Four new members will join the Massachusetts Department of Transportation Board of Directors at a time when transportation in the greater Boston area is under heavy strain, the Healey administration announced Wednesday morning.
Commuters are about to deal with a month-long shutdown of the Sumner Tunnel, which state officials have pitched as necessary to repair the almost 100-year-old link between East Boston and downtown. That is virtually guaranteed to create traffic headaches across the city, officials said over the weekend.
And federal officials are still scrutinizing the MBTA, where a portion of the Green Line is scheduled to close for 12 days in July for track replacement and new details are emerging about how a Red Line rider was dragged to his death last year at Broadway Station.
The new board members include, for the first time, a person from the disability community, Dr. Lisa Iezzoni, and familiar faces in the transportation policy world like Richard Dimino, who led A Better City for 28 years after working as transportation commissioner for the City Of Boston from 1985 to 1993.
Gov. Maura Healey also appointed Thomas McGee, a longtime politician who served in the state Senate and House and as mayor of Lynn from 2018 to 2022. McGee chairs the MBTA Board of Directors. Ilyas Bhatti, an interim dean at Wentworth Institute of Technology with previous state government experience, rounds out the group.
Healey pitched the four appointments as a group of “talented” and “diverse” leaders who will help “drive the work” of the MassDOT board, an eleven-member body that oversees the Registry of Motor Vehicles, MBTA, and highway, aeronautics, and rail and transit divisions.
“We are particularly proud to be appointing a member of the disability community for the first time in the board’s history,” Healey said. “As a user of the DOT and MBTA systems herself, Dr. Iezzoni will bring a critical perspective to this board that will help us ensure that our transportation system is accessible for people with disabilities.”
Iezzoni has focused on the healthcare experiences and outcomes of persons with disabilities.
She spent 16 years as co-director of research in the general medicine and primary care division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center before working as a professor of medicine based at the Mongan Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Bill Henning, executive director of the Boston Center for Independent Living, first met Iezzoni when she spoke to 10 plaintiffs in the early 2000s who were suing the MBTA over violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Iezzoni had written a book on basic accessibility for the disability community, Henning told the Herald.
“She brings personal experience of navigating communities as a woman with a physical disability, brings an enormous intelligence and inquisitiveness on what is needed. She’s open-minded as well,” Henning said. “There’s obviously accessibility issues with the MBTA.”
Dimino has long worked in the Boston transportation scene, serving as the head of A Better City, an organization representing business leaders focused on transportation, infrastructure, land use and development, and energy and the environment.
A Better City credits Dimino with achieving “major organizational accomplishments,” including influencing a “wide range of city and regional infrastructure projects.”
A Better City President and CEO Kate Dineen said Dimino’s “passion for transportation is surpassed only by his boundless energy and creativity.”
“Under Rick’s leadership, the MassDOT Board will be well-positioned to tackle some of the region’s most pressing challenges and to advance the transformative infrastructure projects needed to deliver sustainable, equitable growth for our communities,” Dineen said in a statement to the Herald.
He was also the chairperson of Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel Project interagency taskforce, which focused on the Big Dig.
Bhatti is the interim dean of Wentworth Institute of Technology’s School of Management and a professor of construction management. He was the director of construction for the Massachusetts Highway Department from 1995 to 1998 and served as the associate project director for the Big Dig.
He served as the commissioner of the Metropolitan District Commission from 1989 to 1995, the predecessor to the Department of Conservation and Recreation.
Bill Geary, who served as the chairman of Metropolitan District Commission from 1983 to 1989, said he “poached” Bhatti to work at the MDC from the Department of Environmental Protection after Bhatti managed to save some face for Geary at a state budget hearing in the 1980s.
Geary was only two weeks into his tenure as head of the MDC when the then-chair of the Senate Ways and Means Committee wanted to know how much water was being drawn from the Sudbury River to a nearby reservoir.
“Seated at the testimony table I had the then-director of the division and his key people. And I’m asking them and they don’t know,” Geary said. “And the chairman seeing us all squirm, he says ‘in this whole auditorium, is there anybody that has the answer?’”
Bhatti raised his hand and offered up the information, Geary said.
“So my top deputy, I write on my legal pad and slide it, I said ‘find out who this asshole is and hire him,’” Geary recounted to the Herald.