A correction has been added to this story.
IN THE DEBATE over the future of the MBTA, very little attention has been paid to the relatively new board that oversees the transit authority.
The board began its work last fall and adopted a very different style from its predecessor, the Fiscal and Management Control Board.
The previous board was criticized by a safety panel it hired in 2019 for meeting too frequently and for too long and for taking up too much of the staff’s time, even though state law required the board to meet three times a month. When the new board was created, the law required the board to meet at least once a month and the panel on its own adopted a more hands-off approach, letting MBTA management set the agenda. (This paragraph was corrected to make clear that the number of meetings per month was set by state law.)
“That’s quite intentional,” chair Betsy Taylor told CommonWealth in December. “The secretary of transportation and the GM [of the MBTA] worked with the governor and the Legislature to create this new board. They wanted it to be more like the [Department of Transportation] board. They did not want it to be a control board.”
Yet with the MBTA facing a federal safety review and lawmakers on Beacon Hill asking whether the transit authority should be abolished and rolled into the Department of Transportation, some transportation advocates are beginning to question whether the new board is too passive.
“They are not probing or using as much of their oversight authority as they could,” said Brian Kane, executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board, which represents the municipalities in the transit authority’s service area.
Both the former control board and the new T board are made up almost entirely of appointees of Gov. Charlie Baker. That, too, was by design, to give the governor direct control of the MBTA.
The old board, particularly toward the end of its nearly six-year tenure, occasionally took different positions than the governor (backing a low-income fare, for example), but the new board, still getting its bearings, rarely goes off script.
That could change. In its recently approved budget plan, the Legislature inserted a provision expanding the size of the seven-person MBTA board by adding two new members, one appointed by the mayor of Boston and the other a municipal official in the MBTA service area appointed by the governor.
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Editor, CommonWealth
About Bruce Mohl
Bruce Mohl is the editor of CommonWealth magazine. Bruce came to CommonWealth from the Boston Globe, where he spent nearly 30 years in a wide variety of positions covering business and politics. He covered the Massachusetts State House and served as the Globe’s State House bureau chief in the late 1980s. He also reported for the Globe’s Spotlight Team, winning a Loeb award in 1992 for coverage of conflicts of interest in the state’s pension system. He served as the Globe’s political editor in 1994 and went on to cover consumer issues for the newspaper. At CommonWealth, Bruce helped launch the magazine’s website and has written about a wide range of issues with a special focus on politics, tax policy, energy, and gambling. Bruce is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He lives in Dorchester.
About Bruce Mohl
Bruce Mohl is the editor of CommonWealth magazine. Bruce came to CommonWealth from the Boston Globe, where he spent nearly 30 years in a wide variety of positions covering business and politics. He covered the Massachusetts State House and served as the Globe’s State House bureau chief in the late 1980s. He also reported for the Globe’s Spotlight Team, winning a Loeb award in 1992 for coverage of conflicts of interest in the state’s pension system. He served as the Globe’s political editor in 1994 and went on to cover consumer issues for the newspaper. At CommonWealth, Bruce helped launch the magazine’s website and has written about a wide range of issues with a special focus on politics, tax policy, energy, and gambling. Bruce is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He lives in Dorchester.
Those appointments could shake things up a bit, but change is also coming because a new governor will take over in January. When Baker leaves office,, the terms of four members of the current board — Transportation Secretary Jamey Tesler, Robert Butler, Mary Beth Mello, and Thomas (Scott) Darling – will also come to an end. If the new governor replaces all of them, a majority of the board members will be new on the job at a time when the T is grappling with pressing safety and budget challenges.
“What that means is we’re going to have another time of folks learning the ropes,” Kane said.
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