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- [00:05]
Santi Ruiz
Hi, I'm Santi Ruiz and you're listening to Statecraft. Specifically, you're listening to me interview Stephanie Pollock and what's one of my favorite conversations I've ever recorded on Statecraft?
- [00:16]
Stephanie Pollock
And I'll tell you why.
- [00:17]
Santi Ruiz
For one, I had a blast. Stephanie's funny and she's got a killer Boston accent. For another, she explains some of the ideas I care about incredibly well, like how well intentioned regulations turn bad, how political pressures make simple things hard to pull off, why building in the real world is so hard. She taught me a huge amount about building transit in this conversation, and she's a great storyteller. Some context Stephanie was the Deputy Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration for the first half of the Biden Admin. Before that she served as the Secretary of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. She was secretary when she had to step in and salvage the Green Line extension, a Boston transit project that went horribly wrong. And a while before that, before she was in the business of building things, she was an environmental activist who sued the Massachusetts Department of Transportation for building things. We'll get into that evolution in her career here. This conversation is one of a series.
- [01:13]
Stephanie Pollock
Of conversations over the coming months about.
- [01:14]
Santi Ruiz
Transit, why it's gotten so hard to build, who fights over it, and what it takes to build something people love and use. As a reminder, the transcript for this full conversation and for many others is available at www.statecraft.pub. that's statecraft.pub. i'll shut up now and let Stephanie talk.
- [01:36]
Stephanie Pollock
All right, Stephanie Pollock, thank you for joining. Let me start with this. What do most people not understand about federal transit?
- [01:44]
I think most people don't understand that the way transit agencies get money from the feds is very different than the way highways get money from the Fed. And that fundamentally changes the ability of transit agencies when they want to deliver a megaproject. Highways get money that's allocated year after year after year. They know years in advance how much money so they can plan. And most state transportation or highway departments are in the building things business. Most transit agencies are in the running transit business. And then every so often when they want to do a big project, they actually have to go through a really laborious process that's run by the Federal Transit Administration and basically get a grant.
- [02:25]
Can you explain how much of what transit agencies do is maintenance versus the amount of maintenance that state highway work involves?
- [02:33]
Yeah, it's a great question. State highways are probably 9010 building things and operating things, and transit agencies are probably 9010 operating things and maintaining them and making sure that they pull off the commute every day and 10% doing real capital work. Because if you think about the way most people would judge their local transit agency, it's based on the morning commute or the afternoon commute. Like, how good did it work? Did the train show up, did it break down and did it take the time it usually takes or doesn't? So transit agencies are their DNA as being operators and highway agencies their DNA as being constructors.
- [03:12]
And is that mostly on the highway side, just down to the fact that it doesn't take that much maintenance to keep a highway running? Is that the kind of a naive or unformed way of thinking about no.
- [03:21]
It'S actually probably how a lot of highway people think of it. It's not that it doesn't take work to maintain a highway, right? There's potholes to be filled and guardrails to be repaired. And if you're in Massachusetts and northern states, there's know to be plowed. But I don't think it's how people think about it. Like, if you think about your drive, you're not necessarily saying, oh, traffic was terrible today, that's the state transportation department's fault. But if you think about a transit commute, it's like, oh my God, it was awful today. That is the transit agency's fault. So there is, there is operations. And the truth is highway folks could learn a lot from transit folks about operations, right? But it's not mostly operations. It's far and away building. And also the history of the federal government and their relationship to state highway agencies is they enlisted state highway agencies in the 50s and 60s and 70s to build out the Interstate highway system, right? People think of the Interstate System as federal, and it is because it's federally funded, but it's actually built and owned by the states. So they were born to build, whereas transit agencies were born to provide service.
- [04:31]
Will you treat me like I'm five here and basically explain how do state highway agencies get money from the federal government? And then how do state and local transit agencies get money? Just walk me through the actual mechanics of I've got something I want to build. I ask the feds for money. How does that work?
- [04:48]
So basically, state highway agencies don't ask for money, they just get it. It's called formula funding or apportionment. But what it basically means is every five or six years, Congress passes a big bill. They did it last in 2021, and they lay out for five or six years into the future, how much money each state is going to get, mostly for roads and bridges. And then you know, you have that money, which means if you're trying to plan, right, a series of big projects to fix roads and bridges, you don't just know what you're getting this year, you know what you're getting next year and the year after and the year after. And you know that since the 1970s, every five or six years Congress re ups the system. So you can even plan. You know, the current end of the federal highway bill is September of 2026. But all over the country, states are planning projects for 2027 and 2028. Not legally. They don't legally have that money. But like practically speaking, they do. And it just, it makes a big difference. Whereas transit agencies do get some money by what, by formula? They get a certain amount, but it's really to do maintenance. It's not for big projects. If they want to do a big project, they have to apply for the money and go through a multi year process before they know they're getting the money. And then when they do that, they get money for one project and they have to come back for the next project they want to do.
- [06:16]
Can states use that formula funding for big projects legally or is it just not enough capital?
- [06:21]
It's a great question. So the biggest transit systems, the ones many people think about when they think about transit, New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Boston and San Francisco, no, smaller systems that mostly run buses do have flexibility under federal law. They can move the money between operating the system, maintaining the system and doing capital work. But the bigger systems, by and large, the federal government sees its role as supporting their maintenance, but not big capital projects.
- [06:54]
You've had a really interesting career, Stephanie, and I'll just flag a couple key points here for listeners. You were an environmental advocate for something called the Conservation Law foundation in Massachusetts. You sued the MBTA over price increases. You were in court with state and local transit agencies. Later you end up on the other side of those kinds of fights. In the Cabinet of Massachusetts, Governor Baker at the state Department of Transportation. You're involved in building out state and local transit. And then you end up not so much in the transit side, but at the federal level, the Federal Transit Administration working on federal highways. We were talking before this conversation. You sent me over a bunch of Boston Globe articles and other reading about projects you'd worked on, like the Green Line extension. And one of the things that your critics say in those articles is something like, Stephanie was critical of these projects at one point. Now she's on the other side and she's. Or she wanted more funding for them at one point and now she's saying we don't have that money. How do you think about the through line of your career on these different kinds of transit projects?
