Commonwealth Magazine | By Michael Jonas | June 26, 2015

The temperature is rising on Beacon Hill in the battle over reforms to the much maligned MBTA.

The Globe‘s David Scharfenberg reports today that both sides in the T debate are turning up the heat, with the Carmen’s Union that represents MBTA workers hitting the airwaves with a new radio ad blasting efforts by the Baker administration to win more leeway to privatize T services. Meanwhile, the conservative Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance is blasting the “union bosses” holding back progress.

But you don’t need to tell us that things are getting testy. Wednesday’s Download included a link to a Boston Herald story on the Carmen’s Union ad campaign. The Download item, using the same language as theHerald piece, referred to the union effort to block the administration’s attempt to suspend the “anti-privatization” Pacheco law. That prompted a call to CommonWealth yesterday from Sen. Marc Pacheco.

The Taunton Democrat, who may be the only legislator in recent memory to have his name so closely tied to a piece of legislation, authored the 22-year-old statute that sets up a complicated set of rules governing the ability to privatize state services. Pacheco says use of the term “anti-privatization” to describe the law is a mischaracterization. “We didn’t pick a side,” he says of the 1993 passage of the law, insisting that the Legislature simply set up clear rules to oversee privatization efforts that were running wild with little accountability under the Weld administration. The goal, he says, was to ensure that any outside contractor actually brought real savings to the state.

So, strictly speaking, might Pacheco’s signature legislation be better called a privatization-regulating or privatization-limiting law?

He has always had a much grander vision for it. “I’ve referred to it since the time we got it passed as the ‘Taxpayer Protection Act,’” says Pacheco. He insists that the law, far from being the union-friendly boondoggle critics call it, guards against taxpayers getting fleeced. Pacheco says there were all sorts of allegations of people exiting the Weld administration and “setting up deals for themselves” through overpriced privatized services. The law aimed “to stop the revolving door that was going on,” he says.

He points out that 80 percent of all applications to privatize services under the rules of the Pacheco law have been approved. Critics say Pacheco’s defense of the law is a weak one, and charge that the statute establishes a byzantine set of rules and regulations that have made it nearly impossible to privatize, and so few attempts have been made. If the anti-privatizing shoe fits, they say, the law needs to wear it.

Pacheco acknowledges the law’s critics have largely won the framing war. “They’ve been very good at getting that narrative out there, to the extent that even credible journalists use it,” he says. A quick check shows “anti-privatization” used not only by the Herald but also by the play-it-down-the-middle Associated Press.

And then, in a special category, there is Globe columnist Scot Lehigh, who has been the most consistent and vociferous critic of the law, and who certainly doesn’t shrink from the anti-privatization phraseology.

“He should send me a thank you for probably about 40 columns over the years,” says Pacheco.