‘OFFICE OF POSSIBILITIES’ GETS A NEW NAME AT MASSDOT
Just think of the possibilities...
That was the mission of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s so-called “Office of Possibilities” when it was established a year ago under then-Secretary Gina Fiandaca. And it still is now, even as the two-person office has been rebranded with the more mundane, and perhaps less imaginative name, “The Lab @MassDOT.”
The two employees at “The Lab” make a combined $310,579 a year and are tasked with serving as a testing ground for “promising ideas,” the agency said.
The office was renamed after Fiandaca’s departure because “a lab is where experiments occur and ideas” are explored, a MassDOT spokesperson said.
In response to a request for an accounting of the 2023 work product from “The Lab,” a MassDOT spokesperson provided a general overview of what the two-person team does and a handful of examples of their work last year.
One effort saw “The Lab” reach out to transportation officials and experts in New York state to learn about technology that automatically reduces the speed of a vehicle in an effort to keep people from speeding.
The Massachusetts team looked at federal research into speed assist technology, met with the advocacy group America Walks, and attended a National Transportation Safety Board briefing on the matter.
State transportation officials argued the outreach, learning, and understanding of the technology by “The Lab” and an effort to figure out if it could work in Massachusetts is an important part of putting in place safety programs.
The office is also researching the use of telematics to improve infrastructure maintenance and identify locations where unsafe driving occurs. That is on top of testing safety programs like “direct vision” for large trucks, which looks to develop a standard way of measuring a driver’s blind zones.
Both former City of Boston workers, the office’s two employees make $166,400 and $144,179 a year. That is only a fraction of MassDOT’s $407 million payroll in 2023, according to records obtained by the Herald.
Nine employees at MassDOT were paid a total of more than $200,000, according to payroll records. The top paid employees was David Belanger Jr., a senior supervising engineer who earned a total of $234,358 in 2023, including $80,418 in overtime pay.
Another nine employees at the agency made more than $100,000 in overtime pay, with highway maintenance worker Zachary Fuller raking in $141,164 in extra dollars, according to payroll records.
Fiandaca, who officially stopped working for the administration at the end of the year after stepping down as transportation secretary, made a total of $163,829 in 2023 between serving as the head of the agency and later working as a senior advisor in the Healey administration.
Total overtime pay at MassDOT reached over $38 million and buyout pay for just over 440 employees totaled more than $4.4 million, according to state records.