said. “There’s plenty of blame to go around. We know that from reading the reports, but I do believe if COVID hadn’t hit, this FTA report would look a lot different.”
However, some advocates, experts and prominent politicians have also blamed Poftak and his boss, Gov. Charlie Baker, for a pandemic-era hiring freeze at the T that helped generate the dispatcher crisis and a huge hiring shortfall that’s crimped the ranks of bus and train operators as well as numbers of critical safety personnel.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who sharply questioned Poftak last month at a hearing about the MBTA’s ongoing failures, called his resignation “long overdue.”
“We now have a critical opportunity to make much-needed changes and ensure our public transit system is safe, reliable, and first-rate,” Warren said in a statement. “With visionary leadership, sufficient resources, and effective oversight, we can get the T back on track for its riders and workers – and the people of Massachusetts deserve nothing less.”
Next Leader Faces Big Challenges
Selecting new leadership for the MBTA already appeared to be a likely step for the next governor, and Poftak’s announcement pushes that task up the to-do list for Healey or her GOP opponent Geoff Diehl.
The next GM will have to grapple with the aftermath of the FTA investigation and the price tag – which could total hundreds of millions of dollars – of making the necessary changes to fix immediate safety problems and restore former service levels.
That person will also face major staffing challenges. By the FTA’s estimate, the T is already as many as 2,000 employees short of the workforce it needs, and current MBTA leaders envision bus system upgrades that will require hundreds more people, all in a job market where the agency has struggled to attract and retain workers.
On top of that, MBTA financial officials expect the agency will face an operating budget gap of hundreds of millions of dollars as soon as next year. Baker and lawmakers have agreed to steer more than half a billion dollars in one-time aid to the T already, but they have shown little to no interest in rethinking more permanent funding mechanisms, although an income surtax on next week’s ballot is one option.
Advocates Suggest Priorities
LivableStreets Alliance Executive Director Stacey Thompson said she wants Poftak’s successor to prioritize staffing up, improving transparency and communications, and making a case to Beacon Hill that the T needs additional funding.
“We need a strong governor, and we need a legislature that is willing to talk about finances instead of throwing out random ideas about restructuring,” she said.
“I’m not going to say Steve was perfect, and I don’t think Steve would think he was perfect, either. I think it’s easy to blame the guy with general manager attached to his name to deflect from the lack of leadership we saw at the legislative and administrative level,” she added.
Brian Kane, head of the the MBTA Advisory Board, said he hopes the next general manager will focus more on the day-to-day operations side of the MBTA, calling it “desperately what we need next.”
“I think Steve has done what his political bosses asked him to do, which was spend tons and tons of capital money to try to get the system into a state of good repair quickly and try to get those Red and Orange line cars delivered,” Kane said, referring to a project to replace two of the subway fleets with brand-new vehicles. “There never has been a directive from on high to run the T day-to-day well.”