- [07:54]
So I would say there's one through line that hasn't changed and that's the importance of transit. Not just as a mode of transportation, but as the glue that holds a region and its economy together and that creates access for people for whom a car is not a affordable or realistic way of getting around. That's why you sue the MBTA when they try to raise fares and you're worried that they're going to make transit unaffordable. Right. Or that's why you sue when this Commonwealth of Massachusetts is going to build a giant highway project and you're worried they're going to neglect investment on the transit side of the house. Right. So that, that is the through line is the centrality of transit, at least for big metropolitan areas like Boston, not just to the transportation system, but to people and communities. And the. I think the difference is over the different roles that I've played in my career, I've learned a lot more and I think there was a certain amount of naivete early in my career about, well, if they sign a legal document and say they're going to build a project, then they're legally obligated to build the project. And the money part is not my problem. The money part is their problem. They made the promise. And the more I came to understand the intricacies of the financing system at the state and federal level, the more I understood that the game is actually the money. Like it doesn't mean anything to say we're going to run a world class transit system or we're going to build this project by this year. None of that is true if you haven't figured out what you're building, how you're going to build it, and most importantly, how you're going to pay for it.
- [09:34]
Give me an example of that intellectual change or that move from naivete to getting it on the money side. What's a case study in your life where that realization hit you?
- [09:45]
When the Big Dig was being planned in Boston and there were all these concerns that it was going to sort of suck up all the money and there wasn't going to be money for transit, the thought was, well, there's two different transportation entities in Massachusetts. There's the state transportation department, formerly the highway department, and there's the mbta. And we were very clear that we didn't want the MBTA to be paying right. For transit that was being built as part of this bigger Eastern Massachusetts enterprise. The Big Dig wasn't a project. It was a series of. To us in the environmental world and in the community, it was a series of projects. And the transit projects were just as important as the highway line. And so the thought was, you know, it was a transit project, but it was the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that was going to be responsible, and it somehow wasn't going to affect the T's budget to build and operate these projects. That is so not true.
- [10:40]
Why?
- [10:41]
Well, for one thing, it's always the T's responsibility to operate the project. And like when we, when I was secretary, we actually took a look at what it does to the operating budget. Right. Or I'll give you another example. So the, the Green Line extension, it made the Green Line, which is already a pretty long transit line, almost five miles longer. So if you try to operate a much longer transit line with the same number of trains, it's going to take way longer for a train to get from the beginning to the end. And you're actually going to have less service. Right. Like, you're going to wait the platform longer for the next train. So you have to buy train. I didn't know that when we were first. Like, I just, I was thinking about the extension as its tracks, its signals, its platforms. Right. Well, you have to buy trains. Oh, well. So they had to buy 24 new trains, and that was almost $200 million. In addition, now you own 24 new trains. Where are you going to take care of those trains? There's all these FTA requirements. They have to be inspected. They have to get upgrades. They don't have enough space at their existing maintenance facility. They have a certain size fleet, they have a certain number of train cars. So now you have to build a new maintenance project. U.S. transit agencies are often criticized for spending so much more money than European transit agencies or Asian transit agencies. But I think one of the problems is, is that the way the system works in this country, the conversation about things like how big should the fleet be and how are you going to maintain it, is driven by a project. The conversation about the Green Line in Boston got driven by the Green Line extension. And the cost of the Green line extension includes 24 new cars in a brand new maintenance facility. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Well, if you take the cost of the project and divide by the Number of miles. Right. You're going to have a really high cost per mile. But hundreds of millions of that cost aren't to extend the system by 4.7 miles. They're to buy trains and build a maintenance facility that in different system is in a different part of the budget. The problem for transit in the US Is there is no different part of the budget.
- [12:38]
That's a great clarification. Will you double back and let's just go chronologically for a second. Explain to me like I'm from Arizona and have never heard of the Big Dig. What was the Big Dig? And then we'll get to the Green Line extension, because I think both of these are worthwhile to talk about.
- [12:53]
So the Big Dig was the nickname given to a project that was proposed by Michael Dukakis when he was governor of Massachusetts in the 1980s to take an elevated road that ran through the middle of downtown Boston and really cut the city off from Boston harbor and bury it underground, both to make traffic flow better, but also as an urban planning endeavor. Right. To have this beautiful surface in the city of Boston where you could stroll right over to the edge of the Boston harbor without walking underneath this horrible, always congested elevated highway via dark. It was formally called the Central Artery Tunnel project, but it became known as the Big Dig, probably infamous, because then Congressman Barney Frank at one point said that he had come to the conclusion that it would be easier to raise the city than lower the Central Artery.
- [13:48]
And the Big Dig was originally estimated around $2 billion. What did it come in at when all was said and done?
- [13:54]
12 billion. But that's if you don't count the cost of food financing it, because for some odd reason, we don't include interest on the bonds that get issued to pay for these projects and their project costs, but at least $12 billion instead of 2 billion. And so the Big Dig was important. It was important to the city. It was important because almost every transportation professional in greater Boston, including some of the ones who later worked on the Green Line extension, cut their teeth on the Big Dig because it employed everybody. And it was important because it got a national profile because it ran so far over budget and that there were congressional hearings and there was a decision to basically, I told you at the beginning, there's always money for highways. The Big Dig was the exception. They actually cut the money off and said, no, the state has to pay for this. This is ridiculous.
- [14:42]
We'll get into a couple different case studies of cost overruns, and they're not all the same I mean, the Big Dig is very different from a transit extension, is different from other kinds of projects. But real quickly, I mean, what went into the incredible cost overruns for the Big Dig? How should I, as a layman, think about those, you know, at least 6x overruns, and that's the. As the low end, Right.
- [15:02]
So I would say it's worth thinking about three different things. It's only a cost overrun if the cost you thought was real. So the first thing is there was never a $2 billion central artery tunnel project and there was never a $600 million green line extension. When people build projects, the cost estimates at the beginning are based on almost no information. And the incentive that any supporter of the project has is going to be to lowball the. Because if you tell people 12 billion at the beginning, the answer could be no. But if you say for only $2 billion, you can transform the city of Boston and make traffic go away, then you have a conversation. Some people would say it's deliberate. Some people would say it's what economists call optimism bias. Right? People are just like, oh, yeah, we can do it. But I think the first thing I would say is almost any time you hear about a project that has doubled, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled it actually there was never a time it was going to be built for that price. That price was fantasy. So that's the first thing to think about.
- [16:01]
Just on, on my end professionally and in my editorial work, we talk about the planning fallacy all the time, that you always underestimate the amount of time it's going to take you, the author, to finish a certain piece of work. So it sounds like there's a, just a similar kind of fundamental human thing going on here.
