Governor Baker, despite his professional experience and his (self-proclaimed) expertise as a problem solver and manager, has left a legacy of serious dysfunction at multiple state agencies. This legacy will haunt Massachusetts for years to come as subsequent Governors work to fix problems he ignored or exacerbated in his eight years as Governor.
Baker’s most high-profile failure is almost certainly at the MBTA. It, and the public that relies on it, will suffer for years to come from service reductions, slow train speeds because of rail and maintenance problems, deteriorated infrastructure that causes frequent service interruptions and delays, and the failure to get new subway cars delivered on schedule. The Baker administration’s lack of transparency about all of this is legendary and exacerbated the misery for MBTA users. See more detail below.
Chelsea Soldiers’ Home: The serious and deadly problems at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home weren’t enough to get Governor Baker to pay attention to serious problems at the Chelsea Soldiers’ Home. The Baker administration knew about squalid conditions at the Chelsea Soldiers’ Home and about the incompetence of the superintendent there but for at least six months did nothing about them. Way back in June 2020, Senators Warren and Markey called for an independent investigation into the Covid outbreak at the Home, but the Baker administration never completed one.
Department of Developmental Services: In 2014, Massachusetts passed the Real Lives law that directed the Department of Developmental Services (DDS) to make self-directed service planning available to adults with disabilities. Self-directed plans offer choice, flexibility, and self-determination to adults with disabilities and their families. Baker’s DDS dragged its feet for eight years before even proposing regulations late in 2022 for the implementation of the Real Lives law. The regulations that were finally proposed were described as not appearing to “properly implement or interpret the law.” The result is that the Massachusetts service system for adults with disabilities is in disarray and thousands of individuals are without services.
Department of Public Utilities: Baker’s Department of Public Utilities (DPU) was extremely slow in processing cities’ and towns’ proposals to create or update community choice electric power aggregation programs, under which they could purchase cheaper and cleaner electricity for their residents and local businesses. Over 30 municipalities waited two years or longer for approval of their proposals.
The DPU, whose three Commissioners are appointed by the Governor, is also supposed to oversee safety at the MBTA. When the Federal Transit Administration stepped in to review the MBTA after a number of safety issues including a death, its report stated that the DPU wasn’t providing appropriate oversight and, furthermore, didn’t have the expertise to do so.
Department of Corrections: In December 2022, the Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC) agreed to a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in which it promised to make major changes in its treatment of prisoners with mental health issues. Two years earlier, the DOJ had issued a scathing report finding that DOC violated the constitutional rights of prisoners by failing to provide mental health services and subjecting them to conditions and circumstances where they harmed themselves, including committing suicide. DOC had placed prisoners under prolonged mental health watches, which were akin to solitary confinement, and, nonetheless, failed to adequately keep watch over them. The agreement with the DOJ requires DOC to report regularly on prisoners on mental health watch, to create a new, intensive stabilization unit run by a contracted health care provider within 18 months, and to implement all elements of the agreement within three years.
In 2018, Massachusetts passed legislation establishing medical parole for DOC prisoners. However, the Baker administration and DOC have repeatedly implemented the law too narrowly, making very few prisoners eligible. In 2020 and 2021, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC), in two separate cases, voided DOC regulations as too restrictive. Two more cases were brought to the SJC in the fall of 2022.
In December 2022, the Legislature held a hearing on DOC’s treatment of prisoners and other criminal justice issues related to the implementation of the reform law passed in 2018. It included the lack of use of medical parole, the continuing excessive use of solitary confinement, and the lack of educational programming for prisoners. It was noted that DOC has a waiting list of 3,170 prisoners who want educational programs, while only 843 are enrolled in such programs. Testimony also indicated that DOC has failed to comply with the 2018 law’s requirements for reform of solitary confinement and that more than half of the youth in the juvenile justice system have special education plans that DOC has routinely failed to implement. Legislators had requested detailed information and testimony from Baker administration officials, but they refused to attend the hearing and submitted a written response that ignored some of the questions asked.
