DURING A SPEECH this week, Monica Tibbits-Nutt said she is a transportation secretary who doesn’t ride the commuter rail system.
Her comments were part of a wide-ranging speech before the Charles River Regional Chamber of Commerce that offered her perspectives on a lot of issues, including traffic congestion.
“We live and work in communities that are just crippled by the congestion on the roads,” she said. “It is actually getting worse. People talk a lot about it. Is this a perception thing? No. It’s actually getting worse. And May has been one of the worst months for congestion in a very long time.”
To address the congestion, the secretary said, she can’t add capacity to the roadways. She said the state could raise tolls and introduce congestion pricing to discourage driving. (She didn’t mention that her boss, Gov. Maura Healey, pretty much ruled new tolls off the table after Tibbits-Nutt in a previous speech said she was considering tolls at the state’s borders.)
The key, according to Tibbits-Nutt, is shifting riders to public transit, but she said most people don’t have a lot of transit options or those options are very expensive.
“For a lot of people, it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t time right. It isn’t convenient. And for a lot of commuter rail riders, it’s insanely expensive. I live very close to two commuter rail stations. I’ve actually never gone to those commuter rail stations, nor have I ever used commuter rail from where I live because it’s $400 a month,” she said.
Tibbits-Nutt assured the crowd she and her team are working to address these issues, but she indicated additional funding will be needed to address the problem.
“I’ve spent a lot of time talking about different funding mechanisms. That is a very controversial thing to talk about, but we have to talk about it. And whether people think my ideas are crappy, that’s fine. But we need ideas. We need any ideas because we’ve used everything we have and it’s still not working,” she said.
AG Campbell backs public defender in race for obscure post
Attorney General Andrea Campbell is wading into the race for an elected post you rarely hear about.
Campbell went up to the 37th floor of One International Place earlier this week to stump for public defender Allison Cartwright, who is facing Boston City Councilor At-Large Erin Murphy for the post of Suffolk County clerk for the Supreme Judicial Court. The job comes with an $189,000-a-year salary and opened up after Maura Doyle said she isn’t running for another term.
Doyle, who held it for nearly 30 years, handles administrative and disciplinary matters involving lawyers, and the caseload for justices when they hear cases alone and decide whether they should go to the full court.
“Most folks are like, the clerk of what?” Campbell quipped to the crowd assembled inside the offices of Prince Lobel.
Campbell briefly served with Murphy on the City Council, but the decision to back Cartwright was a “no-brainer for me,” she said, praising Cartwright’s work ethic. As she spoke, state Sen. Lydia Edwards, a major Cartwright supporter, beamed in on a Zoom screen behind Campbell.
The crowd included former DA Ralph Martin, attorney Jay Carney, former Boston Councilor Mike Ross, state Sens. Jamie Eldridge and William Brownsberger, and Urban League of Massachusetts head Rahsaan Hall.
Cartwright supporters have noted that their candidate is the “only attorney” in the race, a pointed (and accurate) dig at Murphy, a former Boston schoolteacher, though there is no requirement that candidates for the post have a law degree. (Some Murphy supporters have made an effort to refer to her as a “lawmaker” because she is on the ordinance-making City Council.)
Murphy has picked up support for her bid from construction and public safety unions, as well as donations from Auditor Diana DiZoglio and the New England Patriots Foundation’s Josh Kraft, who has discussed running for mayor of Boston.
The retiree and the transportation chief
The prospect of former Massachusetts transportation chief Rich Davey returning after a two-year stint as a transit executive in New York City had the local chattering class buzzing this week.
That was thanks to Frank Phillips, the former Boston Globe State House bureau chief who keeps posting scoops to the site formerly known as Twitter. He was the first to report that Davey is the top choice to be the next CEO of Massport, the quasi-public agency that owns and operates Logan Airport.
Phillips and Davey are familiar with each other, of course: In 2015, Davey took a detour from the public sector to lead the unsuccessful Boston 2024 Olympics effort, which brought back Davey to Beacon Hill for briefings of State House leaders. As he and Steve Pagliuca, a top Olympics bid backer, left one such meeting, Pagliuca was jolted by the sight of the press corps, which had been waiting outside. “Oh my God,” Pagliuca said. “That’s not God,” Davey said quietly, almost to himself. “That’s Frank Phillips.”
While the Boston media largely shied away from citing Phillips for his scoop this week, New York outlets readily credited the retired journalist, which prompted Davey to tell their reporters, “When you retire, get better sources.” But on Thursday came word that Massport’s board is weighing two finalists for the job, and Davey is among them. A final decision is expected in the next week.
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