General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

http://www.metro.us/news/local-news/boston/mbta-parking-vendor-skimmed-millions-ag-healey

LAZ won a five-year, $39 million contract with the MBTA in late 2012, according to court documents, and the payments announced Monday amount to about 14 percent of the total contract price.

"After review by third party auditors, and on mutual agreement with the MBTA, LAZ acknowledges the alleged theft by three dishonest employees at a limited number of these parking lots. Once the loss was discovered, we acted swiftly to identify and immediately terminate those allegedly responsible," LAZ President Jeffrey Karp said in a statement. "Throughout this process we have been diligent, fully engaged and cooperative with the authorities involved to identify the nature and extent of the financial loss to the MBTA."
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The math doesn't add up on this. Three employees at a limited number of lots stole 14% of the parking revenue from the whole system? That's got to be a much larger percent of the cash portion of the revenue too.

If this was 10s of thousands of dollars, I'd believe we were talking about sticky fingers. Something in this scale has to be systematic. I want to be clear that I have no evidence beyond what I read in the paper - but this smells reallllly bad...
 
CSTH said:
Three employees at a limited number of lots stole 14% of the parking revenue from the whole system?
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It doesn't say that at all??? It says they settled for 14% of the contract. The contract presumably is less than parking revenue, otherwise MBTA would not be making any money on their parking lots. And the settlement may be for more than what was stolen. Often, the contract will stipulate an interest rate if breached.
 
dwash59 said:
It doesn't say that at all??? It says they settled for 14% of the contract. The contract presumably is less than parking revenue, otherwise MBTA would not be making any money on their parking lots. And the settlement may be for more than what was stolen. Often, the contract will stipulate an interest rate if breached.
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Ok, you're right, should have been more careful.

This article says T parking revenue in 2016 was $21M, and that revenue increased by about $2M annualized after the theft was discovered (though it acknowledges that its hard to distinguish between organic growth and increases from stopping the theft.)

https://commonwealthmagazine.org/transportation/t-parking-revenue-up-22/

And in the Metro article from above, the AG is quoted referring to 'millions' in stolen revenue, presumably over a period of several years.

So I think my points / questions / concerns still stand...hard to imagine this is just the result of opportunistic, entrepreneurial initiative on the part of some cashiers....
 
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The FMCB approved two one-year pilot programs yesterday:

-One will provide early service (as early as 4 am) on 10 designated bus routes.

-The other will provide regular Commuter Rail service to Foxborough, partially subsidized by Kraft.

[Globe: MBTA boosts early-morning buses, adds Foxborough commuter rail service]

Also, the T is set to announce their new pick for GM today at 11. This person, reportedly, "is not from the Greater Boston area and is also not from the public transit industry" and "whose corporate resume includes a long stint at General Electric Co".

[Globe: MBTA to name new general manager]

UPDATE: It's Luis Ramirez:

Boston Globe said:
Ramirez is currently a consultant specializing in business turnarounds, and was previously chief executive of Global Power Equipment Group, an industrial concern in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, according to his profile posted on LinkedIn. Before that he worked in various GE energy divisions for 12 years.
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[Luis Ramirez Linkedin]
 
ELECTIONS. HAVE. CONSEQUENCES.

HOLD YOUR CANDIDATES ACCOUNTABLE.
 
Balerion said:
https://twitter.com/adamtvaccaro/status/897475064152690688



Seems promising!
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What could possibily go wrong?

Oh wait.. someone who isn't a Boston native and no transit experience. Sounds to me like the state wants a puppet to control. No transit experience means they won't know what is right from wrong.. so anything that FCMB says will go.

Say what you want about Bev Scott, at least she had experience, which is why she up and left. She knew she was going to be squeezed out for someone who was a yes man for the FCMB and Baker. Smart Lady.
 
datadyne007 said:
ELECTIONS. HAVE. CONSEQUENCES.

HOLD YOUR CANDIDATES ACCOUNTABLE.
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Absolutely. This was Baker's guy. The MBA/"turn around specialist"/management consultant -type.

Data is spot on. However this guy turns out needs to be tied back to the elected officials' mentalities that resulted in his being selected.
 
bigpicture7 said:
Absolutely. This was Baker's guy. The MBA/"turn around specialist"/management consultant -type.

Data is spot on. However this guy turns out needs to be tied back to the elected officials' mentalities that resulted in his being selected.
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This isn't going to end well. I guarantee it.

He will be as useful as a ice maker in the arctic....
 
If Pollack is OK with him and he is open to bringing in best practices from other systems, I don't see how we can be saying he is pre-judged a failure.
 
Arlington said:
If Pollack is OK with him and he is open to bringing in best practices from other systems, I don't see how we can be saying he is pre-judged a failure.
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How does he possibly know enough about transit systems to recognize a best practice if it hit him in the face? Total farce in my opinion.
 
