AT THE MBTA board of directors meeting on Thursday, General Manager Phillip Eng followed what has become a familiar script, focusing on the process of getting the T where he wants it to be rather than addressing head-on the setbacks afflicting the transit authority, which seem to be occurring on almost a weekly basis.

The latest controversy centers on the emergence of 3 mile-per-hour slow zones on roughly a mile of the Green Line extension to Somerville and Medford. Slow zones are typically put in place when a defect in the tracks dictates a reduction in speed for safety reasons. As first reported by the Boston Globe, the slow zones are popping up on the relatively new Green Line extension, so they don’t fit the narrative Eng has used to date of blaming slow zones on years of disinvestment.

In his remarks to the board on Thursday, Eng focused on his revamped management team, letting many of them introduce themselves to board members. He didn’t mention the Green Line extension slow zones at all except to say he rides that section of the transit system on a daily basis and that “these types of occurrences are unacceptable.”

Only when MBTA board chair Thomas Glynn asked about the Green Line extension slow zones did Eng reveal that he is pretty much in the dark about what caused them. Eng said the Green Line tracks met specifications when the extension opened in two phases in March 2022 and December 2022 and during some follow-up inspections. The most recent inspections that took place on September 13 and 14 indicated the distance between the rails on the tracks had narrowed very slightly.  In most cases, he said, track width widens with usage and doesn’t shrink.

“It is not typical, but I wouldn’t say it’s impossible,” he said of the narrowing of the tracks. “I need to find out more about how this came about.”

Eng’s approach to the Green Line extension slow zones is similar to how he has handled other issues, including slow zones in general and the T’s problematic dealings with its Chinese subway car manufacturer. He focuses on the process of improvement rather dealing with the specific issue at hand.

One member of his revamped management team, Douglas Connett, the T’s new chief of infrastructure, delivered a stream-of-consciousness report on what he has seen at the T during his first month on the job. At one point, he said flatly that the original work on the Green Line extension tracks didn’t meet construction standards, meaning the track was probably laid down incorrectly.

Connett said the silver lining with the recent emergence of the slow zones on the Green Line extension was that it shows employees are taking track testing seriously. He noted prior to the most recent tests no slow zones had been ordered, and now they have been.

“That’s a turn,” he said.

He also said the maintenance of way division, which failed to address past rail defects, is making some progress but has a long way to go. He said the division is budgeted for 372 employees but currently has 294, on a level where it was between 2018 and 2020.

Connett said the division needs more equipment (“There’s a lot of stuff we don’t have”), needs to do a better job of making repairs in harder-to-reach areas (“We didn’t do that well over the years”), and often hasn’t followed the advice of consultants it has hired (“A lot of things people we had hired to tell us what to do and maybe we didn’t do it”).

Tim Lezniak, the chief safety officer at the T and another new member of Eng’s revamped management team, told the board that there had been six near-miss incidents between vehicles and repair staff on the transit system over the last two months. Glynn asked if six represented a spike in incidents, and Lezniak said he thought it was a spike in reported incidents.  Lezniak said he thinks employees are reporting more nearmiss incidents now, whereas previously they would have kept quiet about them.

Jarred Johnson, the executive director of the advocacy group TransitMatters, told the board members during the public comment period that its customers are tired of the constant setbacks, the poor service, and the lack of transparency about problems on the transit system and the timetable for addressing them.

“The confidence in this agency is at an all-time low,” he said, saying the agency is on the verge of a “death spiral.”

He called for “radical transparency,” saying the public cannot learn about problems at the T from reports in the Boston Globe.

He also said state transportation officials need to come up with a plan for repairing the T and go to Beacon Hill to seek the money needed to carry that plan out. “We cannot keep trying to do more with less,” he said.