What better place for “Dr.” Beverly Scott’s next soft landing than the National Transportation Safety Board?
The NTSB has as its mission, among other duties, the investigation of train wrecks, and who better to probe train wrecks than a train wreck like Bev Scott?
Another nationwide search, and if you dare question her qualifications, then you are immediately labeled a … well, you know.
The doctor (Ph.D. from Howard, B.A. from Fisk) once scoffed at the MBTA infrastructure as “no spring chicken,” which is an apt description of herself at age 65. But now her dear friend Barack, like her dear friend Deval before him, is taking care of Dr. Scott with a $155,000 a year sinecure for five years.
So she wedges her snout into yet another new trough and starts working on a federal pension, on top of God only knows how many others she’s already grabbing.
Eat your heart out, Olga Roche and Sherri Killins and Andrea Cabral and Ron Bell and Carl Stanley McGee and all the rest of Deval’s greedy coatholders. Bev’s died and gone to hack heaven. Not bad for an MBTA boss who, in retrospect, makes her predecessor Richard Davey look like Steve Jobs.
What would Bev call this kind of score?
“Makin’ a way outta no way,” she said last winter, when the MBTA was absolutely paralyzed by snow and the banana-republic work ethic of Deval’s appointees.
Gore Vidal once said, No talent is not enough. But for Bev, it has been. And still is, apparently.
Like her mentors Barack Obama and Deval Patrick, Beverly Scott is never held accountable for her failures, or anything else for that matter. She never pays the price. Think of her as a professional fare-jumper, with one, and only one, qualification. She’s the right demographic.
But sooner or later, usually sooner, the incompetence catches up to Bev. The optics outweigh the demographics, and it’s time to move on, just like she did from Atlanta to Boston.
We knew she was lugging a lot of baggage with her when she arrived from
Atlanta. What we didn’t realize at the time was that the bags were full of her dirty laundry, which she was planning to have cleaned at the five-star hotels she junketed to every couple of weeks, charging everything to the taxpayers of Massachusetts.
“Flyin’ like an eagle” — those are some more of Bev Scott’s words, and they aptly sum up her lackluster career.
This is a woman who doubled the number of T employees — as opposed to workers — making over $100,000 a year. Just last year, she added 213 Friends of Deval to the T payroll. She bemoaned the lack of funds to deal with blizzards, after signing off on a state capital expenditures budget of $6.2 billion that included $2.83 million for “snow-fighting equipment.”
That’s one-twentieth of one percent, for those of you keeping score at home.
But by God, she is ready for her new slot on the federal mammary.
“I’ve been through hurricanes,” she said last February, “I’ve been through World Trade Center bombings, tornadoes coming, 30 inches, 36 inches and all so this ain’t this woman’s first rodeo.”
Let’s just hope it’s her last, but I’m not optimistic. Old hacks never die, they don’t even fade away. They just go somewhere else and screw up all over again.
Listen to Howie 3-7 p.m. on AM 680 WRKO.
