Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Who's Minding the Store at MassPike?

The Boston Globe reported today that several Amorello loyalists left the Turnpike Authority today as chairman Matt Amorello's resignation took effect. I'm wondering if anyone's minding the store over at the Turnpike offices during the transition period. After all, let's not forget what happened the last time a Mass Pike Chairman was ousted:

[The Inspector General's] Office's investigation has determined that thousands of pages of documents are missing. When asked by an investigator from this Office about the whereabouts of the missing documents, the Turnpike Chairman stated that after his arrival at the Turnpike, in April 2000, file cabinets had been emptied and computer hard drives had been "sand blasted so data could never be recovered from them, and so that the computers wouldn't even turn on." According to the Communications Security Systems Directorate of the U.S. Army, computer hard drives are "sand blasted" for data security reasons as follows: "[the] equipment is taken completely apart and the hard drive disk is literally sandblasted with a sandblaster so as to render the disk permanently unreadable."

The Chairman also informed an investigator from this Office that after the Chairman's arrival at the Turnpike, a former MassHighway staff person was caught on video surveillance tapes removing boxes of material from Turnpike offices at Ten Park Plaza in Boston. This removal of material occurred during four trespasses or break-ins over a three-day period. The purpose of the trespass was presumably to remove files from Turnpike offices.
The last thing we need is a repeat of these shenanigans in the chaos of employee turnover.