Michelle Wu: Municipalities need a voice on T board
"We need communities and stakeholders who are directly impacted by the T to have a direct voice in the agency’s governance."
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Michelle Wu wants change for the MBTA.
Following two derailments on the T earlier this month and ahead of planned fare hikes in July, the Boston city councilor at-large says it’s time to let municipalities have a seat at the table to look over the public transit system.
“We need communities and stakeholders who are directly impacted by the T to have a direct voice in the agency’s governance and push for the scale and pace of change our region deserves,” Wu penned in a Boston Globe Op-Ed published Wednesday.
Opening the doors for cities and towns in the MBTA’s service region should take the form of a new oversight board, as the agency’s current Fiscal and Management Control Board — a temporary group born out of 2015’s winter service troubles — dissolves next year, Wu says.
We’re running out of time to fix the T & won’t get there without riders & city leaders at the table.
If we want urgent & extensive action to end transportation disparities across the city & region, we need to change @MBTA governance: https://t.co/QnBS3lbkeD #bospoli #mapoli
— Michelle Wu 吳弭 (@wutrain) June 20, 2019
While Wu has pushed for new ways to make the MBTA more equitable, this idea, however, would be a restoration of a needed partnership, she wrote.
Municipalities that sit within the T’s service area once had a voice in the T’s budget process through the MBTA Advisory Board, but that ended under the restructuring that transferred oversight of the MBTA from the state’s Department of Transportation to the FMCB, Wu wrote.
Meanwhile, as Boston officials work to bring in new transit features to ease congestion such as designated bus lanes, collaboration between the city and the MBTA is crucial, according to Wu.
She noted cities like New York and Chicago have a place on their state’s transit boards. Worcester also has municipal representatives that serve on a Regional Transit Authority advisory board.
“We need a T governance structure capable of responding to the depth of our regional transportation crisis while tearing down silos that keep municipal leaders and state officials from working together with urgency on shared goals,” Wu wrote. “Along with MassDOT board members, the new oversight board should include a rider representative, a permanent seat for the City of Boston, a rotating seat for municipalities in the T’s inner core service area, and a rotating seat to represent communities served by commuter rail.”
Wu’s piece comes days after Boston Mayor Marty Walsh also called for municipalities to be reinstated on an oversight board. He told reporters Tuesday, “There’s absolutely no checks and balances right now.”
In recent months, Wu has been a leading voice against the MBTA’s imminent nearly 6 percent fare hike, pushing instead to eliminate T fares.
On Thursday, she announced plans to mobilize volunteers on the morning of July 1 — the day the increase is slated to take effect — across the MBTA system “to help engage riders and spark a conversation … about what we could do NOW if we marshal the political will to act with urgency,” according to a sign-up form.
In a series of tweets, Wu wrote that the “MBTA is failing Greater Boston.”
“We need to rally our ridership and empower every commuter to push for solutions to fix the T,” she said.
https://twitter.com/wutrain/status/1141763204227448832