- [16:15]
There absolutely is. So that's the first thing that tends to push all large scale infrastructure projects way over their initial budget. The second thing is what planners and engineers would call mission creed. Once you get some momentum on a project, whether it's the Big Dig or the Green Line extension or the Second Avenue subway in New York, people sort of see this money train and they're like, oh, doing that. Can you do these other things that, like, are in the general geographic vicinity that we've never been able to find money, Right. So let's attach different pieces to the project. Let's fix a bunch of the river roads, let's fix a bunch of other bridges, let's build a bunch of parks, let's build a bicycle and pedestrian path next to it. And so the initial estimate is Actually, for a project that bears only a passing resemblance to the project that gets built, the project that gets built tends to be bigger, more complicated, and have more elements. And the more things you add to the project, the cost goes up. That original 2 billion didn't include certain things, Right? Same for the Green Line. So that's the second thing. The project that you build doesn't really look like the first project that you estimate. Then the last thing, and I think that this is a huge problem, not just in transit, but in infrastructure delivery in this country, is we build projects really, really, really slowly, right? So when the Big Dig was being permitted, it was 1990 and 1991, and that was the first time there was a conversation. And the Commonwealth said, you should build the Green Line extension. And folks said, okay, we should have a deadline for you to do that. And the deadline is going to be 2011. Right. We're talking about 21 years. We're setting a deadline. You know, we're planning to take forever to build that project. Same thing with the Big Dig. Well, time is money when you construct projects. And this is particularly true when you start a project and you don't know how you're going to pay for it because you don't put out one big contract to build the project. You actually put out a contract for the money you have. It's a $2 billion contract. I only have $600 million this year. I'll put a $600 million contract out. We'll start to do some preliminary work, and then at the end of that contract, I'm going to go procure a new contract. I'm going to maybe hire a different company. Depending on who bids, the first company is going to be paid to take down all the stuff that they're no longer using. The new company is going to be paid to what's called mobilize, put up new stuff. And so building projects in this sort of series over a long time because we don't have enough money at the beginning to end is really toxic to delivering projects on budget. But it's kind of how we've gotten in the habit of building things in this country over the last decades, because we rarely actually have all the money for a project when we get started.
- [19:05]
I have so many questions to follow up here. Right off the bat, how does inflation play into all of this? Because it's not just that you're waiting on new rounds of money, but the actual money that you have is. The real value of that is being eaten away over time.
- [19:19]
So the interesting thing, it's hard to remember now, but before COVID we had a four decade run of very low inflation in this country. Right during the heart of the growth in the federally funded infrastructure program, both the interstates and then the programs to build transit, which is the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, post Jimmy Carter stagflation. We don't have a lot of inflation, right? People don't actually think that much about the time value of dry. They don't say, oh well, if you spend 10 years instead of five years building it, right. But now, because of COVID because of inflation, because of a lot of other reasons. I mean, at its peak, the tracking measure that the Federal Highway Administration used to measure construction cost inflation on the highway side was growing at 2% per month. So that meant if you delayed a project five months for a community process or a permit or procurement, you just increase the cost of the project 10%. Now you don't have enough money for the project, so then you go and you find more money for the project, which takes you months, during which time the cost of the project goes up. So in an atmosphere of 1 or 2% per month construction cost inflation, you can't build projects the way you built them when there wasn't any. Except we still do.
- [20:43]
That's incredible. With a big dig when you had structurally lower inflation, what are the factors there that lead to the target date being 20 years out from when you, when you kick off? Well, before you answer that, I'll say on Statecraft, we talk a lot about permitting and that big burden to projects that puts your timelines out. But as I'm sure you're going to say, there's other factors that are not permitting things that we don't pay as much attention to on this podcast that play a big role.
- [21:09]
So I would say that it's helpful if you think about four P's and one of them is permitting, it is not a bad thing to spend a long time planning. There's an argument that's been made by many people that more time planning and then once you get started, go fast. So plan long and then build fast. Could be a real thing. But like, we can plan forever. And this is particularly true again for projects for which we don't have enough money because it, it if, if you're an elected official or a supporter of that project, you create some sense of momentum by having planning meetings and issuing documents and doing PowerPoints and maybe having little, you know, events. There's a different project in Massachusetts called South Coast Rail. And when we did a groundbreaking for it when I was the secretary, the state senator who represented the district said, this is my fifth groundbreaking for this project because previous governors had found some money and done a little piece of work and held the groundbreaking. So planning takes us a long time on purpose. Permitting is real.
- [22:10]
And if I can't get, say, the state legislature to pony up enough money in a given year, all I can really do is planning, right? That's the only thing that fits the, fits the scope. I can't really truly start the project, but I can do more planning, right?
- [22:25]
Because planning and permitting is as frustrating as they can be and as lengthy. In the end, they're going to be 10, 15, 20% of your project costs. Most of your project cost is going to be building it, right? If you have short money, it's a great thing to do. So planning and then planning is followed by permitting, which unquestionably takes too long and is too complicated in this country, and then planning and permitting. The third P is public engagement. And on the one hand, all of us agree that certainly it is critically important that the people who, both the people who are going to use a piece of infrastructure, but also the people who are going to be affected by a piece of infrastructure because it goes through their neighborhood. The problem with those three Ps, planning, permitting and public engagement is being gone forever, right? You've heard people call it, it the vetocracy. And what I say is the processes are a real problem, okay? But the truth is, at the end of the day, the actual problem is, is that no one is willing to make a decision and find the money. So until someone is willing to make a decision, either yes, we're building it or no, we're not. And I can tell you how we're going to pay for it. Then planning and permitting and public engagement go on and on, not just for years, but in some cases for decades. And then when people look backwards, they say, oh, the planning, permitting and public engagement is why it took decades as opposed to the unwillingness to make a go, no go decision. And the lack of money is why it took decades. And during those decades, we did a lot of planning, permitting and public engagement to keep the project alive.
- [23:58]
That's an interesting point, that while you're waiting, the political will, these processes can just drag out forever because what else.
- [24:04]
Are you going to do? And to sum it, and I want to be clear, there's value, right? Like they are advancing the product. You're learning things, you're figuring out how to build things. Sometimes if you're creating creative, you find little pieces of money, and so you. You fix some utilities that are in the way, or you fix a bridge that's going to need to carry train tracks and heavy trains, or you fix a place where the road and train tracks meet, which is called a crossing. And you're going to have to have a bunch of grade crossings fixed. So if you can do five a year, every year for five years, then 25 grade crossings are done, and then they don't have to be part of the project. So I don't want people to think that the entire planning, permitting, public engagement time is a waste. It's not. But I would say that amount of value it adds to a project is small relative to, like, what you could get if you had a more succinct process. And when we talk about the Green Line extension, I can talk a little bit about how you could actually get through a compressed version. And then I just also want to mention the fourth P is procurement, which is absolutely obscure and not something that a lot of people think about, but procurement is the legal process by which you hire the people who are going to build your project, and it's really important to get it right. And so that's another one where it adds time to the process, but it actually adds value to the process. If you have the right team and the right contract structured the right way, the odds that you can deliver the project are good. And if you get procurement wrong, you know, you're basically starting off in the wrong place, and you haven't even begun building the project.
- [25:42]
Talk me through the Big Dig in a little more detail. How did each of those P's play into the Big Dig and the amount of time it took time and money.
