Governor Paterson has appointed a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Richard Ravitch, to lead a special commission that will take on the MTA’s budget shortfalls.

Mr. Paterson said the commission, comprising business and civic leaders and economists, would be charged with balancing the MTA’s capital plan, analyzing aspects of Mayor Bloomberg’s defeated congestion pricing plan that could still be used, and ending what Mr. Paterson calls the MTA’s habit of “refinancing and basically covering debt with excessive borrowing.”

“By 1998 in this country, the five largest borrowers were the state of California, the state of New York, the city of New York, the state of Massachusetts, and the MTA. The MTA doesn’t even have a governor and they are the fifth-largest debtor in the entire country. That has to be changed,” Mr. Paterson said in a speech yesterday at a breakfast in Midtown hosted by the Association for a Better New York.

In 1975, Mr. Ravitch was appointed chairman of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, and he was later credited with maintaining the agency’s solvency. He served as chairman of the MTA between 1979 and 1983, and was a Democratic mayoral candidate in 1989 but lost in the primary to Mayor Dinkins.

In a phone interview yesterday, Mr. Ravitch said Mr. Paterson approached him about the position on Monday. “I am not sure it is anything but a Sisyphean task, but I will undertake it with energy and enthusiasm,” he said.

Mr. Ravitch has been a frequent critic of the MTA. In a recent interview with The New York Sun, he criticized the authority’s handling of the bidding process for the development rights to the West Side rail yards, which it later awarded to Tishman Speyer. Mr. Ravitch called the process “ill-conceived” and said he did not believe that “the MTA can get the ultimate real value of that area until the economy turns around.”

A professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, Mitchell Moss, praised the appointment, noting Mr. Ravitch’s track record of implementing fiscal restraint. “Dick Ravitch is to state government financing what Donnie Walsh is to the Knicks,” Mr. Moss said, referring to the basketball team’s new president.

Mr. Paterson said the MTA’s capital plan has a shortfall of between $11 billion and $13.5 billion, and that the agency has fallen behind schedule and budget on a number of its development projects, notably the new Fulton Street transit hub. Last month, the MTA said it would have to postpone a $30 million package of service improvements that it had promised to riders because of a lack of funding.

“We look forward to working with the commission to identify funding sources for the MTA’s critical funding needs,” a spokesman for the MTA, Jeremy Soffin, said.