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One month after the state’s Inspector General released a report detailing “mismanagement” of the Pope’s Island Marina, the New Bedford Port Authority has responded, saying the report’s findings were “flawed” and its recommendations “pedantic.”
“As financial investigations go, this was not a serious effort,” wrote Gordon Carr, executive director of the New Bedford Port Authority (NBPA), in a Dec. 18 letter to the Inspector General.
“In the course of its two-year investigation, the [Inspector General] sought to interview neither the NBPA’s Executive Director, CFO, its General Counsel, the manager of the Pope’s Island Marina, nor any other NBPA employee,” Carr wrote. He said the investigators “did not request copies of the NBPA’s foundational financial records, such as its audit reports, annual budgets, or profit and loss statements.”
“There is no indication in the report that [Inspector General’s] officials ever set foot in New Bedford to examine the marina,” according to Carr.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Inspector General did not respond to specific questions, but offered the following statement: “The Office of the Inspector General stands by our letter.” The Inspector General’s critique of the marina was previously reported by The Light.
Carr and the local port authority responded to most accusations with two defenses: first, that the investigation missed key information or misunderstood what it found; and that the lack of evidence (especially for rental payments) did not substantiate the findings.
Carr pointed out that law requires agencies to retain records for a limited period, and said that all such “missing” records were outside the retention period. He said the findings were similar to saying, “If a person cannot produce his grocery bills from 20 years ago, the possibility that he was shoplifting food cannot be ruled out.”
On issues of maintenance, the Port Authority said the Inspector General misunderstood ongoing issues, but did not deny that they existed. Instead, the Port Authority said that the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) was to blame.
“The [Inspector General] is correct that DCR should have undertaken the capital replacement of the docks long ago. But it could not be more wrong in concluding that the NBPA was not properly maintaining the docks,” Carr wrote.
According to Carr, workers at the marina went above and beyond to perform regular maintenance on the docks. A 2020 report that showed the docks were beyond their useful life was treated “as though it were a smoking gun,” Carr said, “when in fact the NBPA’s purpose in commissioning the report was to demonstrate to DCR that the docks” needed replacing.
In Carr’s telling, his organization is “a port agency that has done everything it could to keep the marina going, despite the state’s failure to pull its own weight.”
Meanwhile, Carr said that DCR “has a checkered history in managing state assets over several gubernatorial administrations, and a chronic lack of investment from the legislature.” He continued, saying that, “We have been extremely frustrated in our dealings with the agency. But the [Inspector General] had no basis to accuse the NBPA likewise of shirking its responsibilities.”
An ongoing battle to care for New Bedford’s waterfront
The Port Authority’s letter also describes a tortuous history of caring for the city’s waterfront assets, in which the city, its state representatives, and relevant state agencies all seemed to talk past each other.
Going back to 2012, Carr said, the Port Authority had found that the marina’s docks were “nearing the end of their useful life.” It commissioned reports to prove so, but “DCR still undertook no discernable effort to replace the docks.”
In 2014, state Rep. Antonio Cabral helped the Port Authority go around the state agency, Carr wrote, securing $4.1 million in funding through an environmental bond bill, to help the state replace the docks.
Some new docks were installed, but the overall situation had changed little. It’s unclear if there was ever a signed lease that specifically described the responsibility for undertaking capital improvement (the lack of which was one of the Inspector General’s key findings). According to Carr, “special permits” that the Port Authority signed with DCR “incorporated the lease by reference,” and those permits did not make NBPA responsible for capital improvements.
In 2021, Mayor Jon Mitchell got involved, and “proposed a last-resort alternative” in which DCR would give up its ownership of the marina. Over the course of three years, until 2024, this plan seemed to advance, but then fell apart when the state “changed its mind.”
Then, state Rep. Chris Hendricks tacked an amendment onto a state law in 2024 that “imposed caps on slip fees, arbitrary spending limitations, and an unrealistic lease term,” according to Carr. Failure to meet these stipulations meant the state could look for a new tenant, besides the Port Authority. And this year, it began the process of looking for a new tenant.
All the while, some of the marina’s assets seem to have deteriorated, according to Carr’s own admission. He described the marina as “a fully depreciated asset whose book value now is close to zero.”
Carr said that no private investor would be interested in taking over the marina, but that the city is committed to operating it to support small businesses and recreation.
At present, slip fees at the marina are 50% below the prevailing market rate in the region, which Carr said “fairly reflect[s] the fact that the docks were older than their expected useful life.”
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
Time to get State Run Agencies out of New Bedford and return these properties for use to grow private industry. Talk about boost for economic growth, the Marina, State Pier, and the Wind Terminal properties would bring in plenty of revenue to help the city tax wows.
This is such an important resource to .1% of the residents of New Bedford.