MBTA OFFICIALS, who have been considering privatization of three bus maintenance garages to cut costs, say they reduced spending on bus repairs by 16 percent over a four-month period through management initiatives using existing T workers.

A presentation by MBTA General Manager Luis Ramirez on Monday said the T spent $36.3 million on bus maintenance from July through October this year, compared to $43.4 million during the same period last year. Wages, overtime, and the cost of materials each fell by $2 million.

A separate presentation by Jeffrey Gonneville, the T’s deputy general manager, said the cost per bus revenue hour at the Cabot Garage in Boston has fallen from $36.60 in January to $25.23 in October, a 31 percent reduction. Gonneville said the purchase of new buses to replace older vehicles helped play a role in the reduction, but management initiatives were also critical.

Ramirez’s presentation said the T continues to pursue cost reductions through management initiatives, collaboration with its labor unions, and privatization. He declined to provide a timetable for any privatization decision.

A request for proposals for private bus maintenance providers yielded just one bid, from a company called First Transit out of Cincinnati. The company is reportedly one of the largest providers of bus maintenance in the country, but its history with the T is clouded by an incident in 2012 when it walked away from a contract to operate the T’s paratransit service and ended up paying a $7.3 million settlement.

Commuter rail for the future

The MBTA laid out a loose timeline on Monday for developing a commuter rail service for the future.

T officials didn’t say what that service would be, but they said they plan to begin transitioning to it in 2022 and complete the process sometime between 2026 and 2041. The timeline means the T needs to keep its ancient and aging commuter rail locomotives and coaches running until sometime halfway through the 2020s because of the lead times needed for making investments in new equipment and developing operating approaches for the system of the future.

Scott Hamwey, manager of long range planning at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, said the T is looking at a variety of options, including regional and urban rail. He defined regional rail as providing more service throughout the day (as opposed to primarily just the morning and evening peaks) with the possibility of speeding up service on some lines by skipping little-used stations. He defined urban rail as providing more day-long service on commuter rail within the system’s urban core, where the bulk of the region’s development is occurring and population is growing.

Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack cautioned Hamwey to avoid a bias in favor of the T’s core service area. She noted commuter rail is one of the few T services that caters to outlying areas across the state that have lower-cost housing and a thirst for development.

“We have an entire Commonwealth where we need to share the prosperity,” she said.

Officials said the timeline for the new commuter rail service might seem like it offers long lead times, but they said decisions will have to be made over the next two to three years to provide enough time to order equipment and structure service to make it work.

In the meantime, T officials said, they need to keep the existing commuter rail network operating. Bill Griffiths, senior director of vehicle fleet maintenance and strategy, said half of the commuter rail’s locomotives are beyond their recommended useful life. He said the T is currently spending $51 million to keep the aging fleet going and may spend as much as $273 million on locomotive and coach overhauls as well as leases of new engines, something the T has never done before.

T officials mum on parking critique

Neither MBTA officials nor the agency’s oversight board made any mention at their meeting on Monday of a scathing memo put out by the departing director of parking on the private contractor currently running the T’s garages and parking lots.

David Friend gave T management a 30-page statement as he left the T under what he called an involuntary resignation. The statement, reported last week by CommonWealth, was critical of the way T managers were overseeing Republic Parking System of Tennessee, to which Friend gave a grade of “F+.”

Jeffrey Gonneville, the T’s deputy general manager, said the parking operation doesn’t report to him, but he said he was relieved to see that Saturday’s snowstorm was handled by Republic with little problem. Friend said in his statement that Republic was not able to follow through on its commitment to de-ice and plow garages with its own staff and would have to hire an outside contractor at an additional cost of $450,000 a year.