With a top state lawmaker calling for de facto federal receivership of the MBTA to address a torrent of safety failures, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said Monday that the agency needs “a partnership, not a takeover.”
Wu, who leads the city at the heart of the T’s sprawling subway, bus and commuter rail network, lamented that the fraying quality of service and backlog of unaddressed maintenance “never should have gotten to this point” but drew a line in the sand around ceding control to federal overseers.
“We need a partnership, not a takeover,” Wu said. “The situation is at a breaking point when riders don’t know on any given day what might come up, how serious of a safety concern might emerge that day, how late they will be that day. It is time for sustained focus, investment and action to tackle what we’ve known for many, many years has been a building problem.”
An escalation in the Federal Transit Administration’s involvement at the MBTA looms as a possible outcome once the oversight office completes its ongoing safety management inspection, expected to wrap up this month.
Sen. Ed Markey, who joined Wu at a Monday event to highlight a new spending bill the U.S. Senate approved a day earlier, also called for the FTA and MBTA to craft a “very close working relationship.”
“For workers, for students, it’s got to get fixed, and we need the closest partnership with the FTA, which has identified the problems in eye-watering details, to work with the MBTA to get it fixed and get it fixed as quickly as possible,” he said.
Wu’s opposition to a “takeover” put her somewhat at odds with Transportation Committee Co-chair Rep. William Straus, who made clear that he wants federal regulators to place the region’s transit authority into “functionally the equivalent” of receivership.
Straus, who first floated the topic in an interview with Axios Boston last week, told the News Service on Monday he wants the FTA to go beyond ordering corrective action at the MBTA and remain “on top of the situation basically every day.”
He said he wants the federal agency to take the same action with the T that it did in 2015, when the FTA assumed temporary, direct safety oversight of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or WMATA. That expanded role continued for about three and a half years.
“If the T is about to be in some kind of transition, which I think it needs to be, in the meantime we need to have the extra oversight and implementation authority of the FTA,” Straus said. “I’m not calling for a permanent takeover, but what I’m saying is, as the T gets to where we all want it to be in terms of managing a transit system, the FTA is going to have to have more than just an investigatory and directive-issuing role, drawing on the precedent of what they did seven years ago in Washington, D.C.”
The FTA has already taken rare steps to prompt changes at the T. Its ongoing probe is only the second of its kind the agency has ever launched, and federal investigators already ordered a range of immediate actions before wrapping up their final report.
In June, the FTA outlined four corrective actions the MBTA had to address within, at most, 30 days. One order to rein in the number of hours dispatchers worked prompted the T to slash service on the Red, Blue and Orange Lines. Another order sought to prevent runaway trains, and the MBTA’s response proved so unsatisfactory that the FTA demanded a “safety standdown” in late July.
The federal scrutiny provided the “impetus” for the MBTA to shut down the entire Orange Line for 30 days of maintenance, T General Manager Steve Poftak said last week.
“We wouldn’t do this without the FTA’s permission,” Gov. Charlie Baker said Wednesday.
Straus said state lawmakers should not face blame for the state of the public transit system or the unprecedented steps now underway to address its problems because the Legislature “does not have a role, a responsibility, in day-to-day…
Read More: Boston Mayor Calls for Partnership Over Takeover – NBC Boston