Gov. Paul LePage last week said he was putting a halt to a $19 million bus rehab contract between Maine and the operators of the Massachusetts “T” because Maine had underbid the project.
But workers at the former Loring Air Force base are still on the job this week, and the state’s adjutant general says he’s hopeful that Maine and the Boston-area transit system can find a way to complete the project.
Two years ago, the Maine Military Authority won the contract with the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority to refurbish 32 articulated public transit buses. The contract has helped keep about 50 workers on the job at the Limestone facility, and they’ve completed repairs on 11 buses so far.
But Brig. Gen. Douglas Farnham, the LePage administration’s top military official, says the buses are costing more to finish than the contract pays.
“There was an expectation that the deficit or negative cash that would go along with each bus would shrink and would shrink rapidly, and you’d start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I don’t think that’s happened as quickly as anybody hoped that it would,” he says. “And so you get to a certain point and you say, ‘We need to take a time-out and make sure we look at this and act appropriately.’“
The Limestone workers are experienced in refurbishing military Humvees and, more recently, school buses. But the complexity of the articulated transit buses has been a challenge, Farnham says, with more work than expected and unanticipated costs for parts and other expenses.
Farnham says he is still trying to get a detailed understanding of those costs.
A copy of the contract provided by the MBTA shows that there can be strong penalties in the event of failure to meet its terms, and it does not appear to allow for a unilateral work suspension by Maine officials. But it also includes language indicating that Massachusetts officials could allow a delay and financial adjustments if they determine that there has been “an increase or decrease in the actual cost of performance of the contract.”
Farnham says it’s in both parties’ interest to make sure the project does not come “crashing down.”
“Nobody wants to go there,” he says. “So what we are looking for is how do we go from where we are now to we get to a place where MBTA is happy, the facility at Loring continues to do the quality work that they’ve been known for almost two decades for, and we all come out in the right place.”
A spokesman for the MBTA says that so far, it has paid $6.7 million to the Maine Military Authority for bus rehab. Farnham says determining just how much of a loss the Maine taxpayers have already taken is one of the things he’s still trying to figure out.
