MA: GM Phil Eng pushes back on report about increased costs at the T

The T’s general manager is pushing back on a recent think tank report that shows costs up year over year at the public transit agency, noting that the bus and rail operator has completed four decades of maintenance in a matter of months.

According to GM Phil Eng, the study by the fiscal watchdog Pioneer Institute fails to note what people have gotten for their money: a faster, more reliable MBTA.

“If you really think back to what we inherited — which you don’t need me to validate, you can ask the public — the service was not what was needed. It was a lot of safety concerns, there were slow trips, long trips, and unreliable service for the public,” Eng told the Herald in an exclusive interview Tuesday.

Since then, through programs like the agency’s Track Improvement Program, the system went from one hobbled by more than 200 speed restrictions required to navigate stretches of track hampered by delayed maintenance, to one with no standing restrictions in place anymore.

That massive amount of work, according to Eng, only took 14 months instead of the 40 years worth of weekend and overnight closures it might have taken to accomplish, and that’s to say nothing of the additional maintenance that was done at the same time to improve signals and upgrade train stations.

Eng acknowledged that some costs are up, but they are up after the Federal Transit Administration inspected the T and found that disinvestment had left it in terrible condition. The FTA recommended a paradigm shift at the T, and that’s what the Healey-Driscoll Administration and the Legislature have delivered, Eng said.

The results of that report, Eng said, probably weren’t a surprise to anyone who used the T three years ago. At the same time, anyone using it today wouldn’t be able to tell how bad things were until very recently, Eng said.

“Again, you don’t need me to validate that, just look at the public comments,” he told the Herald.

The Pioneer Institute study released Monday found operating costs at the T had climbed since the agency’s Fiscal and Management Control Board was disbanded in 2021.

In the pair of years that followed, costs were up by almost 6% year over year. From fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2024, costs jumped by 15%, with a sizable chunk of the increased spending due to extra overtime.

In 2021 the MBTA paid out $85.3 million in overtime wages. By 2024, the figure had jumped to $126.4 million.

“In 2024, 117 MBTA employees earned more than $100,000 in overtime, and 76 were paid more in overtime than in base pay,” the Pioneer study authors found.

According to Eng, that extra money needed to be spent.

Beyond that, he said, not pushing off maintenance for some other administration to handle somewhere down the line will likely save the agency money in the long run. Sometimes you have to spend money to save money, Eng said.

“I actually believe we saved money by doing it in the manner that we did,” he said. “That was record work."

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