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Thanks, Choo-Choo Charlie
By adamg on Fri, 10/20/2023 - 10:08am
At least this Charlie's train seems to run.
Jerry Berger writes that famously T-averse Charlie Baker has (good and) plenty to answer for with the latest MBTA fiasco, this time on the brand-spanking new Green Line Extension (remember when Baker got into office and said he'd likely cancel the whole thing because it was too gosh-darned expensive, and then he found a way to cut the cost by zillions?). Why, the legislature should convene hearings on who's to blame.
Only problem:
But those lawmakers would have to shine a spotlight on their own oversight, or lack thereof, on one of the principal causes of concern about the state’s "competitiveness" - a public transit and highway system that causes people to stew in traffic or at T stops waiting for trains that run every 20 minutes in "rush hour."
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Comments
this article, like all the
this article, like all the articles, does not have any substance that Baker was even remotely aware of any of this. This starts and stops with T management.
Oh?
And who appointed the T management?
Baker is the one who completely reorganized the T's senior management early in his tenure, in part to remove all holdouts from the Patrick admin. (Patrick was a complete turkey regarding the T in his own right.)
Baker told us great things would happen if only there was a corporate style board that would plan for the long term and keep a watchful eye on the spending. Guess what didn't happen?
Baker didn't need to know
The CEO is responsible for culture. Suppose Baker told them to do the project on schedule and on budget or face consequences. People might decide to look the other way on things that might cause them not to hit the improbable goals set from above. People don't hide safety reports just for the hell of it. They had to have a grand opening before Baker left, they cut some corners. His expectations set them up to either fail or to be reckless. Either way, he's at fault.
We've been on it a few times
We've been on it a few times and it seems to ride just fine... just leave it and change the spec to allow the way it is :-)
The Governor and State Auditor need to act
The Governor and Auditor need to create a special squad of untouchables to investigate white collar criminals stealing millions on the MBTA. It is quite obvious the Transit Police are not up to the task.
It's not theft
It's an utter lack of state oversight on capital projects. It would be easier to accept if it was criminal activity.
Take the Springfield plant: It was a lousy idea to start but the state could and should have brought the hammer down as soon as they started missing deadlines.
In the case of GLX, why wasn't there an emergency meeting to review the findings of the engineering verification report?
When Baker ran for reelection
He asked that we judge him on the progress he will make with the T in the next four years against the 2 previous administrations. Curiously, he made no mention of his first four years in office.
When Baker ran for reelection
He asked that we judge him on the progress he will make with the T in the next four years against the 2 previous administrations. Curiously, he made no mention of his first four years in office.
State capacity has been decimated
The GLX was a privatizer’s wet dream! The MBTA had to hire an engineering firm to write the RFP, another to evaluate the submissions, and another to oversee the hiring of the contractors to build and evaluate the project. Nobody left at the T with the expertise to actually build!
For more than the past 50 years, Republicans, and even many Democrats of the neoliberal persuasion, have been calling for “privatization” and “outsourcing,” insisting that the private sector is more capable and more efficient than government. There was never much evidence that this could possibly be true, especially when one considers that each contractor in the pyramid of subcontractors required to do any large project will each have to take their own profit cut.
It’s true that the arguments for privatization fell on fertile ground, because many large government projects were done in a way that was either out of touch with the local community, or else filled with patronage and waste. But as we now know, the solution to that was not to decimate the entire bureaucracy, and to expect the private sector to pick up the pieces and act in the public interest. That was always a fantasy.
We are at a moment in history in which we will need to undertake public, works projects on a scale never before imagined, if we expect to be able to continue to live in the places that we call home. We desperately need to reconstitute capable bureaucracies with the experience and the expertise to oversee these huge building endeavors. And we need to fund them properly.
This means breaking the anti-democratic stranglehold that the Senate president and the House speaker currently enjoy on Beacon Hill. It means electing politicians, who will actually follow the Will of the people, instead of immediately finding ways to undermine things like the millionaires tax.
We’ve spent the last 50 years undermining the public’s trust in government. But, the only hope we have of any kind of project being responsive to our shared needs is if it is run in a way that our input is part of the loop: that’s called democratic government.
Wonder how the millionaire's tax is going...
The millionaire's tax (4% surtax on incomes above $1 million) is allegedly bringing in a billion dollars, and being distributed to fix roads and give free school lunches...but given the Legislature's propensity to funnel everything into the general fund instead of its intended places, I have the feeling some of that money is being diverted there without the public knowing it.
Source: Business Insider
I'm full of questions today...
How on earth did the Barletta Heavy Division not know the gauge of the tracks required for an extension of the Green LIne? They're a local company out of Canton. You'd think someone in the company had ridden the T at sometime before in their lives.
For the uninformed the "Track Gauge" is the distance between the inside faces of the two running rails. This is extremely important in preventing derailments.