F-Line to Dudley
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You always hear the chatter about how the state should just hire engineers/construction workers and keep them on full-time in order to save some money on subcontractors. Problem is, we're a small state, and don't have enough projects (well, the budget for enough projects) to keep a full-time staff of construction people (engineers and workers) employed indefinitely.
So, what if instead of being directly state employees, thry were the employees of a technically private engineering firm 100% owned by the state? That way, when they weren't working in MA, they could be hired out by other states (with projects in MA taking priority, of course). If managed well, the firm might even make money. There would have to be strict regulations in place preventing this new firm, "Massachusetts Engineering and Construction, Limited" or something, from using state subsidies to artificially underbid other engineering firms, just to keep the playing field level.
Come to think of it, this would ideally work best as a federal concern, or at least the engineering part of it would (federally operated construction workers could work, but the potential for graft just seems too high to be practical at this current time).
MTA Construction's incredible unstoppable cost bloat is the cautionary tale to be careful what you wish for bureaucratically. See also: Port Authority NYNJ. While we absolutely need to fill our anemic internal project management ranks so somebody's watching the contractors much more diligently (the big lesson from the GLX quasi-reboot after all the contractor graft was exposed), we absolutely don't want to mime to New York where centralized construction primarily serves to keep politically influential sandhogs extremely well-compensated on the public's backs. The gravitational pull from corrupt NYC transpo construction calls is huge enough to distort costs nationwide, and no way in hell do we want to encourage any more of that insanity.
MassDOT can take a necessarily much bigger role in oversight and best-practices policing without going cosmically off the deep end like New York. There's a proper balance out there to be had, but "MassDOT Engineering & Construction, Ltd." probably isn't it.
But more practically: what specific construction tasks are so everlasting that they can be entirely internalized? If you look at a cross-section of T projects, for instance, it's not obvious at all where there are internal fits for all that much additional labor scale. Now, you've got the in-house track gangs on rapid transit working on shifts all 24 hours 6 days a week plus their Keolis equivalents on commuter rail because basic maint tasks are everlasting enough to fill those shifts. And we do need way more of that trained labor because employee attrition and hiring freezes have left the ranks too threadbare for too long. However, when it's specific surges like the spate of "[G/R/O/B]LT" track work blitzes even the in-house guys need external augmentation from contractors to help scale-up for the more "shock-and-awe"-scope projects. They can't expect to staff in-house for something that big when it's a one-shot deal that's not going to be repeated year-round.
At least with Commuter Rail they draw some efficiencies with Keolis being able to import out-of-state workers as surge labor for track and signal projects, as they're doing right now with the Franklin Line double-tracking project and final sprint to the PTC installation deadline. But while the elasticity of Keolis' ops contract affords some labor efficiences that way, it is still a de facto outside contracting job for Corporate Keolis to have to muscle in the non-Boston labor for those special projects. If commuter rail were run entirely in-house you'd still be seeing those surge jobs advertised to conentional contractors all the same, because it's an above-and-beyond surge past the everday/everlasting tasks the in-house employees are hired for.
It gets even tougher when the jobs require more intensive specialized expertise. Station construction/upgrade projects are particularly hard to homogenize here. The ancient subway stations are almost always high-difficulty enough from their individual quirks to require very involved design-build process for ADA'ings and thorough renovations, as are a lot of the backlog of commuter rail accessibility projects where the configuration trends much more to specialized than cookie-cutter. Examples of those would include platforms that have to be raised while retrofitted around a historic depot building that's the centerpiece of the station, or when you have viaducted (e.g. Winchester Center) or deep-pit (e.g. Natick) stations with infrastructure stacking a little more complex than average. But even the cookie-cutter ones are arguably not numerous enough to be able to full-time in-house.
If they want to make up some ground on station renos, it still is way simpler for them to bulk-contract out, say, the 6 low-platformed Reading Line stops...excluding Reading-proper with its very tricky depot building. Wyoming Hill, Cedar Park, Melrose Highlands, Greenwood, Wakefield, and North Wilmington are all prefab-as-can-be jobs abutting grade crossings where the only difficulty is gaining community input rubber-stamp for swapping Wakefield onto the south side of the Albion St. grade crossing so it can be a full 800-footer. So there's a case where a 6-in-1 bulk contract with one prefab design and a common set of construction staging per station can gain some efficiencies. But I'm not sure there's too many other jobs you could roll up in a wad like that. Reading Line is simply a lucky coincidence where literally all the station work line-wide (excluding Reading Depot) happens to fit exactly-alike surroundings. You'd be hard-pressed to find roll-up opportunities that large with the heterogeneous nature of all other systemwide tasks requiring design-build.