- [25:50]
So planning took a while, in part because in the end, the Big Dig actually was a combination. While at first it was a combination of two road projects that were separate. Right. One was to bury this elevated highway through the center of Boston. But a second one was to build a third tunnel under Boston harbor to connect Logan Airport to metropolitan Boston. Logan Airport was built actually on an island out in the middle of Boston Harbor. And then as it grew, it filled in a bunch of islands. And so access to the airport was a huge transportation, but an even bigger economic development, limited issue. So there was sort of a project that was about the tunnel, and then there was a project that was about the artery. And the decision was made by Governor Dukakis and his Transportation Secretary, Fred Salvucci, to put Those two together. And that's probably what created enough benefits and political momentum to get it done. But as you can imagine, a planning process that starts with two pretty big projects and then combines them into one gigantic process takes a long time.
- [26:51]
Okay, Test planning.
- [26:53]
So a lot of people talk about something called NEPA or the National Environmental Policy act as permitting. And it is important.
- [26:59]
I talk a lot about nepa.
- [27:01]
I've done probably more nepa. Like I've written comments, I've sued people under nepa, I've signed records of decision in my role as Federal Highway Administrator under deepa. And it's really important, but it's actually not permitting. Right. And one of the problems with permitting, actually one of the problems with all of these processes we're talking about is that they are sequential instead of concurrent. We do them one after another instead of at the same time. If you think about it, there is no reason you couldn't do planning and public engagement and permitting kind of at the same time. And you could spend four years on each of them and you could be done in four years, or you could spend four years on each of them sequentially and it could take you 12 years. Right. Permitting is very non sequential in the United States. NEPA was designed. It's a very short law.
- [27:49]
It's five pages, I think.
- [27:51]
Yeah, it's like five page. Like, like we talk about laws now that are a thousand pages long. Right. So it's like amazing that we had a five page law and that it's made such a difference. But the idea of NEPA was you should gather a lot of information, give the public a shot to look at that information and use that information to better define your project, to identify what is usually referred to as the locally preferred alternative. And then having finished that sort of information gathering part of the process, then you, you move into actual permits. You need a permit, you know, to move utilities, you need a permit to fill in part of a river, you need a permit to build on part of a park. And some of those are federal permits and some of those are state permits and some of those are local. Right. Just because it's a federal project. And so that's the thing is like finishing NEPA is the starting garden for the rest of permitting. People think it's the finish line. It's not. It's the starting line. And so NEBA itself, I think last time I looked before, the most recent set of process reforms made by Congress was taking six to eight years for big carry projects like the Central Artery Project. And The Green Line extension. But when that's done, all you have is a giant factual record. You don't actually have a single permit.
- [29:04]
I want to ask this carefully, but how has your view on the ability to litigate under NEPA and then state and local permitting requirements changed since you went from the litigating side to the state side?
- [29:16]
The fact that you can litigate under NEPA is essential if your concern is that agencies will not do their job and that they need to be held accountable. And so if you hand them a process and let them screw up the process, and then they can still move on and permit and procure and build the project, that's a terrible thing. But once you subject that decision at the end of NEPA to litigation, it's not just the lawsuit partakes. It changes everyone's behavior throughout the entire process because everybody is thinking about the lawsuit. The NEPA process at this point is about minimizing the risk of a lawsuit or covering your butt if there's a lawsuit, or creating the factual record. And so what I have said, and I'm a big supporter of intelligent deproceduralization and process reform, but if you reform the process and you make it a really quick and dirty process, and it's short and it doesn't have thousands of pages and all that kind of stuff, and you can still litigate the result of that process, I'm not sure that it just doesn't turn into the next NEPA like, whatever you call it. So that litigation decision is really critical. But if you don't allow litigation, then what you're saying is, well, what is the accountability? We're having this conversation right in April of 2025. It's hard to have a conversation right now and say we're comfortable not having the courts have any role in holding government agencies accountable for the actions they take. Like, right now, it feels like in some areas, there isn't any. But the courts, who has a chance of holding certain federal agencies accountable for certain things they're doing, not just infrastructure. So it's not an easy call. It absolutely completely shapes the process that there is litigation at the end. But if you take it away, what does that mean?
- [31:00]
You're making a bunch of my points for me on this conversation. What my colleagues at the Institute for Progress would say on a lot of this, they would totally agree with you that the ability to litigate is a bigger problem than the specific requirements on agencies in nepa. But you can also litigate under other substantive requirements that the Fed's not dump sludge in the water. Right. And NEPA isn't one of those requirements. It's a requirement about process. Do you think environmental advocates in an ideal world would spend time litigating those kinds of substantive requirements and not have as much surface to litigate under nepa, the process requirements?
- [31:35]
So I know that you did a podcast with Nick Bagley about Coast Chevron, right? I was literally a law clerk at the D.C. circuit and a young lawyer when this is happening. So NEPA passes in 1970. The original Chevron decision is 1980. So in the early years of NEPA, we don't know what the legal standard is under which a permitting decision by a federal agency will be reviewed. Like we don't know how much deference the courts are going to give to the permitting agency. So we want belts and suspenders, right? We want multiple bites at the apple. We want to litigate under NEPA and then we want to litigate the, the permits. Right. You could put together a system in which NEPA is just the foundation and then you do the permits and those can get litigated. But I do think many of the advocates who are concerned about accountability by the agencies and adherence to environmental laws in a post Chevron world are going to be really skeptical of that approach because they're worried that all the permits will just be upheld.
- [32:35]
Got it.
