Governor Maura Healey backs a dedicated seat for Boston on the MBTA’s board of directors, a change Mayor Michelle Wu has wanted for years.
The seven members of the board that oversees the T are mostly appointed by the governor, with one seat for the state transportation secretary and another filled by the MBTA Advisory Board and reserved for someone with municipal government experience. There's no guarantee that Boston, which accounts for the bulk of the T's core service area, has a direct voice in running the T in its current governance structure.
In a Boston Public Radio interview Tuesday where she also touched on education policy, Healey said she supports giving Boston a seat on the T board.
Healey said she also thinks the state should take “a real look” at congestion pricing measures to ease traffic, whether that’s in the form of a pilot or something else.
“If we want to get people out of cars and we want people to come back into the city, they need to have a reason to do that, and they need to have a transportation system, a transit system, that works,” Healey said.
A Boston seat on the MBTA board is one of the items on Wu’s legislative agenda for the two-year term that began this month, and Boston lawmakers Rep. Ed Coppinger and Sen. Michael Rush have filed the bills that would make the governance change. Healey's support could give the bills a boost as they wind their way through the legislative process.
Wu’s interest in giving Boston a voice in the T’s governance predates her tenure as mayor. In 2019, as a city councilor, she wrote in The Boston Globe that the board should have a permanent seat representing the capital city and rotating seats for other communities served by the subway and commuter rail.
Meanwhile, Healey declined to take a position on another measure that’s been floating around Beacon Hill for years: giving teachers and other public employees the right to strike.
State law bans public workers from striking, and the Massachusetts Teachers Association wants to change that this session. A handful of teachers unions have embarked on strikes in recent months despite the law — Woburn's schools were closed for a second day on Tuesday after contract negotiations faltered between the educators union and municipal officials.
Healey said she was “not comfortable taking a position” on the right-to-strike legislation, but that her team talked to both Woburn officials and the union Monday.
“I hope they will resolve this today, because we really need to make sure that our kids are back in school,” she said. “You know, obviously, I come from a family of educators. I support educators. We want to make sure that our educators are treated well and fairly, and we want to do the things that will incent more people into education – teachers, paraprofessionals and the like. It’s also really important, particularly with what we’ve seen kids experience through COVID, we’ve got to make sure that kids are in the classroom.”
Healey called it “good news” that the state will have more money coming in through a tax on incomes over $1 million that voters approved in November to fund education and transportation, and she pledged that money will be spent “exclusively” in those two areas. Healey administration and legislative budget writers on Monday estimated the state is likely to collect $1 billion from the new tax during the new fiscal year that starts in July.
The governor said she is meeting later Tuesday with her new transportation secretary, Gina Fiandaca, and that she has asked her education secretary, Patrick Tutwiler, to develop a proposal “about what we can do around reducing the cost of child care.”
