Massport under the microscope

By Scot Lehigh, Globe Staff, 9/28/2001

IT'S THE BLUE-ribbon commission versus the patronage leviathan.

Acting Governor Jane Swift yesterday appointed an impressive group to mull
reforms at the Massachusetts Port Authority. For a primer on the agency
they're about to tackle, let's take the time machine back to early 1999.

Governor Paul Cellucci had just ordered the authority to give a cushy job to
state Representative Gus Serra, an East Boston Democrat who had broken party
ranks to back him over Scott Harshbarger in the 1998 gubernatorial race. Now
Massport executive director Peter Blute and his aides faced the task of
coming up with a title that sounded weighty enough to justify Serra's
$119,000 salary.

''How about special assistant for projects?'' came one suggestion.

That, everyone agreed, put a plausible polish on the latest patronage plum.
Until Blute raised a question: ''Didn't we give that to Franklin
Ollivierre?'' Certainly it was easy to overlook Ollivierre, who, on a scale
running from essential to superfluous, ranked somewhere to the right of a
sixth wheel. But when, in December of 1997, Cellucci had foisted his
embattled elder affairs secretary on Massport, he had come to the agency
with just that title to justify his $73,000 job.

Unenthusiastic about Ollivierre, Blute had balked at hiring Serra.

Couldn't the low-energy legislative lifer be off-loaded at the Massachusetts
Turnpike Authority instead, he had asked. Whereupon the Massport chief had
been summoned to the State House and subjected to a little political
reeducation by the governor himself.

''I was basically read the riot act,'' Blute recalls. ''I had never seen
Paul Cellucci that angry. He said this was something he wanted. He got a
little red-faced. He said do it. And we did it.''

And so Serra got his sinecure. And the title of director of strategic
planning. Has he been doing anything remotely useful at the authority?

''Not while I was there,'' says Blute.

Thus it goes at Massport. Patronage has always been par for the course at
the authority, though in the Cellucci years it was particularly odoriferous.

One person remembers that, back in the days when he was executive director,
Stephen Tocco balked at taking a covey of hacklets that the governor's
office wanted to roost there. That occasioned a livid phone call from
Virginia Buckingham, then a top Weld-Cellucci aide.

''She called up and threatened Tocco's job if he didn't stop complaining
about patronage hires,'' this source recalls.

Swift herself is part of that history. When she came looking for a job after
losing a 1996 congressional bid, Blute remembers, she wanted to be director
of international marketing. Did that mean getting rid of the person already
performing well in the job, a perplexed Blute asked then Governor Weld?

Weld hadn't considered that. ''Well, just find her a good place,'' he
answered, reflecting the prevailing mindset that Massport's payroll could
expand endlessly to meet political needs. So Swift became the $78,000
director of regional airport development, staying 10 months until a real
job - state director of consumer affairs - opened up.

Now the authority is under fire as the departure point for the two hijacked
planes that destroyed the World Trade Center. Absent more compelling
evidence, it's an unfair leap to say that Massport's habit of stuffing the
payroll with ill-qualified political hires is to blame for the tragedy.

After all, the airlines, which are primarily responsible for the security
checkpoints, have fought efforts to professionalize the work force. And the
FAA appears to have performed more like a captive agency than a tough
regulator.

Still, the tragedy has cast a spotlight on a rotten apple of an authority -
and the out-of-control patronage culture of the recent past. As a
beneficiary of that culture, Swift may seem an implausible reformer. Yet her
experience at Massport should give her ample personal knowledge of the
problems.

Her commission is a first step - but only that. With Massport finally under
the media microscope, what Swift does to overhaul the patronage-pocked
agency will be a crucial test of her own commitment to abandon the practices
of her predecessor and embrace a better brand of politics.

This story ran on page A21 of the Boston Globe on 9/28/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
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