- [32:35]
I want to say something else about NEPA that I think we didn't know when it was passed or even in the 80s. I speak as someone who literally wrote their third year paper for law school about NEPA. So I've been thinking about this a long time. So in the world of people like Jen Palka and people who are thinking about, you know, abundance and stuff, right? We don't like waterfall decision making, right? We like test and learn decision making. We like the government to be able to sort of do a little bit, learn something and then do a little bit more. So NEPA is the ultimate waterfall, right? Permitting is the ultimate waterfall. You literally have to do this whole multi year process before you can do anything. And what that assumes is that the way you build big projects like the Big Dig or the Green Line Extension is that you literally know everything about the project when you're doing neba, to the point where you can calculate exactly how many square feet of wetlands you're going to impact or exactly how many square feet of parkland. But every time you change the project, let's say you change it because you discovered environmental impact or because your public engagement convinces you that you want to go this way instead of that way. Every time you change it, it cascades and it changes all of the impacts, right? So if you just set aside like what NEPA is and you just asked yourself what a rational process would look like, right? It would actually be iterative, it wouldn't be waterfall, right? You'd like start with a project, you'd engage the public, you'd start to look at the environmental impacts, you'd start to think about the permitting requirements, then you'd make changes to the project, which would in turn change your permitting, change your impacts, right? But that's okay because you're making those changes because the process actually made you change things. And this is where the P of procurement comes in. Until two decades ago, the way we built infrastructure, there was one way you procured a team to build it for you. It was called design, bid, build. And what that meant is the agency who owned the road or the bridge or the transit, they would design every asset. Doesn't matter how long they took them, that took them 25 years. They would design it so specifically that it could then be permitted and go through nepa and then they would write a procurement that said build exactly this this way, and they'd find out what it cost. By the way, that would be the first time they actually knew what it really cost. Because now you have a real company telling you that you build it and then they would go out and they would build that exact project. Except of course they wouldn't because as soon as you started building it, you'd bump into something you didn't know was there. So in a design, bid, build world, right, you can do permitting and public engagement and NEPA and everything else, and you get to this 100% design. But one of the things that I think we've learned and that a lot of places in the world have learned, is that's a really stupid way to build a project, right? That a better way to build the project is to actually engage the team that's going to help you build it earlier in the process and sort of do designing and public and engagement and permitting iteratively and kind of design and maybe build the first piece of it, design and then build another piece of it, push off some other part that has a really complicated engineering problem and let people work on it. Well, in that world, how do you do waterfall permitting at all? You never get to the point where you know exactly how many square feet of wetlands you impact until you've finished building. So all of this permit and public engagement and planning process actually grows out of the assumption that at the end of the day, when you're ready to finally build, you're going to do this waterfall thing where you're going to take this 100% design, you're going to hand it to the industry, and you're going to say, okay, industry, tell me what it's going to cost me to build it. But in fact, the best infrastructure projects being built in the US and around the world right now are not being built, design, bid, build anymore. But nobody has really taken that step backwards and said, okay, but in a world where we're actually, even if we don't use these words, trying to go from waterfall process to test and learn processes, to incremental processes to iterative processes, all of which, I think all of us now have come to understand, really are better for delivering things. Well, now you have to ask, okay, so then how should that change how we permit things and do public engagement and plan things? If the thing that you're doing is not like a thing that at a moment in time is done, but is a thing that is iteratively being planned and designed and permitted and thought about and engaged with the public right up.
- [36:59]
Until the date opens, Move us forward in time to the Green Line extension in which you're no longer litigating these projects from the outside. You're responsible for executing these projects. And again, imagine I'm from Arizona. I've got no special knowledge of Boston geography. What is the Green Line extension, and at what point do you come in to that whole project?
- [37:19]
So the Green Line is a light rail line in Boston. It's a subway line. Part of the time it's underground, and part of the time it's a trolley that literally runs down the middle of street and it ends just north of the Charles River. So Boston is separated from the city of Cambridge by the Charles River. So the Green Line goes over the Charles river and has a couple stops and then it ends. And it ends just before a city called Somerville, Massachusetts. To understand why the Green Line extension matters so much, you have to understand Somerville. So Somerville is a 4 square mile city with 80,000 residents. It is one of the densest places in the Northeast United States, and it is almost certainly the densest place in the Northeast United States that has no transit except buses. And they've been trying to get transit forever. And the idea of the Green Line extension, and this is true for a lot of infrastructure projects, it seems really simple. There is a commuter rail line from the North Shore of Boston that runs through the city of Somerville on tracks that are already owned by the MBTA without stopping. So you're Somerville. You have terrible transit. You have these buses and you watch these commuter trains full of people from distant suburbs going through through your city. By the way, they're diesel trains, so they are spewing diesel exhaust into your city and you get no service.
- [38:35]
And you're one of the densest places around for hundreds of miles, and clearly.
- [38:40]
You can support transit use. You're denser than other places in Boston that have transit. Right? So someone asked the logical question. Well, what if where the Green Line currently ends, it ends at a station called Leechmere. You can see the commuter rail tracks from Leechmere. Like there's a road in between them. But like, this is engineering, this is soluble, right? You either move the road or you move the tracks. But you move something and then, boom, the Green Line hits this existing commuter rail line. You run a second set of tracks next to this existing commuter rail line. Boom. You now have six new stations in the city of Somerville. And instead of 20% of the city of Somerville being in walking distance of a stop, 80% of the city of Somerville is in walking distance. And since housing is another issue that I know you and I both share an interest in, I will tell you that one of the reasons that the Green Line extension becomes such an important project that it's worth saving when we need to save it, is to their credit, the city of Somerville completely replanned and rezoned itself to bring in denser and often housing development in its new six station areas. Right. It actually took a 15 acre site, brought in a master plan like this wasn't hypothetical. This wasn't zoning on the ground that allows for hundreds of housing units. This went beyond that. So the Green Lane extension starts as this is a really easy project.
- [39:58]
It's a no brainer.
- [39:59]
It's a no brainer. It's going to cost a few hundred million dollars, but the Big Dig is going to cost a few billions. So you just sort of attach them together and you go, well, that would work, except for one thing. If you think about train tracks or a road going through a busy city, it probably occurs to you that people are probably not crossing those train tracks every day. You're building bridges over the train tracks so that you can get over it if you're in a car or on foot or on a car, bike, right? So you build those bridges. Bridges have things underneath them that hold them up. They're called abutments where do you put the abutments? You put them right next to the train tracks. You don't leave enough room to put a second set of train tracks. Because if you put the train tracks next to it, there's literally a bridge abutment there. Not just one, not two. Eight. Eight bridges have to be completely rebuilt somehow. This is never part of the conversation. It's not part of the cost estimate. It was literally. The conversation starts as lay down the tracks.
- [40:57]
I mean, just back up for a second. I know there's a lot to talk about here, but how is it that you have a bunch of smart people in a room thinking about transit and nobody thinks about this? What happens there?
- [41:06]
I mean, I'm sure somebody thought about it, right? But the public image of this is a no brainer. We're going to put one set of tracks next to a second set of tracks. And they didn't think about bridge advancements. And also the other question is this. So Somerville's up here, train tracks are down here. If the commuter rail's running through your city and it doesn't stop, then there's a thing you don't need somewhere to get on the train. A station. You're going to build rapid transit and you want to have six stations along a less than five mile route. Because the whole point is to get everybody in walking distance of a station, right? Where does the station go when the tracks are down here and the world is up here? Do you need elevator? Like, you know, and people in wheelchairs and people with strollers? So one of the reasons I told you that projects cost a lot more is they never were going to cost what people said at the beginning. This project was never going to cost less than a billion dollars. The problem was people spent many years and we'll fast Forward and in 2014 and 15, people really thought they knew what it was going to cost. It had gone through the NEPA process. It had gone through the Federal Transit Administration's process. It had gotten its grant. You go through this huge process to figure out what a project costs before you can get a grant from FTA. FTA say it's going to cost $1.9 billion. We're going to give you half of that. State of Massachusetts is going to pay for half of that. They signed this agreement in January of 2015. This is a project that's been in permitting, planning and public engagement since 1990. But 15 years in, you're ready to go. It is ready to go. And they use this new procurement method. That has never been used before in Massachusetts, probably without really understanding it. And it's a procurement method where you basically pick the person is going to build your project, and then you let them tell you how much each subsequent contract is going to cost. So you don't put the contract out and let five people bid on it. You pick the team and then you say, what's this going to cost? There's a whole bunch of other fancy parts around it, but that's the basics.
