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A state senator is calling for a new safety oversight authority of the MBTA days before he chairs a legislative hearing looking into whether the Department of Public Utilities should continue in that role.

“I like the model of the semi-autonomous state commission,” said Mike Barrett, Senate chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities & Energy. “I think of the Office of Campaign & Political Finance or the inspector general’s office or the Ethics Commission.”

“If the feds are looking for safety oversight to enjoy some separation from gubernatorial power, quasi-independent models offer a path forward,” he added.

Whether the DPU should continue to serve as the “commonwealth’s watchdog over safety on the MBTA,” as the office of Barrett and House Chair Jeff Roy put it, will be the focus of the joint committee’s hearing on Thursday morning.

Legislators also plan to review the DPU’s formal response to the Federal Transit Administration’s Aug. 31 safety management inspection report, which ordered the agency to beef up its staffing and review its independence from the MBTA.

In its response, the DPU outlined a plan to share the results of its workload assessment with the FTA by Dec. 15. Its HR department will then work to create and post jobs to fill identified gaps in resources, and DPU will provide monthly updates on hiring to the feds through 2023.

“The DPU understands its important role as the SSOA and remains committed to ensuring that the MBTA is implementing safety-critical required actions to address the FTA’s immediate safety concerns for MBTA riders and employees,” DPU Chair Matthew Nelson wrote in a Sept. 29 letter to FTA Associate Administrator Joe DeLorenzo.

However, Barrett said the real problem is that the MBTA and the DPU are competing in a very tough labor market for people with the same skill set.

“The best way for the DPU to compete in that type of environment would be for the DPU to let go of the safety auditing function and see it set up in some autonomous function,” he said.

The committee may make a recommendation about continued DPU oversight, but the final decision would come in the form of legislation, Barrett said.

On Thursday, lawmakers will evaluate whether the DPU is “hopelessly compromised” from doing its job because it needs to focus most of its attention on the interrelated questions of climate, energy and the environment, he said.

“They’re certainly stretched too thin,” Barrett said. “In an ideal world, we would move away from the question about whether today’s personnel are doing their jobs and onto the question about whether there’s an institutional alignment here that would beat individual heroic efforts to monitor T safety.”

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