Kudos to Christine Todd, chair of the Dukes County Commission, for publicly speaking out on the deplorable situation at the Steamship Authority. Her voice along with that of the Falmouth port council representative Robert Munier appears to have finally convinced Bob Davis to step down as the CEO. His tenure as CEO has been marked by ballooning budgets and declining service. To assume that his departure will solve the issues is a big mistake. He will be the CEO for another year and then will be a paid “consultant.” The cause of the problems extends throughout the management team.

Those of us on the Vineyard who have been the casualties of this service should not be heaving a sigh of relief because, as Ms. Todd points out, the problems at the SSA start at the Board of Governors and extend through all the top management. The board has rubber stamped all of Davis’ projects including the expansion of the Woods Hole terminal, the purchase of multiple ferries and the ridiculous project to create a new WEB interface.

All these endeavors have resulted in huge cost overruns with little benefit to the users of the SSA. Are the staff shortages due to the inability to recruit new employees because of a toxic environment? I have heard strong complaints from many of the senior crew members. Where are the next generation of captains to replace those that are near retirement age?

The latest announcement of the price increases due to a multimillion-dollar budget increase is horrible and totally unnecessary had the board and management been focused on the traveling public. The board has fiduciary responsibility but has failed in this essential task. The board rubber stamped all the huge cost overruns. The board should never have agreed to all the waste to begin with and should now be trimming the budget to eliminate the need for the increases.

Let us not forget that the increase in cost for any of us to purchase a ticket is just one part of the impact. It will also mean that the cost of almost all the goods and services that we buy will increase. This in turn results in the continued displacement of the working people on which the Island depends who can no longer afford to live here. Affordable housing is a necessary requirement to enable families to live here, but it is not sufficient.

To complicate the situation even more the structure of the SSA board suffers from badly misaligned goals of the five entities that comprise the board. This most glaring are the differences between the Vineyard and Nantucket. Despite both being Islands, the needs of these two places related to the ferry service are very different.

There needs to be a complete revamping of the culture at the SSA and that means new blood.

We have personally experienced the same issues that we continually hear from everyone on the Island: cancelled trips, missed medical appointments, lack of information about the status, inaccurate information about standby lines and lack of transparency of the operations of the SSA. Enough is enough.

The fight has just begun to make the SSA a customer responsive organization. Thank you Christine Todd.

Bob Rosenbaum, Bob Zeltzer

Chilmark