Here’s hoping state transportation czarina Stephanie Pollack, who once stared down a Chicago billionaire in a duel over the future of Boston’s waterfront, will lower the boom on the bumbling MBTA.
If there is anyone who is smart enough, savvy enough and downright tough enough to whip the T into shape, it’s Pollack.
She’s well-known in development circles for her showdown more than a decade ago with then-Fan Pier developer Nick Pritzker, when, as a young environmental lawyer, she fought successfully for more parkland and public space in the fast-growing Seaport.
And frankly, it will be up to Pollack to drive forward an overhaul of the chronically late, chronically underfunded, chronically inept, chronically everything T.
Major Shakeup Needed
Standing up to Pritzker was no cakewalk, but it may look easy compared to the challenge Pollack now faces with our broken public transportation system.
As a lawyer for the Conservation Law Foundation, Pollack emerged as one of the most forceful and memorable figures in the long-running battle over the Fan Pier mega development, threatening to sue to stop the massive project unless major changes were made.
Pollack will need to show some of that old fire – and then some – in order to deal with one of the most unaccountable and arrogant government bureaucracies of all time, one that routinely blames everyone and everything else for its problems, whether it is the weather, state funding or even its long-abused riders.
I certainly don’t see much reforming zeal on the panel – a collection of warmed-over government bureaucrats – rolled out by Gov. Charlie Banker and tasked with investigating the T’s woes. It’s an all-star lineup of former government functionaries, including a former Boston Redevelopment Authority chief, a former New York transit czar, the former chair of the Legislature’s transportation committee and the Massachusetts Port Authority’s finance guy. A Harvard professor is the sole representative of the private sector on the panel, which isn’t saying much.
It seems odd that Baker, who is a Republican after all, couldn’t have found a way to put a T critic on the panel. Certainly anti-tax crusader Barbara Anderson has been a great watchdog on some key T messes over the years, including Cadillac pensions that allow rail and subway workers to retire at 55.
But if Anderson was seen as too much of a Molotov cocktail to put on this stuffy panel, how about someone from the cerebral and moderately conservative Pioneer Institute, which has been pushing for T reform for years as well?
Pioneer has reported thoughtfully and cogently over the years on the T’s woes, building the case that mismanagement, not just funding issues, is at the heart of the T’s increasingly pathetic performance.
Panel Of Lame Ducks?
Finding examples of mismanagement and incompetence at the MBTA to poke fun at is like shooting fish in a barrel. You don’t exactly need to be a super sleuth.
The T has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last few years on new rail cars and locomotives that arrived in Boston needing hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs before they could even be used. One batch of 75 rail cars was delivered by the manufacturer 2 ½ years late, The Boston Globe has reported.
Of course, the T routinely blames outdated equipment for its inability to make the trains run on time, or at all these days, but that’s hardly the full story.
My latest favorite T bungle is the lack of preparation for dealing with heavy snowfall, one of the most predictable things about New England weather, even if this winter has been positively freakish.
Greg Sullivan, the state’s former inspector general who now works at Pioneer, notes the agency set aside a measly $2.8 million in its budget for snow fighting equipment.
“The MBTA’s lack of preparedness for the winter of 2015 has exposed the weaknesses of the MBTA’s management in planning for the future,” he noted in a recent missive. “More money will not lead to kinds of change to the T’s persistent managerial woes that got us into this situation.”
That’s probably not the kind of direct, commonsense advice Pollack will be getting from the governor’s newly appointed T panel.
Who knows, maybe this odd collection of former city and state government bureaucrats will surprise us all – they would have to be pretty dense not to at least acknowledge the deep level of public outrage and frustration.
But my bet is that if the T is going to truly get overhauled, it will be because of Pollack, working with the new governor, of course, not the lame panel.
The PC thing right now in the liberal, we-believe-in-government crowd is to bang the drum for more money for the T, while glossing over the agency’s dismal track record. And sure, conservatives right now are more outspoken on the T’s breakdown. But in the end this is not an ideological issue, but rather of getting a government authority to live up to its promises and the commitments it has made to the public.
Given her environmental background, Pollack also surely knows that a thriving public transportation system is key to getting more cars off our state’s already jammed highways. And thriving the T is not, having lost more than 13 percent of its passengers over the last decade – the only one of 18 major U.S. subway and rail systems to see a decline in ridership, according to Pioneer.
Here’s betting Pollack is too smart to let politics prevent her from getting to the bottom of the MBTA’s seemingly endless woes.
Email: sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com