Department of Children and Families: Tragedies at the Department of Children and Families (DCF), which serves children who have experienced abuse or neglect, continued to the last days of the Baker administration. Governor Baker promised on multiple occasions to fix problems at DCF. The litany of tragedies, reports on DCF’s failures, and recommendations for change at DCF goes back to the initial days of the Baker administration. The most recent fatal tragedy was in September 2022 when a 12-year-old girl in DCF custody died. Not quite as tragic, but a travesty nonetheless, in the fall of 2022 a 15-year-old boy in DCF custody spent 40 days in a hospital emergency room. He had gone there for a psychiatric evaluation because of behavior issues and for 40 days he wore paper hospital scrubs and didn’t leave a tiny windowless emergency room except to go down the hall to use the bathroom or shower.
In addition, on average, more than two dozen children in DCF custody have been in inpatient beds in hospitals, ready to be discharged, except that DCF had no other place to house them. Children have also been spending nights in DCF offices (which are not equipped for overnight stays) and have been shuttled on a day-by-day basis among emergency, short-term placements. To subject already traumatized children to these kinds of inappropriate and sometimes chaotic and re-traumatizing experiences is horrifying.
MBTA: The litany of problems at the MBTA are truly mind boggling. Governor Baker promised during the first months of his administration – after the cessation of MBTA service during and after a major 2015 snowstorm – to fix the problems at the MBTA. A snapshot of how bad things had gotten under Governor Baker came in August 2022 when the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) reported on its investigation of the MBTA (which was triggered by a series of serious safety problems including a death). The FTA identified 545 action items. As-of late February 2023, 36% of them had been completed but some of them won’t be done until 2025, underscoring the depth of deterioration at the MBTA during Governor Baker’s eight years.
Here are a few, recent low lights of Baker’s legacy at the MBTA:
- Extensive speed restrictions are in place on the MBTA due to track problems, missing safety records, and maintenance issues, requiring trains in some places to slow to 3 miles per hour. (The standard is 40 mph.) At one point, the maximum speed on the whole system was temporarily reduced to 25 miles per hour when it was discovered that the MBTA could not produce documentation verifying what sections of track were in good working order. As-of March 24, 2023, 27% of subway tracks have speed restrictions.
- Reductions of over 20% in the number of trains run per day on the Blue, Orange, and Red Lines were ordered by the FTA in June 2022 because of a shortage of dispatchers in the control center – a serious safety issue. There were 15 dispatchers at the time although the budget called for 18. As-of February 2023, it has been identified that the minimum staffing level should be 24 and the goal is to have 32 dispatchers.
- To address the backlog of infrastructure problems, which grew under Governor Baker, the MBTA scheduled nine shutdowns of 2 – 9 days on various lines in March 2023. Six are all day shutdowns and three are evening only shutdowns. There were at least 12 shutdowns in February. Furthermore, it seems that hardly a week goes by without a major interruption in service due an infrastructure failure, such as a power outage, a signal system problem, a switch malfunction, a train breakdown, or some other failure.
- Delivery of new cars for the Red and Orange Lines is way behind schedule and cars that have been delivered have had problems requiring some of them to be removed from service temporarily. A $567 million contract for 284 cars was awarded in 2014 and in 2016 the Baker administration added 120 more cars and $277 million to the contract. As-of September 2022, just 78 Orange Line and 12 Red Line cars had been delivered of the 404 ordered in 2014 and 2016. Problems with these cars led the MBTA to send a letter to the manufacturer, CRRC MA, in December 2022 presenting a list of 16 serious concerns about workmanship quality and inspection of the cars.
(For an historical perspective on the extensive leadership and management failures of Governor Baker and his administration during his eight years in office see the PDM website at https://www.progressivedemsofmass.org/baker-watch/. Serious mismanagement and scandals occurred in the State Police, the Registry of Motor Vehicles, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the state’s Covid response, transportation policies and planning, energy and environmental policy, the criminal justice system, and elsewhere.)