JeffDowntown said:
How does he possibly know enough about transit systems to recognize a best practice if it hit him in the face? Total farce in my opinion.
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"Expertise is irrelevant, only ideology matters" is becoming the mantra of a certain political movement...

If we're not careful, we'll end up a society where no one is inspired to become an expert in anything anymore.
 
Let's give he guy a chance. Expert managers are experts at managing complex organizations. Not all great managers came from the same industry. Let's judge in actual success or failure.
 
Nope. Nothing wrong with nurturing a leadership pipeline to acclimate talented high-potential leaders from other areas to a new field/discipline. But that's not what they did. They appointed him as GM. Not as Deputy GM...not as Director of ____...not as Operating Officer...they appointed him to the top spot. And that is a supreme insult.

This guy is a slasher/outsourcer/turn-around artist. That is why he was appointed. The move is associated with a specific leadership ideology that believes that efficiencies can only be achieved through discipline-agnostic cost control and business process management...that ideology does not embrace the view that you can achieve better efficiencies through better design of a better transit system .

"If you know how to design a great motorcycle engine, I can teach you all you need to know about business strategy in a few days.

If you have a PhD in business strategy, years of labor are unlikely to give you the ability to design a great motorcyle engine"

- Prof. Richard Rumelt
Anderson School of Management, UCLA
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TallIsGood said:
Let's give he guy a chance.
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Sure, we have no choice.
Unlike some, I won't let my beliefs prompt me to desire failure of others. I want the MBTA to thrive during his tenure.
Plus, I believe in the possibility of statistical flukes.
 
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Alan Mulally was a Boeing exec who inoculated Ford against the Great Recession, and then turned it around. It did not take automaking domain expertise, it took stuff like finance, supply chain, labor relations, R&D, and marketing. Industrial company stuff, nothing about up through the ranks in one town, one industry, or one organization.
 
Arlington said:
Alan Mulally was a Boeing exec who inoculated Ford against the Great Recession, and then turned it around. It did not take automaking domain expertise, it took stuff like finance, supply chain, labor relations, R&D, and marketing. Industrial company stuff, nothing about up through the ranks in one town, one industry, or one organization.
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Sorry, but this example is exactly wrong. Mulally was the consummate engineering manager, and was hired specifically for his expertise managing hugely complex engineering design, development, and manufacturing programs.

The ideology that led to Mulally's hiring is 180-degrees from Baker's idea of how to run the T.

"An automobile has about 10,000 parts, right? An airplane has two million. And it has to stay up in the air."
- Alan Mulally
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And yes I trust Pollack. 7-day Student & Youth passes overhauled nicely (also for summer months) but below the radar here. 4am service start. GLX-reboot. Barrier-free fare collection on GL. These are great, progressive achievements aimed at the core. And I'd notch both Krafts (Foxboro) and Union Square (U2-paid) as a healthy trend of tapping landowners for more help in service expansion.

And also we know that The Ride is waaay too expensive and it is good that they're looking at a cheaper Uber/Lyft model.
 
bigpicture7 said:
Sorry, but this example is exactly wrong. Mulally was the consummate engineering manager, and was hired specifically for his expertise managing hugely complex engineering design, development, and manufacturing programs.

The ideology that led to Mulally's hiring is 180-degrees from Baker's idea of how to run the T.
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Cherry-picked view that does Mulally a disservice. Mulally also borrowed $23b in good times, mortgaging the company. It was dollars, not engineering, that kept Ford from bankruptcy. He also brought back the Taurus brand, ditching the OCD rule that all Fords begin with F (Freestyle, Fusion, ...).

Being CEO is a domain expertise unto itself. The T should have bus and rail managers who've got the domain expertise. It's the CEO's job to balance and enable them.
 
Arlington said:
Cherry-picked view that does Mulally a disservice. Mulally also borrowed $23b in good times, mortgaging the company. It was dollars, not engineering, that kept Ford from bankruptcy. He also brought back the Taurus brand, ditching the OCD rule that all Fords begin with F (Freestyle, Fusion, ...).

Being CEO is a domain expertise unto itself. The T should have bus and rail managers who've got the domain expertise. It's the CEO's job to balance and enable them.
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Doing Mulally a disservice is the last of my intentions, given that he's one of my heros.

Mulally is a technical expert who truly GETS finance.

The bar for the MBTA GM position should have been set at: transit expert who truly GETS finance.

We're selling ourselves short of we don't demand both. Sure, the CEO can delegate that stuff - but again, why not have someone who speaks both languages?

Glad to respectfully appreciate our differences of opinions, but this is the statement I philosophically oppose:
Being CEO is a domain expertise unto itself.
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It's not that being a CEO isn't hard
It's not that all technical experts sufficiently get finance.

It's that the endeavors we pursue are complex enough - and there are enough possible candidates who can be developed in to strategic and financial leaders - to demand both.
 
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