Unfortunately, the D'Allessandro report only goes through 2009 (with a look forward into 2010) and therefore doesn't cover the past few years...but the 2000-2009 period certainly laid the groundwork for the current situation.
As that report says:
Contrary to not trying, we found evidence that the MBTA did make some hard expense choices. Across-the-board cuts were routinely made to departmental budgets. Periodic layoffs and hiring freezes restrained the headcount. Individual managers took pride in eliminating inefficiencies and redundancies, while embracing a new organizational ethic of customer service. Yet in the end, they could not pare staff below the number needed to move hundreds of thousands of riders across hundreds of routes each workday. Add the complexity and cost of sustaining the system’s aging infrastructure, and it became evident that the cost inflation and savings assumptions in the Finance Plan were never tested against the daily grind.
I would be unsurprised to find that some of the cost growth in 2010-2014 was necessary "get it working again" repairs; remember the Harvard-Alewife track repair work? That's specifically called out in the report (p. 25) as an unfunded project which needed $80M in 2010 and didn't get it. It was done in 2011-2012, and probably cost a bit more than the 2010 budget because of that....
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2015-02-11 04:56 pm (UTC)As that report says:I would be unsurprised to find that some of the cost growth in 2010-2014 was necessary "get it working again" repairs; remember the Harvard-Alewife track repair work? That's specifically called out in the report (p. 25) as an unfunded project which needed $80M in 2010 and didn't get it. It was done in 2011-2012, and probably cost a bit more than the 2010 budget because of that....