The MBTA will up its spending by hundreds of millions in the coming fiscal year by using the last available one time sources of funding for their proposed $3 billion budget, all the while staring down a looming $700 million shortfall.

The T’s Board of Directors, on Tuesday, gave their approval to a fiscal 2025 spending plan ballooned by 11% — nearly $300 million — over the previous year. The budget, according to its authors, will allow the beleaguered transportation system to spend another year focused on hiring and fixing the many problems it’s finding along the tracks and at stations.

But after this coming year, the money in the MBTA’s reserve accounts will have been spent, leaving nothing to lean on in coming years except for wishful thinking.

“This is an enormous issue at the T. It’s an existential issue,” Roy Epstein, a Belmont Select Board member and operating budget oversight committee chair at the MBTA Advisory Board. “Existential is often a word that’s overused, but this is really an existential issue.”

According to Epstein, filling that huge budget hole will require efforts, “potentially, on all fronts. On the cost side, on the revenue side.”

To make ends meet in 2025, the MBTA will draw down on $307 million in pandemic-era cash reserves and shift $191 in federal funds slated for preventative maintenance toward the operating budget. The budget also expects a 10% growth in revenue as riders return to the T.

The extra money will fund 8,000 employees, over 400 more than in 2025, and covers wage and benefit increases negotiated with current workers over the last year.

Funding those employees, a recurring cost that clearly increased in the last several years, is a necessity, Epstein said. So too are the T’s plans to remove as many slow zones from the train lines as possible by the end of the year.

Both are required, Epstein said, in order to keep the system’s current customers and attract new riders.

“There is no fat in this budget,” Epstein said.

Next year is a different story, MBTA Advisory Board Executive Director Brian Kane said just before the Board of Directors approved the budget Tuesday.

According to Kane, that the service will need to do something, and fast, to figure out how to come up with $700 million without the support of federal pandemic relief funds or other one-time revenue sources.

“Something has to change in the next 13 months, or else we’re going to be looking at massive service cuts and real stagnation in our economy and our society,” Kane said.

The MBTA Board of Directors also unanimously approved the T’s five-year capital improvement plan on Tuesday, a $9.6 billion investment toward shoring up the aging systems physical infrastructure between now and 2029.

MBTA General Manager Phil Eng told the board earlier this year that it will take upwards of $25 billion to bring the system into a “state of good repair.” Despite that fact, T Chief of Policy and Strategic Planning Lynsey Heffernan said Tuesday that over $10 billion was requested this budget cycle, and only 8% was filled.

“We’re treading water, barely,” MBTA Board member Tom McGee said.