- [43:01]
Now, why would you do that?
- [43:02]
Because it moves faster. And because all major infrastructure projects occur in the real world with real politics. And Deval Patrick is the governor of Massachusetts and Barack Obama is the President of the United States, except for that Donald Trump is running against Barack Obama and a strong Republican is running against Deval Patrick. So the project is being designed so that there can be what's called a full funding grant agreement, the legally binding agreement in which federal transit promises you your billion dollars while Barack Obama is president and Deval Patrick is governor. And when they work backwards from that date, they come to the conclusion this particular procurement method will get you there and no other procurement method will.
- [43:49]
Just to make sure I'm hearing you correctly, the political goal is get the contract done and move the money before we get any major changes in administration, either at the state or at the federal level.
- [44:01]
Get it paid for. Because remember, I told you at the beginning that one of the things that kills projects is that at the beginning, you don't know where all the money is coming from. So actually, it's not a bad idea to institute a process by which your goal is to have all the money at the beginning. Right. Like that actually is a good thing. There's this little political window in which you could have all $2 billion that you need to build the project, like from the get go.
- [44:29]
So we have to move fast.
- [44:30]
But it requires you to sort of do procurement in a way you've never done it before.
- [44:36]
And what are the consequences in this case of doing procurement that different way?
- [44:40]
So the consequences are that they start to give small contracts, mostly for design or some early work, to this consortium that they've hired. The first project costs way more than they thought it would. The second one does, the third one does, the fourth one does, and the fifth one does. And then Deval Patrick leaves office and Charlie Baker comes in. The next package comes in and it's the first big construction package. It's to rebuild one station, the one you have to move to connect the Green Line to the commuter rail line and to build the first two stations. And it comes in wildly above.
- [45:15]
Wildly. Meaning what.
- [45:16]
What it's supposed to. Meaning that what we thought was a $2.2 billion project becomes a $3 billion project. And that's assuming that the next package and the one after that and the one after that, though, and I'm secretary and the governor is the governor. And it's 2015, and earlier that year in the wintertime, we had four blizzards in a row and 114 inches of snow, and the tee literally closed in the middle of a day.
- [45:42]
Snowpocalypse.
- [45:44]
Snowpocalypse. The general manager quits the legislature with the governor's strong approval, puts the T under a control board. Like, this is like New York city in the 1970s. And you got to go to the control board and tell them, oh, and the other thing you need to know is the federal money is fixed. You get a billion towards your $2 billion project. You also get a billion towards your $3 billion project or your $4 billion project. All the cost overruns are on the T, but the T doesn't have the money. And even if the T has the money, it is a valid question for the governor and the control board to ask, would you spend it on the Green Line extension or would you fix all the things that we have discovered are wrong with the T as the result of snowpocalypse? So it is the summer of 2015. This is when it becomes impossible to ignore that this project does not cost what we thought it was going to cost, and the feds are not going to give us any more money. At that point, the Federal Trends Administration actually says we're going to freeze the money we did give you because we want to understand what the heck is going on here.
- [46:46]
Let me just jump in and ask your secretary of the state Department of Transportation at this point, who are the different voices in your ear, the different pressures that you have on this question of, do we stick the money in the T, do we take some other route? What kinds of pressures are you under at this point?
- [47:01]
This is a project I know well. Sued over it 10 years earlier is also a project that I believe in because I'm doing. Because before I become secretary, I'm doing a ton of work on getting housing built near transit. And I know what Somerville has done, and I know that the belief is that this project will support 10,000 new housing projects, 45,000 new riders. Like, I want to build this project. This is who you need to convince. Need to convince the governor, this is going to be state money. Need to convince the control board that of all the things that are facing them, that they're going to peel off hundreds of millions that they weren't planning on spending and they're going to put it into this and not all the other things that are wrong that they're discovering at the T. Need to convince the local elected officials in Cambridge and Somerville who are expecting the project to be the project that they have been promised for 25 years, actually need to convince the legislature because at the end of the day, most of the new money is going to come in the form of state bonds or some other form of state money because feds are not going to give you any more money. And you actually need to convince the Federal Transit Administration that it's close enough to the project that they approved because there is a new president. And if they want to freeze the grants, something that we didn't think about as much in 2015, they actually legitimately can. Because say we said we're not going to build seven stations, we're just going to build the first three. That's how we're going to save the money. They could say, well, I didn't give you a billion dollars to build pre stations, I gave you a billion dollars to build seven. You don't get the billion. So we had to keep the billion. Right. Keep the billion we had in state money and figure out how to build the rest of the project.
- [48:36]
Okay, that's great context. So you're in this position. You've got a lot of cross pressures, a lot of stakeholders. What do you do?
- [48:44]
For me, this is where the whole what does project development look like when you do it fast instead of slow? Because I also know that time is not on our side at this point. Right. We either have to sort this out, have a new project and get going again. Right. Or governor's going to say no, or.
- [49:01]
They wouldn't come to the table.
- [49:02]
Building it is on the table, but we got to get past all these barriers. But canceling it is also on the table. Right. That was one of the things I honestly believe if he had not said canceling is on the table, would have never gotten the political alignment. People had to believe that there was a real risk. Risk. We also did not have an infinite amount of time. This becomes, how do you take everything you know and say the following six months from now? I would actually like a go, no go decision six months from now. And that means permitted planning, public engagement and procurement all have to happen. From where we are, which is we have a $3 billion project, we can't afford to having a new project six months later in which we have an answer to planning. Do we need a vote of the city council? Do we need new permits? Do we need new dollars? Do we need a new procurement? This is where you can't do waterfall comes in. I mean, in fact, it was sort of easier for me internally in some ways. It's like people say all the time, you know, when, when i95 burns down in Philadelphia, isn't it amazing that like overnight we can do something that we can't do? Or I40 Secretary Duffy just said this about Interstate 40 in North Carolina. This is a different kind of emergency, but it's the same thing, right? It's like you just have to throw out the way you do things, the business as usual inside your own agencies and say we're not going to do it that way. We are going to literally simultaneously process this. So we needed a different project team. I didn't believe anything anyone said. I didn't believe the engineers, I didn't believe the cost estimators. Governor wouldn't, the control board wouldn't, the legislature wouldn't. They were had been so wrong for so long. Right. I need a new team. We hired the new team in January. Like we announced this in August. We hired the team in January. We promised people an answer by May. You have to do procurement differently to do that. We actually fired all of the old teams so that we were in a position to do a new procurement. And we re engineered the project and we figured out the procurement strategy and we figured out the finance, like all of it basically between December of 2015 and May of 2016.
