Lawmakers look to remove MBTA oversight from Department of Public Utilities
State lawmakers are drafting legislation to move MBTA safety oversight out of the Department of Public Utilities.
“Work on the subject is quite intense,” said state Sen. Mike Barrett. “We have to decide whether all the transportation functions currently organized in the DPU should move over to an independent agency, or whether a new agency should focus only on the MBTA and safety.”
The DPU is also the oversight authority for other regional transit agencies across Massachusetts, he said, and the “threshold question” will be whether any new agency deals with just the T or with the other transportation authorities as well.
“I don’t think you want to leave the DPU with a weak, but still demanding schedule of transportation oversight with regards to other parts of the state,” Barrett said. “The DPU probably would not be very attentive to that reduced mandate and I imagine that users of bus systems in that part of Massachusetts wouldn’t like the result.”
Barrett co-chairs the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities & Energy, which held a hearing in October that centered around whether the DPU should maintain safety oversight of the MBTA.
The hearing followed a scathing report from the Federal Transit Administration that highlighted management and operational failures at the MBTA and DPU’s ineffectiveness in its oversight function.
Barrett said he expects some pushback from the DPU, which has stated that it wants to maintain its role with the MBTA, but the key question would be the position of the next governor, Maura Healey.
A spokesperson for Healey declined to comment on her position, but said in October that as governor, Healey “will instruct her new transportation safety chief to review the Department of Public Utilities’ role in MBTA safety oversight.”
A DPU spokesperson said the agency is working diligently to comply with federal directives, which includes beefing up its staffing and conducting more field work and auditing to provide further oversight.
The DPU has six full-time employees dedicated to rail safety oversight, a higher number than prior years, and has created two new positions, a director of rail oversight and assistant director, the spokesperson said.
The department is making weekly unannounced visits to the MBTA operations control center to ensure employees are not working excessive hours and there is appropriate coverage, and is making weekly visits to yards and car houses to “verify safe working conditions,” the spokesperson said.
“I’m interested in moving transportation safety out of the DPU for two reasons,” Barrett said. “First, the DPU has blown it in terms of consistently attending to its oversight responsibility but secondly, as the climate issue looms larger and larger, I don’t want to see the DPU distracted by other issues.
“In my mind, both the climate question and transportation safety benefit from separating the two.”
The deadline to file legislation this session is in January. Other politicians, particularly from the Joint Committee on Transportation, will want to weigh in on legislation before it’s finalized. The question of who files it in the House and Senate is still unresolved as well, he said.
“I think whatever we write will then get circulated to a lot of people and I expect the bill to circulate some more,” Barrett said. “This is a lengthy process because you want to be inclusive. You want to strengthen the bill’s chance of passing so you have to listen to a lot of interested parties.”
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/d21ZyOl
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