The Codcast

Three leading transportation advocates – Jim Aloisi of TransitMatters, Chris Dempsey of Transportation for Massachusetts, and Stacy Thompson of the Livable Streets Alliance – ring in the new year on The Codcast with a discussion about priorities.

One of the biggest is putting a price on transportation carbon and using the proceeds to invest in expanded transit options, cleaner vehicles, and climate resiliency. Massachusetts and eight other states plus the District of Columbia plan to spend the next year developing the initiative. Dempsey calls it a “really big deal,” largely because it will provide badly needed revenues that can be used by the participating states to bolster their transit systems and reduce emissions.

According to Gov. Charlie Baker’s Commission on the Future of Transportation, which recommended pursuing a regional price on transportation carbon, the initiative could raise somewhere between $150 million (at $4.50 per ton of carbon) and $500 million (at $15 a ton) a year for Massachusetts. For the average driver, that works out to between $24 and $84 a year.

Jim Aloisi likes to write a holiday verse every year for CommonWealth, and this year he went all out. This year’s ditty is a clever take on linking the Red and Blue Lines. You can read/sing it yourself (to the tune of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) or you can listen to Aloisi and Chris Dempsey, the director of Transportation for Massachusetts, belt it out for you.

Enjoy, and have a happy holiday season!

Republican Jenn Nassour and Democrat Jesse Mermell tee up a year-end conversation for the final 2018 installment of "Disagreeing Agreeably" on the Codcast. To help them, they brought in guests who lean left, political consultant Wilnelia Rivera, and right, Paul Craney of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance.

Asked for a one-word description of politics for the year that was, their guests had starkly contrasting takes. For Craney, it was "boring," as he pointed to the big statewide races that held little suspense. Rivera, who was a strategist on the campaign that delivered the year's biggest upset, Ayanna Pressley's Democratic primary victory over 20-year incumbent congressman Mike Capuano, stuck with the rule by declaring as her word "#disruptthenarrative."

What’s it like to be in charge of nearly half the state budget?

Extraordinarily humbling,” said Marylou Sudders. But don’t confuse humbling with cautious indecision or lack of tenacity.

Gov. Charlie Baker’s health and human services secretary has a reputation for strong leadership and a social worker’s commitment to the enormous range of state programs she oversees, led by the Medicaid program that delivers health care coverage to 1.8 million state residents. Sudders said she is on board for a second Baker term, and highlighted some of the priorities she’ll focus on, including another stab at reining in Medicaid drug costs, an initiative to preserve access to community hospitals, and continued work to ensure access to mental health services.

Sudders said the state has built up a lot of protections against any rollback of the Affordable Care Act, but called herself a “worrier” who nonetheless closely tracks developments outside the state -- prescient words on Friday afternoon, only hours before a federal judge in Texas struck down the entire federal law.

Sudders touched on those topics and more in the inaugural episode of “Health and Consequences,” a new health policy-focused entry to the Codcast line-up being helmed by John McDonough, a one-time Massachusetts legislator who now teaches at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and Paul Hattis of Tufts University’s School of Medicine.“

Emily Rooney, who is celebrating her 20th year hosting Beat the Press on WGBH, says the biggest change she's witnessed over that time period has been in the news-gathering business itself.

In television, the network and local news shows have narrowed their focus and range. Locally, she says, the focus increasingly is on traffic, weather, and "two-bit crime coverage. Anchors, once known by their first names, are now barely known at all."

"Everything looks exactly the same and they've got these fungible anchors that all look the same," she says on The Codcast.

The head of the MBTA’s oversight board says the hoped-for transformation of the transit agency has a long way to go yet.

“We’re still at the very beginning,” says Joseph Aiello, the chair of the MBTA’s Fiscal and Management Control Board. He says the collapse of the T during the winter of 2015 exposed the sorry state of the agency. “We were probably in as dark a hole as you can possibly be in,” he says.

But Aiello is not all gloom and doom. He says the agency is moving ahead with an overhaul of the Red and Orange lines that will double their capacity and committing to an annual maintenance schedule that will prevent the sort of deterioration of service that occurred the last time the two lines were upgraded. “We’ve got a pretty radical transformation going on,” he says.

Some people may have been taken aback by the overflow crowd of 350 people who showed up earlier this month for a Boston City Council hearing in Roxbury to hear concerns about displacement. Kim Janey was not one of them.

“I was not surprised at all,” said Janey, the district city councilor who represents Roxbury along with parts of Dorchester, the South End, and the Fenway.

Janey, who sponsored the November 13 hearing, said concerns about displacement have reached a fever pitch in Roxbury, where housing costs shot up by 70 percent from 2010 to 2015, twice the rate of the overall citywide appreciation of 36 percent during that period. “People are feeling the heat,” she said on this week’s Codcast. “People are being pushed out of our neighborhood. And so we need to come up with creative solutions to keep residents who want to be in Roxbury in Roxbury.”

Rep. O'Day discusses National Grid legislation by CommonWealth Beacon

It feels like an odd time to be celebrating charter school success in Massachusetts, but that’s just what Cara Candal does in a new book that not only touts the schools, but telegraphs a bold claim about them in its title.

The Fight for the Best Charter Public Schools in the Nation, published by the charter-friendly public think tank Pioneer Institute where Candal is a senior fellow, leaves no doubt about the author’s view of the independently operated, but publicly funded, schools that were first authorized in the state’s 1993 Education Reform Act.

But Candal is an honest broker. She doesn’t ignore criticism of charters, such as their long-standing practice in the past of not “backfiling” empty seats during the school year. And she says charters have, as some critics charge, not always made good on the promise that these schools would share with districts best practices and other lessons to improve education more broadly.

Making getting to Logan easier by CommonWealth Beacon