Mass. Senate Passes MBTA 'Bailout' Bill

June 20, 2012
 
STATE HOUSE, BOSTON — If your sports team is losing, you fire the coach. That’s what Sen. Gale Candaras (D-Wilbraham) proposed doing with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority during a June 20 fight over a proposed $51 million bailout of the struggling agency.

“In corporate America every single day, on professional sports teams every single day, if the team you have isn’t getting you where you need to go you need to find a different way of doing it," she said. "You need people with different voices, fresh talent, different perspectives.”
 
Candaras and four other senators wrote an amendment to the bailout bill that would suspend the MBTA’s board of directors and replace it with a new governing board.
 
They argued that this is the third time the state has been asked to bail out the MBTA. And that the agency gets more public subsidies than other major transit system in the nation. And that it already receives 60 percent of its funding from general state revenues.
 
Senate leadership and other lawmakers agreed the bailout bill would only provide a one-year fix for the T's financial woes, and that long-term solutions are needed. But they said that replacing the managers of the MBTA wouldn’t cure the T’s unsustainable structural deficit, aging infrastructure and large Big Dig debt load.
 
The House passed its bailout bill on June 13.