A state legislative committee plans to carry a listening to in October to find out the viability of the Department of Public Utilities’ continued security oversight of the MBTA, given the troubling findings of an intensive federal report launched final week.
“We’ve been disturbed and disappointed to read the contents of the safety management inspection of the Federal Transit Administration, dated Aug. 31,” state Sen. Michael J. Barrett and Rep. Jeffrey N. Roy, co-chairs of the Joint Legislative Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy, wrote in a letter to DPU Chair Matthew Nelson.
“The document has much to say about the MBTA, but it also has much to say about your agency,” the letter mentioned. “The report notes that the DPU ‘does not use its available resources as effectively as it could,’ ‘has not demonstrated an ability to address safety issues,’ and has not ‘validated’ the T’s management of fatigue among employees.”
In the letter, Barrett and Roy invited Nelson to testify on the listening to, which the committee will conduct to “inquire into the Department of Public Utilities’ discharge of its responsibility to monitor the safety of MBTA operations.”
Questions raised on the listening to will focus on whether or not the DPU has sufficient motivation, capability, focus and experience to hold out its state oversight position of the MBTA, which continues to undergo from a startling variety of security incidents.
Plans for a legislative probe into the DPU comes on the heels of a searing FTA report that discovered, amongst different issues, that the MBTA’s deal with capital initiatives has come on the expense of day-to-day operations.
This, in flip, has resulted in staffing deficiencies and overworked workers, ineffective communication, and lax security procedures and insurance policies, the report mentioned.
While a lot of the report targeted on deficiencies on the MBTA, the feds additionally issued a directive to the DPU, requiring it to enhance its capability to supply efficient security oversight of the T.
As the state security oversight company chosen by the governor, the DPU is accountable for overseeing the security of the MBTA system and guaranteeing it complies with federal security necessities and finest practices, the FTA mentioned.
However, Barrett and Roy questioned whether or not the DPU may adequately perform these tasks, given its lack of independence from the MBTA, attributable to their shared reporting tasks to the governor.
They additionally identified the DPU’s comparatively small measurement, when in comparison with its abundance of tasks past oversight of the T, and its perceived lack of awareness, when contemplating the abundance of security issues on the MBTA which have seemingly fallen beneath its radar.
“The federal study identifies deficiencies at the T so serious, and apparently so long-standing, that they should have been evident to any experienced observer,” Barrett and Roy wrote.
If the DPU has the flexibility to identify issues and monitor security circumstances on the T, why hasn’t it occurred?, they contemplated, “and why hasn’t their oversight made things better?”
Source: www.bostonherald.com”