Transit officials knew for a dozen years of a hole in the two-foot-deep ceiling of a subway tunnel on the Lexington Avenue line, but they did nothing to fix it, the president of New York City Transit said yesterday. According to the transit official, Lawrence Reuter, the hole led to short circuits and three power failures that crippled service on March 15.

The manmade hole was created as long ago as 1993 to give workers access to the tunnel below Park Avenue South and 33rd Street. Later, when it was no longer needed, workers assumed the hole was still in use and ignored it, Mr. Reuter told a City Council committee. Eventually, water seeped into the tunnel and short-circuited the electrical system, throwing the commuting schedules of 350,000 riders on one of the city’s most heavily used subway lines into disarray.

That hole and a similar one near the Pacific Street station in Brooklyn have since been filled, Mr. Reuter said.

The major service disruption was one of three last month – including a fire at the Atlantic Avenue station and a fire affecting the no. 7 line – that led riders to feel the subway system was fast deteriorating.

That concern prompted a special hearing yesterday of the council’s Committee on Transportation.

Mr. Reuter attempted to placate council members’ concerns, denying accusations that subway maintenance had declined. Instead, he said that by almost every measurement, the subway has improved since the first capital program was introduced in 1982 to resuscitate an ailing transit network.

“The proof is in the pudding, the proof is in the numbers,” he told the committee. “The numbers really speak very clearly. The system is getting better. It’s safer, it’s more reliable, it per forms far better than it did in the past.”

Exceptions, he acknowledged, include an increase in delays by 12% since 2003. He attributed that to an increase in track repairs. In addition, subway fires saw a 5.8% increase in 2004 compared to 2003.

Mr. Reuter’s assurances did little to assuage the doubts of council members, some of whom recalled similar declarations in the late 1970s from the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Harold Fisher.

At the time, G. Oliver Koppell of the Bronx was a member of the state Assembly and head of the committee that oversees the MTA.

“The system was on the verge of total breakdown, and he [Fisher] said to me, ‘We’ve got all the money for maintenance,'” Mr. Koppell told Mr. Reuter. “So when you say you’ve got plenty of money for maintenance, I look at it with a little bit of a jaundiced eye.”

Transit union officials said the MTA, to save money in the short term, has begun to defer maintenance. The agency reduced the number of track cleaners to 18 from 72. Officials of New York City Transit said they made up for that loss in 2003 by purchasing a second train that vacuums track debris, an addition that helped increase the amount of garbage collected in the system to 15,000 tons last year from 12,000 tons in 1997.

A representative of the Independent Budget Office, while supportive of the way New York City Transit allocated its resources in the last capital plan, agreed that the MTA has “reached a point of crisis in its capital financing.” The state legislature and the governor have underfinanced the modest 6% increase in subsidies that the MTA requested in its 2005-2009 capital plan, and without proper financial support the subways will face a “rapid deterioration,” the budget office’s deputy director, Preston Niblack, told the committee.