- [51:07]
Tell me about the redesigns. What changes about the actual project?
- [51:12]
So I live on the other end of the Green line. I live on the western end of the Green line. When you walk to a Green line station in my town, it's like walking to a slab of asphalt. There's no station, there's no fargate. There's no heat, there's no rain.
- [51:25]
And you just stand there and wait for the train to come.
- [51:28]
It's like a slab of asphalt. They have designed beautiful stations. 50, 60, $70 million station, okay? If the stations cost 5 million instead of 50 million a piece and there are six of them, like that's hundreds of million. You know what I mean? It's pretty easy math, right? So people ride transit. They ride transit because it's frequent and reliable. It's not frequent and Reliable. They don't ride.
- [51:48]
It doesn't matter how nice the station is if it's not frequent and reliable.
- [51:52]
Exactly. So what do you hold constant? And I think this was critical because you have to know what you're aiming at. The faster you're making a decision, the more you're compressing a process. The key is everybody who's working on this knows what are you aiming for? And so we said two things. It's gotta cost hundreds of millions of dollars less. Like, we didn't give a cost, but it wasn't like, oh, if you save 3%, then we're gonna clap and go ask the legislature for the money. So you have to shave hundreds of million dollars of off this. And two is same amount of service. Can't eliminate a station, can't eliminate the purchase of the 24 new cars because you need them to run the trains frequently left. Like, we're gonna hold some things constant. And in a funny way, that means that the team and the public and the elected officials can focus.
- [52:33]
It's not that hard to figure out where you have to cut.
- [52:37]
I mean, it's not easy, but it's a lot easier. But it is. It's one of the lessons is that you got to tell them what you're aiming at. And what we were aiming at is same amount of service, less money. Can we cut money? Yeah. Where can we cut project costs? The other thing I want to talk about for one minute is risk. Project delivery is risk management. But many project delivery teams are not about reducing risk risks. They're actually about playing a game of hot potato with risks. You take it. No, you take it. No, you take it. You don't fix anything by doing that. It's just who gets stuck holding the hot potato when the risk blows up, right? Like, who eats the cost overrun? Who gets the political edit?
- [53:16]
Will you explain that a little bit more? Like when you say that they're playing hot potato with risk, so you hire.
- [53:22]
Somebody to build your project, and they say, well, I'm going to build your project for $2.3 billion. And then they start to build it and they say, oops, actually, I'm going to build your project for 2.7 billion. Maybe you could do that the first time you're building a project, but we're now on the second time through, can't do that. So one of the things that we do during this period of time when we're resetting it, is we actually asked ourselves, what are the biggest risks with the project and which ones could we actually fix before we put it out for bid again? So one of the biggest risks is you have to build it right next to an operating commuter rail line. Line. We operate the commuter rail line and we own the tracks. And those tracks need to be moved over a little to make room for it. We could do that, not put it in the contract for the new guy who's building it. And then when they bid the new project, the risk that when they go to move the tracks, they're not going to be able to do it, or they're not going to be given permission because it's a busy time of year or the Patriots won the super bowl and we need to have a parade. And so we're not going to close the commuter rail down to move it. People tend to sort of just try to keep risk constant. And they do one of two things. They just try to turf it off onto other people or they build in what's called contingency. You just say in the budget, well, we'll just sort of throw $300 million in the budget. If something bad happens, it's already in the budget, so it doesn't make the budget go up. The problem with that, and the t have done that on the Green Line extension, and I don't mean to speak ill of the engineering world, but I have to say that I believe this is true. If there's this big pot of hundreds of millions of dollars in the budget, you will find a way to make the case that you should be given that money to do the work you're doing.
- [55:01]
It's staring you in the face.
- [55:02]
Yes. FTA actually, its process of thinking about risk involves increasing the amount of contingency for these big transit projects. And I have come to the conclusion that, that while well intentioned, is not actually de risking any of these projects. It's just creating a giant bullseye for the building. So we, we wanted a smaller contingency that was very, very tightly controlled. And another place we save money is contingency. We just said we're really going to build it.
- [55:31]
And you gave yourself less.
- [55:33]
Less rope because you hurt yourself when you give yourself too much rope. And, and that is, that is part of the story. So, long story short, so we fire the old contractors, we hire a new team, we go through a public process, we save money basically through much less elaborate stations, downsizing the maintenance facility a bit. But we keep the 24 trains, we keep all seven stations. We cut the contingency and sort of design a different kind of procurement bed Risks. And then we start taking state dollars and doing work while we're doing this other process. So that the contract we will eventually put out and sign in November of 2017 isn't actually the same contract because work has been done and the work has been chosen to make it less risky. So that when we put it out to bid, the world that's going to come through the door in Massachusetts and bid is going to say, they call it bidding in risk. This is what the big companies. So we do a lot of things. I spend an immense amount of time with the mayor of Somerville and the mayor of Cambridge, including convincing them to kick in some money. And what the control board does in the end is they set a not to exceed price. They say we will vote to put it back out to bid. But if the bid comes in over this number, we're telling you right now, we're not approving it. And this tells the world, don't even bother to prepare a bid package. And then the one other controversial thing I'll mention briefly is there was a really beautiful community path for walking and biking that paralleled the entire Green Line extension. And to some extent you could say it was all one project. It was a transit walking and biking project. And to some extent you could say, no, it's a transit project. And they glommed this walking and biking bike patch. It got to it. And the place where we got in the most trouble was there were places where there was enough room for the Green Line and there was not enough room for the bike path. So it turned into an extremely expensive bike path because you had to sort of add a lot of stuff to get the bike path to work.
- [57:24]
Like bridges or you had to bump it out horizontally.
