Almost as soon as Keolis, the French company that operates the MBTA’s Commuter Rail system, pledged in front of state legislators that it would improve it’s questionable on-time performance, the state’s top transportation official suggested that Massachusetts will look elsewhere to replace the rail company after their current contract expires.
Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack hopes the MBTA will go back out to bid for a new vendor contract before June 2022, when Keolis’ time running the commuter Rail is up, she told the State House News Service Thursday.
“Our intention would be to begin a re-procurement process so that it could be completed and a transition - if one were going to even take place - would happen at the end of the current eight-year contract,” Pollack said, according to the News Service.
Re-bidding the contract would allow any rail company, including Keolis, to competitively compete to take over operation of commuter service. The next Commuter Rail contract negotiations could be overseen by Gov. Charlie Baker should he win reelection, or his successor near the beginning of their term. Some of Baker’s top political consultants also do work for Keolis, which could put the performance-conscience administration in a tight spot coming into the 2018 election cycle, where Democrats are seeking any vulnerability in the popular governor’s regime.
“The current commuter rail contract with Keolis Commuter Services runs through June 30, 2022 and MassDOT will continue working closely with Keolis to provide excellent service to our customers for the duration of the contract. In keeping with good business practices, the MBTA is committed to evaluate the contract structure and initiate a re-procurement before the current contract expires. The decision not to extend the current 8 year contract is not a reflection of Keolis’ performance; indeed, I fully expect that Keolis would compete as part of the re-procurement,” Pollack wrote in a statement after her remarks about Keolis were reported.
In a letter obtained by the News Service, Pollack wrote to House transportation chairman William Straus in November, 2016 that “it is appropriate to begin thinking about possible alternative contracting structures and strategies for its commuter rail service in the future.”
“As we discussed, the MBTA does not intend for its current commuter rail contract to extend beyond its remaining term, whether the next contract is with Keolis or a different provider...” Pollack wrote to Straus.
Before Pollack laid out the state’ plans for the rail company, Keolis executives promised that 2017 won’t see repeats of the on-time performance woes that plagued the system throughout the latter part of last year.
Keolis general manager David Scorey told a legislative committee that a major schedule change and a maintenance backlog caused trains to show up on time only 84 percent of the time in November.
“Now, that sort of thing happening on a major schedule charge. I have a lot of experience on schedule changes elsewhere in the world. It can happen. It can happen and it happened here,” Scorey told the Joint Transportation Committee.
Scorey said they’ve worked through the schedule issues and have seen a notable uptick in performance. Scorey said 2017, as we enter the winter season, will be better for riders.
While hearing testimony from the T’s Fiscal and Management Control Board, both House and Senate chairmen criticized the MBTA’s management for withholding reports on cash collection and cleaning contracts from lawmakers while taking credit for making the T more transparent.
Sen. Thomas McGee said that it’s “important for the public to understand what all that dynamic was,” that led to the MBTA’s decision last year to privatize it’s cash counting operation and to cut spending on janitors. “What the costs were, what the employees were making, what the decisions were made and what those ramifications were,” are important, McGee said.
An MBTA spokesman said the documents contain sensitive security information and will revisit the issue when a private collection company takes over the operation.
The MBTA reached a contract extension agreement with its biggest labor group, Carmen’s Union, Local 589, last month that saw the T’s vehicle operators give up expected raises in exchange for guarantees that their jobs won’t be outsourced to private companies. The three-year contract also lays out how the T will streamline its route scheduling system and give bus and subway operators more flexibility over when they work, including allowing for four-day work weeks.
Dealings with the Carmen had become a political flashpoint in Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration’s ongoing efforts to fix the poorly managed MBTA. When they authorized Baker’s plan to set up a new dedicated Fiscal and Management Control Board to oversee the agency in 2015, Democrats in the Legislature also gave Baker the power to privative T services and functions without needing approval from the state auditor. Outsourcing could have spelled the end for many union jobs and over the course of the negotiations, many Democratic lawmakers, who count Labor as a key ally, distanced themselves from the privatization vote.
Both McGee and Straus took issue with the MBTA managers’' repeated use of the term “structural deficit” to describe the condition of the T’s operating budget. The Legislature traditionally pays the T an annual $187 million to fill the gap between what the agency makes off it’s own revenues and what it pays to keep the system running. Lawmakers praised MBTA managers’ success in lowering expenses enough that some of that $187 million could be shifted from operations to long-term projects, but criticized them for characterizing the situation as a “deficit” since the state already fills that hole. The public, the chairmen implied, get the idea that the T is consistently operating in the red, when in fact the state has successfully floated its books for year.
