State Inspector General Visits Nantucket To Discuss His Steamship Authority Investigation

State officials suggested Monday that a closer look at the Steamship Authority’s governing structure could be incoming, but emphasized that the veto power currently held by the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard is not under threat.

“The legislature will pass no changes to the Steamship Authority that would diminish the weighted vote or the influence that island voices from Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket both have,” state Senator Julian Cyr, who represents Nantucket in the Massachusetts Senate, said. Cyr is the assistant majority whip in the Senate.

The comments came at a public meeting on Nantucket focused on a scathing report from the Inspector General that accused the Steamship Authority of wasting millions of public dollars on a failed website redesign project that the state says was “doomed from the start.”

“The board members who serve…their focus is geography and where they’re from,” Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro said, speaking in favor of changes that would add members to the Steamship Authority’s Board of Governors with specific relevant technical experience. “You might have four voices, whether it’s a finance person, or a technology person, or a governance person, and their function is just to continue to remind the board what that role is.”

Shapiro’s report outlines a lengthy list of administrative failures over the course of a blistering 59-page document. Calling the website redesign process a “cascade of failures,” Shapiro lambasted the Steamship Authority for “poor project leadership and decision-making,” stemming in part from what he characterized as a failure to recognize “a plethora of information indicating that the underlying reservation system should have received priority” over redesigning the front-facing website. The Current covered the report in full here.

“The complaints about the Steamship Authority have been mounting,” Cyr said. “We have heard quite a bit, particularly from Martha’s Vineyard.”

Nantucket Select Board member Brooke Mohr agreed that including experts with technical skills on the board of the Steamship Authority could be a beneficial change, but reiterated the importance of protecting the power of the islands.

“The community members from the islands really do [need to] have control over a lot of the decision-making, because we rely on this,” Mohr said. “But I think the idea of bringing these subject-matter experts to the table to support management in a collaborative way is a good one.”

Shapiro’s report was sharply critical of outgoing Steamship Authority general manager Bob Davis, who the Inspector General said “continually exercised poor judgment during the project, regularly misdirected the Board about the project’s status, and appointed an unqualified project manager who proved incapable of making informed and timely decisions.” Shapiro criticized the Authority’s board for agreeing to keep Davis on as a senior advisor after he leaves his position as general manager, a decision he claims could “impede the new general manager from setting his course for the Steamship Authority.”

At Monday’s meeting, current Steamship General Manager Alex Kryska defended Davis’s ongoing role.

“It’s a wealth of knowledge that I’m not about to throw away,” Kryska said. “He’s not in a senior leadership position at this point, so he’s not leading any of the teams…he’s just an advisor at this point.”

Shapiro also clarified that, while his report alleges a major waste of taxpayer dollars, he does not believe any fraud was committed.

“There’s nothing to suggest that anyone did anything with malicious intent,” he said.

The conversation also veered into a discussion of a controversial bill proposing term limits for the Steamship Authority board. While Martha’s Vineyard leaders have been divided on the bill, the Nantucket Select Board came out unanimously against the proposal in August.

“Nantucket has come out against it, and the reason we’ve come out against it is these are jobs that are hard to fill in a small community,” Mohr said. “These jobs are big, they require a lot of time, and people are struggling to make ends meet to live here.”

Advocates argue the bill could lead to beneficial turnover in the Steamship Authority’s leadership and changes to the way it operates. Opponents worry the bill could make it difficult to keep the seats filled and might cost the Steamship Authority experienced, knowledgeable leaders.