AFTER SEVEN MONTHS of rubber-stamping nearly everything put before it, the MBTA board of directors this week balked, at least for a month, at approving a $102 million, five-year contract to hire 200 Transit Ambassadors.

Transit Ambassadors are the MBTA’s greeters. Assigned to 68 station locations, they help customers needing directions, buying tickets, or finding the best route to their destination. They are also the T’s eyes and ears in stations, monitoring whether elevators, escalators, and ticket gates are working properly.

The Transit Ambassador program was launched in 2017 and the initial contract with MyDatt Services of Nashville is set to expire at the end of June. T officials notified more than 200 vendors that it was looking to sign a new five-year contract and expand to 30 more locations. Only two companies showed any interest, and MyDatt was the only company to submit a bid. 

Jeff Cook, the T’s procurements chief, said the transit authority allowed the two companies that showed some interest to submit best and final offers. MyDatt complied, shaving its bid by $470,000, Cook said. 

Members of the MBTA board were astounded at the size of the contract and the lack of interest. Robert Butler, a labor union official, said he was not a fan of the contract. “I find it impossible that a company out of Tennessee is going to come in here and give us 200 people,” he said.

Travis McCready, an executive director at JLL, said several times that the contract was very large. “I’m very surprised about the size of the contract and the lack of responsiveness to the RFP,” he said. 

Cook explained that MyDatt basically acts as a hiring agent for the T, which trains the workers. Cook said MyDatt and the T discovered early on in the original contract that paying $17 an hour was not enough to attract workers, so the pay was raised to $18 an hour, then to $19, and finally to the current level of $20.16 an hour. Cook said he did not know what other benefits the workers received and offered to check. 

McCready said the 15 percent target for minority hires seemed low, but T officials said the company far exceeds that level currently, with 80 percent of the workers and 70 percent of the managers people of color.

Betsy Taylor, the chair of the board, asked why the T didn’t hire the workers and dispense with MyDatt. Cook said it was determined in 2017, when the program was launched, that it would be cheaper to contract out for the workers.

Steve Poftak, the T’s general manager, said he would prefer to leave the Transit Ambassador hiring to someone else. “We have hundreds of positions open and we have chosen to prioritize safety positions and direct service positions, particularly bus operators,” he said. “The notion of internally standing up another function would be very difficult for the T to do at the current time and would be dilutive of those efforts.”

Jamey Tesler, who serves on the T board as the secretary of transportation, recommended putting off a vote on the contract for at least a month, allowing Cook to provide more information on the company’s benefits. Cook said he would seek an extension of MyDatt’s current contract to give the T board more time to review the new one.