PROVIDENCE — It’s confession time.

Members of Governor Carcieri’s panel on transportation funding said yesterday that if the state government is going to ask voters to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more each year to fix crumbling roads and bridges, it had better be able to first explain why the state got into such a mess.

If not, one panel member predicted, the result will be “some very angry, very frustrated meetings” when officials start telling audiences how much money they think should be raised and what sort of taxes and fees should be imposed on the public to pay for it.

The short answer is that a succession of public officials didn’t do anything much to maintain the bridges and roads for many years.

“I’m new here,” said state Department of Transportation Director Michael P. Lewis, who got the job earlier this year. “But my sense is that it’s never really been addressed.”

At a May meeting, a panel member asked why the Pawtucket River Bridge, which carries Route 95, became an emergency in November, with heavy trucks banned and detours in place, when the DOT had known for a decade that it was deteriorating.

He was told that the DOT employs only 13 people to maintain more than 600 bridges. Lewis said yesterday that the state spends about $40 million per year on operations and maintenance and that it should be spending nearly three times that.

The result is a giant repair bill. A lack of routine maintenance such as painting and resurfacing eventually means much-more-expensive bridge replacement and road reconstruction.

“Now it’s time to pay the piper,” Gary S. Sasse, the director of the state Department of Revenue and a panel member, said after a panel meeting yesterday.

The DOT has produced various figures for what’s needed, depending on how much work is to be done and how fast. But officials have been using $640 million per year for 10 years as a rough target, or about $300 million per year more than the DOT expects in revenue.

The first reasonable question from the public, said Keith Stokes, a panel member and executive director of the Newport Chamber of Commerce, will be, what officials have done in the past.

The panel needs to spell that out, explaining, “This is what has not happened,” he said.

Another member agreed, during a DOT presentation yesterday that included pictures of rusted-through beams holding up the Pawtucket River Bridge.

When an audience sees the same image, said Robert A. Weygand, the University of Rhode Island’s vice president of administration and finance, someone will surely ask, “Why did it get that way?”

The panel needs to say, “This is what went wrong, and this is what’s needed to correct it,” said Weygand, a panelist.

“It’s almost a confessional,” said panel member Bob Cusack.

The panel is supposed to come up with ways to pay the difference. It hasn’t offered any indication of what it will recommend to the governor. Ominously, one hypothetical package created by experts from URI — including an increase to the state gasoline tax, tolls on highways and a variety of other taxes and fees — would produce less than half of the additional $300 million.

The panel says it will hold hearings on Sept. 15, 17, 23 and 25, to get the public involved in the process.

blandis@projo.com