State lawmakers grilled state transportation leaders Tuesday over alleged conflicts of interest in a failed 2025 attempt to award a $1 billion contract to redevelop highway rest stops across the state.
Massachusetts Inspector General Joshua Shapiro, interim Transportation Secretary Phil Eng and Undersecretary of Transportation Johnathan Gulliver testified for hours before the State Senate’s Oversight Committee, answering questions about what went wrong during last year’s contract procurement process, which resulted in a messy, months-long public fight between rival bidders.
Committee members hounded Eng and Gulliver over perceived ethics violations among officials at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), and pressed Shapiro on what steps need to be taken to make sure a newly revamped effort to upgrade rest stops goes smoothly.
Last June, MassDOT picked Irish retailer Applegreen to revamp the state’s 18 highway service plazas and operate them for 35 years. But Waltham-based Global Partners, a losing bidder for the contract, waged a vicious PR campaign against Applegreen and MassDOT, alleging unethical behavior and improper communication between the company and representatives of MassDOT. Global ultimately sued MassDOT, and Applegreen pulled out of the deal in September.
A month later, Monica Tibbits-Nutt, who at the time was Massachusetts’ transportation secretary and CEO of MassDOT, announced her resignation to “return to private industry.” Gov. Maura Healey — who said her resignation was “absolutely not” related to the service plaza procurement — appointed Eng as her temporary replacement.
The controversy prompted an investigation by the state Inspector General’s office, which determined that there were a series of flaws in MassDOT’s service plaza procurement process, including perceived conflicts of interest and violations of government rules.
During his testimony on Tuesday, Shapiro reiterated the findings of that investigation and the contents of a February letter he sent to Eng.
Shapiro highlighted a series of texts between MassDOT’s Scott Bosworth — who was serving as the agency’s Chief Strategic Officer at the time of the procurement — and representatives from Applegreen and Suffolk Construction, Applegreen’s construction contractor for the project.
In the exchanges, Bosworth appeared friendly with employees of both companies, even arranging lunch dates at Back Bay restaurants.
Shapiro did not go so far as to say Bosworth violated state ethics laws, but said his texts “created the appearance of a conflict of interest that diminished the integrity of the process.”
Lawmakers latched onto those texts as evidence of potential ethics violations.
“This was like a love-fest,” said State Sen. Mark Montigny, chair of the oversight committee. “It was like wet kisses and heart emojis.”
State Sen. Ryan Fattman suggested that while “maybe nothing criminal happened,” the contact with Applegreen and Suffolk may constitute “civil violations of the law.”
Fattman pressed Eng and Gulliver on whether Bosworth — who is still employed by MassDOT, but no longer serves as chief strategic officer — will take part in the state’s new search for bidders to revamp service plazas, which was announced earlier this month. The two reassured lawmakers that nobody involved in the failed procurement will take part in the relaunched selection process.
Both Eng and Gulliver testified that they believe there are significant lessons to be learned from last year’s controversy. MassDOT’s new procurement, they said, will include more oversight from a public-private partnership commission. It will also split the state’s 18 service plazas into three groups, allowing bidders to submit proposals for one, two or all three groups.
“What we are advancing now is not a continuation of the prior effort,” Gulliver said. “It is a complete reset.”
Lawmakers and Shapiro expressed measured optimism that the relaunched process will be an improvement from last year’s failed procurement.
“I do think they realized that they were running this operation with the wrong people and in the wrong part of the organization,” he said. “That self-reflection is important.”