- [57:28]
Yeah. Moving transformers out of the way, like really expensive things. And so I think probably the thing that got me the most grief was when we said we are willing to build it with a non continuous bike path. We're not going to take it all out. We're just going to take the really expensive parts out and they'll be on city streets. I mean, people do bike on city streets. I do. People hated it. So this is where the obsession with procurement actually served us well. We came up with the following idea. Well, we're going to bid it out and we already know what the highest price is going to be. It's going to be $1 below what, like a drill board said they were willing to spend. So we set up the competition very differently. It's not low bidder, it's a Much more complicated thing. It allows us to sort of pick a team we like. But we also say there are four things that we ourselves could not figure out how to pay for. The most important of which is this community path. The bidder who can figure out the most of those four things and still come out below the price wins. And the winning team figured out how to pay for all four, including the community path, for less than the amount that the control board said they would pay. Because we let the private sector figure out the solution instead of trying to design it to 100% and then asking the question what it would cost. Cost. This is where culture comes in, which I'm sure you talk about a lot on your show. This is, like, against every. Every ounce of culture inside the mbta. Like, you do not just go to the world and say, world, tell us how you would do this project. Like, you tell the world, we're the mbta. We know more than anybody. We're telling you what needs to be built down to every last detail. You tell us what it costs. This is, culturally.
- [59:04]
It'S not in the DNA.
- [59:06]
It is so not in the DNA. It got us a $2.3 billion project, which at the end of the day, ended up being more than the 2.1, but not by so much that we couldn't live with it. And it's pretty much what the project came in at when it was done.
- [59:20]
Stephanie, I had big dreams of asking you all about the Federal Transit Administration and your time there. Instead, I've gotten sucked into a very interesting story about state and local transit. I'm curious, what lessons did you take from the Green Line extension into your role? What did you learn about the kind of broad principles of procurement or about managing these stakeholders that applied when you were in a different kind of transportation role at the federal level?
- [59:45]
It's a great question, and I say this. I did not run the Federal Transit Administration. I had a colleague who ran the Federal Transit Administration. Secretary Buttigieg ran USDOT as a team, and we often worked with each other, so on very important projects like the Hudgen River, Tuttle Federal highway, and Federal Railroad and Federal Transit were in the room together working towards, and actually the Build America Bureau, which does loans. We were all a team. And the team's job was to make sure that that project was going to be funded and locked up in construction when the first term ended. And in fact, it was. But I would say this. The federal rules create the path that you have to follow. And this is true for Federal highway and for federal transit, which is why I'm comfortable saying it. I think it's the wrong path. Like many processes that, that we come to understand are dysfunctional. It is very. Waterfall, is very sequential, and it forces the project sponsors, the people who are actually building these projects, to follow this set of rules that in fact, I think undermine good project management. So, for example, one of the things I learned from the Green Line extension is that the most important thing to do to a project is not to value engineer it. Value engineering is just like spending less money and you get less. Less. It's doing less with less.
- [61:00]
I don't know what value engineering means.
- [61:01]
Tell me, value engineering is what is what the engineers cost it. When you say, oh, it's 2.3 billion, I only have to find 300 million and take it away, that's called value engineering because you're engineering to a value. Right? Okay, but what happens is you. You take out 300 million and you lose benefits. It's not like you hold the benefit constant, like you just make the numbers work. Real project and development is actually about de risking a project. It's not asking what component can I take out so it doesn't go over budget. It's saying what is making it cost this much? Is there a different way to get the same thing but for less money? Or get it in a way to minimize the risk so that you don't need all that contingency? Right. The way you de risk a project, you start to build pieces of it. You start to move the tracks, you start to fix the grade crossings, you start to move the utilities. Well, if the federal system basically doesn't give you any money till you've gone through public engagement, planning and permitting, Right. Where does the money come from to do all that early work comes from you. And does it count towards your contribution? When the feds say how much is ours and how much is yours? Most of the time the answer is no. So weirdly, we've created this path which makes it harder to do what I think is clearly a best practice. FTA knew that and they were trying to fix that and trying to be more open to it. And Federal highway knew that. But the point is that, that this whole system we have, where it's all waterfall instead of test and learn, and where it's all sequential instead of consecutive, that is several decades of accreted. Like what happens when you put together the Federal highway rules with the NEPA rules or the federal transit rules. And I know I'm not going to Say it's federal transit because I ran federal highway. We did the same thing. There needs to be more flexibility in the system.
- [62:45]
Last question for you. You're a Democrat who worked for very, very comfortably I would say with Massachusetts governor who was a Republican. If you were advising Duffy now in the Federal Transit Administration, what advice would you give him based on what you just told me about the way we're doing things wrong?
- [63:00]
I mean Secretary Duffy testified before Congress recently and he said that as he's looking forward to the next five year bill that lays out all the money for the state transportation agencies which is called surface transportation reauthorization, his priorities are safety, which Sarge disagree with, especially when a a plane crashes on your first day on the job. But after safety, his priorities are actually permitting reform and project delivery. So what I would say to Secretary Duffy is if you're serious about that, then be serious about really changing things up. When we fix processes in government, we tend to leave all the processes that were there and then we add these fixes on top of them and then you just get a even more well intentioned. I understand why politically very hard to take things away. Everything that's there is there for a reason. Every word that's there is there because someone cared about that word that permit that process, that meaning that step in the planning process. But honestly I think that we have really built a system that makes it extremely difficult for anybody to deliver a federally funded project. We have gotten to the point and I had these conversations when I was running a state and when I was at federal highway with state where people will look at projects for which they they could get federal money. This is the highway side and they will choose not to use federal money because it complicates the process so much that they would rather go fight with the legislature and the governor to get money. When we build a system where people are willing to walk away from federal funding because of the complexity of using it, that should be a giant flashing sign that we really need to dismantle or at least reevaluate. Not little things at the edges, but like the whole fundamental does this make sense? I am a naive person and an optimistic person. I still don't think that that is actually a Republican or a Democratic issue. I think everybody wants roads and bridges and some people at least want transit and rail and some other people want bike lanes, some people want pipes. Whatever it is you want, you should care that it can get built with the smallest amount of taxpayer dollar is in the shortest amount of time. Right. Then you can fight about which kinds of projects you're willing to put that money into. That's political. But whatever project it is like making it hard to build it because there are these rules that we just haven't reconsidered. And again, we can't take them all away. Some of them exist because people would have hired their brother in law and given them the contract. And that's probably not a great thing. That's Mark Dunkleman and the progressives and all that. If you are serious when you say we've gotten to the point where we need to fix permitting and we need to fix project delivery and we need to make sure that we can efficiently build the things that people need with the money that the government has to give them, then it's not a little fix, it's a why can't it look more like rebuilding I95 or Interstate 40? Or why can't it look more like the first six months of how we did the Green Line extension? Like why does it have to take so long? Why do you have to follow this procurement rule and that permanent rule? It's no one's fault. Every single person who put any one of those requirements in place meant well, but we have just added so many over so many decades that we are working at cross purposes to the fundamental objective of building the things people need. Getting a reasonable amount of money at a reasonable amount of time at a reasonable cost.
- [66:20]
Stephanie, I think I've learned more from this conversation than almost any of the interviews that we've recorded. So that's my last question. Thank you very much for joining.
- [66:29]
Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun.
- [66:36]
Sam.