Few details, some curves in hunt for Mass. Pike budget

By Noah Bierman, Globe Staff  |  July 5, 2009

Consumers in Massachusetts will soon be paying a higher sales tax, in large part to avoid a $100 million toll hike on the Massachusetts Turnpike. So you would think it would be fairly easy to get some details on how the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority intends to spend all that money, along with the rest of its $430 million budget, gathered mostly from collecting tolls.

Alas, dear reader, you would be wrong.

The authority’s board met Monday morning in Framingham to pass its budget. But there were no copies of that spending plan available to the public, either before the meeting so toll payers and taxpayers could show up and comment or register their opinions in some way or at the meeting so the public could quiz the board directly. Forget about finding it online.

So I asked for a copy of this most basic of government documents and was told it would be e-mailed. Later that afternoon, the authority sent reporters a single-page “executive summary’’ that compared toll collections and debt payments for the 2009-2010 budget year with the budget year that just ended.

This did not look like the big budget books I used to see from government agencies, dating back to my days covering small-town governments, or the even more complex books larger organizations like the authority usually maintain.

So I asked for a line-item budget, just to make things a bit clearer. A little after the end of business that day, the authority e-mailed another half-page document. This one listed spending allotments for 15 departments compared with last year’s totals - slightly less vague than the first document, but still awfully slim for $430 million.

I continued - in phone calls and e-mails that evening and the following day - to press the case. Surely the authority knew where the toll and tax money was going.

Colin Durrant, transportation spokesman, responded in two e-mails Tuesday that I had everything turnpike board members were given when they took their vote. Really? The people entrusted with spending $430 million in tax and toll dollars had only a page and a half to review before they voted? Could this be true?

Well, no, Durrant acknowledged Tuesday afternoon. He misspoke. They had more information, and the authority would provide it. They just needed a little more time.

Finally, on Wednesday afternoon, Durrant faxed over eight pages. The document still lacked information other budgets often show, such as employee headcounts by department and explanations of other line items. But why get picky at this point.

Board members Mary Connaughton and Judy Pagliuca asked a lot of questions during Monday’s meeting and were met with some annoyed rebuttals by fellow board members. The state Legislature just voted to dissolve the authority, as part of a major transportation reorganization passed last month, so members of the board are not expected to make significant changes in policy.

“This is a one-year budget. We have a four-month existence,’’ said board member Michael Angelini.

Connaughton argued that current board members still had a responsibility to demand more information before approving a budget.

One of the goals in eliminating the authority is to increase transparency, according to legislators and the Patrick administration. Durrant notes that the new authority being created to oversee most state highways and the public transit system has its own inspector general, its own office of performance management, and must report regularly to the Legislature.

But it remains unclear how public information will be treated.

Connaughton expressed concern that the next board could be harder to penetrate. It will be a bigger bureaucracy, and outspoken critics like her, a holdover from former governor Mitt Romney’s administration, will be gone. The new board will have control over billions of dollars.

Paying tolls just got faster for Zipcar's customers

Zipcar drivers will no longer have to wait in cash lanes to pay tolls on the Massachusetts Turnpike and the Tobin Memorial Bridge. The company, which leases cars to its members by the hour or the day, installed E-ZPass transponders in all 950 of its Boston-area cars last week.

“Everything that you’d have kind of in your own car, we want to make sure you can have in our car, too,’’ said Dan Curtin, Zipcar Boston general manager.

Zipcar is leasing the transponders from New York’s E-ZPass program, even though the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority offers free Fast Lane transponders and a discount for drivers at booths inside Greater Boston. A company spokesman said it was easier to set up the billing through New York’s program, because the company is already set up for billing there.

Zipcar members will have their tolls billed directly to their accounts. In the past, Zipcar members in Massachusetts could not use their own transponder because the turnpike requires drivers to match their account with a specific vehicle.

MBTA seeks bids on crash-prevention system

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, long under pressure to improve safety on its trolleys, opened bidding last week for a crash-prevention system to test on the Mattapan trolley.

The T is asking private companies interested in building the system to design a “fail-safe’’ product that would warn trolley operators if their cars get too close to another trolley and, if necessary, automatically apply the emergency brakes.

The bidding documents do not provide a budget, but the T has said it expects to spend about $500,000 testing a low-cost system on the line that later could be used on the Green Line.

Two major rear-end crashes on the Green Line have increased attention on the system’s poor signaling system.