On track to tackle the T?

For no shortage of good reasons, the MBTA has had a long reign as the state agency people love to hate.

Historically, that disdain has extended to Beacon Hill, where periods of benign neglect from the Legislature have alternated with mostly ineffective stabs at solving the authority’s problems.

But however you feel about its parent agency, the T is crucial to life in the city and region. The bill for making it work more efficiently is coming due, and we are in for some serious sticker shock.

In a funding plan to be released Wednesday, the House is calling for devoting $555 million over the next fiscal year to the MBTA, in addition to another $184 million to regional transit agencies. That’s even more than Governor Maura Healey had requested — but probably less than the perennially cash-strapped agency really needs.

Representative Aaron Michlewitz chairs the House Committee on Ways and Means, which writes the chamber’s budget. He said the decision to propose allocating more money to the T shows confidence in the agency’s direction under general manager Phillip Eng.

“Our budget proposal is signifying that for the first time in a long time we have the right person in place to get us where we need to go,” Michlewitz said.

It’s also a byproduct of extra cash, courtesy of the so-called Fair Share Amendment, which levies higher taxes on wealthy people, with the money devoted primarily to transportation and education.

While the financial problems of our transit agency are not new, the picture has gotten darker in the past few years. Longdelayed maintenance has made everything more expensive. Meanwhile, the T’s revenues have dropped in the wake of the pandemic, with fewer people commuting to work every day. Besides that, increased federal aid tied to the pandemic has nearly gone away.

Bottom line: the agency has a projected budget gap of $628 million this year — a number projected to rise to $863 million by 2028.

Those are scary-looking numbers. But Michlewitz argues that while it is high time to face up to them, the T’s financial problems are too big to be fixed overnight.

“Building a more reliable and a safer service will help bring people back to the trains and build a better revenue source,” he said. “It took years of a poorly-run authority to get us to this, and it will take a long-term strong commitment, not just from the Legislature but from the administration to fix it.”

Healey has likewise acknowledged that stabilizing the MBTA’s financing is a longterm project. She has appointed a task force to make recommendations by the end of the year for how to fund the MBTA’s long-term needs.

While I am a longstanding task force skeptic — most of them float ideas that are dead on arrival or quickly forgotten — I take the governor at her word that she’s serious about finally stabilizing the agency.

At this point, there really isn’t any other choice.

The health of the MBTA is important to the state for all kinds of reasons. Thousands of people ride it every day, myself included. But for me, the culture of indifference to the T’s troubles has long been symbolic of a larger issue.

To a troubling degree, state government has allowed the T to limp along because many people on Beacon Hill felt that it wasn’t their problem. They would whisper that their constituents didn’t use the T, or care about it. They thought the T was pretty much a Boston-Cambridge problem, removed from their lives. So there was never any urgency about addressing it.

Rest assured, if they think that way about the MBTA, they think that way about other public policy issues involving poor and working-class people.

So it’s a good thing if the MBTA is now seen as everyone’s problem. That is a much healthier place to start for the people whose job it is to solve it.

It’s certainly true that fixing the MBTA will be a work in progress for years to come. But maybe — maybe — there is real momentum behind getting started on it.