The Boston Globe, 11/14/2001

DOWNTOWN
Fixing Massport

By Steve Bailey

Marshall Carter, the retired chairman of State Street Corp. who was
appointed by Acting Governor Jane Swift to investigate what went wrong at
Massport, is nearing the end of his mission. Carter's view: There is less
wrong with Massport than the people at the top who have been running it.

Carter is careful to say nothing is final until he delivers his commission's
report to the governor on Dec. 3., but as he talks he sounds very much like
a man who knows where he is going. Those who are looking for some big bang,
some dramatic move to scale back the Massachusetts Port Authority's mission
to simply running Logan International Airport well, are likely to be
disappointed.

Carter now believes that an earlier commission of legislators and other
appointees was on track when it assembled the agency in 1956. The goals at
the time: putting the airport and the seaport together to promote both;
removing Massport from the annual state budget to encourage long-term
planning and giving it bonding authority; and building an independent agency
that could attract more professional management.

''There is no question the concept is very valid today,'' Carter says.

Taken together Massport is a $350 million annual enterprise that operates
Logan, two smaller airports, a seaport, a bridge, and is a very large land
owner in South Boston and East Boston. It is a combination that for the most
part makes sense, he believes. Undoing Massport would not be easy, he adds.

One important, time-consuming hurdle would be Massport's bondholders, who
would have to approve breaking up Massport. Carter also believes that it
makes sense for Massport to control the land near the harbor from a planning
standpoint. Million-dollar condos and 24-hour container-truck operations
don't mix, and Massport must be in a position to protect those seaport
operations, he says. The one piece that may be able to be peeled off is the
Tobin Bridge, but he remains undecided.

What needs to be fixed, Carter says, is Massport's management and its
patronage culture. From Steve Tocco to Peter Blute to Ginny Buckingham,
Massport has had one political appointee after another at the top, and none
had the credentials to run the place.

''The Weld and the Cellucci administrations took patronage to a higher
level,'' says Carter.

Patronage has ''four ugly heads'' at Massport, he says: direct job referrals
from people in high places; special jobs created for special friends;
contracts that go to connected people and their companies; and goodies like
ballparks that get spread around the community as a cost of doing business.

''Can you legislate a stop to that? Probably not,'' Carter says.

But you can insist on professional managers and give them the protection it
will take to say no. Carter likes the idea of a full-time chairman for at
least five years, in addition to an executive director. And he wants to give
them five-year contracts.

Confidence is a fragile thing. Change is coming to Massport, the very symbol
of our state's bloated bureacracy, because the cost of looking the other way
has simply gotten too high. Two years ago when Peter Blute got boozed up on
his cruise to nowhere and got tagged in a scheme engineered by his enemies,
it was an amusing episode in the strange way things work at Massport. Who
was surprised that it happened there?

The situation is very different today. We are afraid to get on planes. The
restaurants are hurting. The hotels are hurting. Boston is hurting. And the
shenanigans at Massport are no longer so amusing.

Steve Bailey can be reached at 617-929-2902 or by e-mail at
bailey@globe.com.

This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 11/14/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
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