It’s easy to call this politics as usual. It’s actually more like pettiness as usual.

Here we go again. Beacon Hill is once again shortchanging T riders, this time by $18 million.

So here’s what happened: After the Red Line derailment in June, Governor Charlie Baker wanted $50 million more this year to spend on our beleaguered MBTA to ensure safety and speed up repairs.

Sure, it’s a drop in the bucket when the maintenance backlog is in the billions of dollars, but the fact that our penny-pinching Republican wants to throw more money at the T is a deal lawmakers should have run with.


Instead, House Speaker Bob DeLeo and Senate President Karen Spilka wanted to show they’re in charge and they’re going to fix transportation, not anyone else.

They whittled the request down to $32 million. Keep in mind, Beacon Hill wasn’t faced with a dilemma here, taking money away from transportation to pay for struggling school districts. This was how to divvy up a $1 billion surplus, the government equivalent of finding coins between the couch cushions.

DeLeo seems to be holding out for a bigger infusion of funds for the T — such as an increase in the gas tax. The House is expected to begin that debate in January. At least that’s the plan today; this game-changing debate was supposed to take place in November — until it didn’t.

Spilka has her transportation working group, yet she has been playing her cards so close to the vest people are wondering if passing a transportation revenue package is even a priority for her this session.

Of course, none of this explains why Beacon Hill is acting like Scrooge when it comes to the MBTA. These are only excuses.


Who suffers? Not Baker. It’s the riders on the T, delayed by yet another mechanical failure, power outage, or whatever indignity du jour awaits us.

The money, outlined by Baker in June, would have been a one-time infusion of $50 million in operating funds to hire additional employees and outside experts to help deliver capital projects, conduct inspections, and improve maintenance. The MBTA has already made 110 hires, and the $18 million would have helped underwrite at least another 75 jobs.

No one in their right mind would think the MBTA doesn’t need that – especially after a scathing report released last Monday showing that safety has not been a priority at the T. One culprit: relying too heavily on long-term capital investments instead of maintaining the existing equipment.

Here’s the thing: We are where we are today — with a bus and rail system in need of massive amounts of money — because of decades of underinvestment.

Governors come and go, but legislators are there for what seems like forever. DeLeo was elected to the House in 1991 and has been speaker for life, I mean, since 2009. Spilka started in the House in 2001 and got elected to the Senate in 2005.

David D’Alessandro, the former John Hancock CEO who led a review of MBTA finances for the Patrick administration in 2009, has long pinned the failure of the system on the Legislature.


“If we’ve had a problem for 20 years, what is the one consistent group who should be watching out for us?” he asked.

In his mind, lawmakers holding hostage T funds was just par for the course.

“Not only have we short-funded you for 20 years, we’re going to do it again,” D’Alessandro said.

Now, some of you may think this is chump change. What’s $18 million when our transportation system by some estimates needs $50 billion to come into the 21st century?

Plus, if the Legislature gives in to Baker’s $50 million, maybe the governor will use it as the reason why the T doesn’t need any more money.

That’s possible, but it’s also petty. The sorry state of our transit system needs every dollar it can get. But once again, our lawmakers are putting politics over people on the T.

Shirley Leung is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @leung.