The Globe reports Jeffrey Mullan will depart as state transportation secretary this fall because he needs to make more money, not because of any concerns over his handling of Big Dig safety issues.
Mullan, however, issued a statement after the Globe report came out:
Reports of my departure as Secretary of Transportation this fall are premature.
The Globe reports MassDOT Secretary Jeff Mullan, who previously said he didn't tell the governor or the public about crashing, corroding Big Dig light fixtures to let his underlings get to the bottom of the problem, now says what really happened is that those underlings didn't tell him about the problem for a month.
The Globe reports the latest on the plummeting light fixture in the Big Dig: Transportation officials withheld news for a month and it turns out the "stem to stern" investigation ordered by the Romney administration didn't include actually disassembling any of the fixtures to see if they were rotting from within, which, it turns out, some were.
Gabrielle Gurley says that needs to be Jeff Mullan's top priority as new transportation secretary:
... Those managers should receive a new mandate: the introduction of fail-safe procedures that ensure that all passengers (especially those stranded in tunnels between stations) receive timely and accurate information about incidents; that employees are deployed in affected areas with technologies that allow them to communicate with large numbers of people, that shuttle services become dependable modes of transport to be used instead of avoided; and that the MBTA website, rather than Universal Hub or Boston.com, becomes the go-to source for real time news about system failures. ...
Say hello to Jeff Mullan, who will become head of the new mega Department of Transportation on Nov. 1:
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