Speaker Elizabeth Mitchell’s $17 million plan to repair, restore and retrofit the State House is ambitious.

And it’s about time someone showed some ambition regarding the dreadful condition of Maine’s most important public building.

Anywhere one looks — from the collapsed ceiling of the once-grand entrance to every dingy nook and grubby cranny, from the walls pocked with hubcap-sized chunks of missing plaster to the water-damaged floors, the neglect heaped upon this 166-year-old structure is beyond evident. It’s blatant.

The state of the State House is an insult both to the living — witness the building’s lone, startlingly awkward and unfriendly handicapped entrance — and to the dead. The Hall of Flags, with its peeling walls, its mistreated marble floor, its corners used as storage for folding chairs and tables, is a dishonor to the heroes who carried those banners into battle.

Visitors, whether schoolchildren, tourists or citizens come to interact with their government, are assaulted by jutting pipes, dangling wires, dripping window air conditioners installed indoors, office equipment and boxes of papers stored in hallways. The foot-weary have a choice between cheesy couches scrounged from the Brady Bunch yard sale or older stuff upholstered mainly in duct tape.

Working conditions are even worse. The reason the hallways are so cluttered with office supplies, equipment and other stuff isn’t that there are no closets in the building. The problem is that people are working in the closets.

One hundred fifty-one representatives share an office the size of the average postage stamp, their only private space a manilla folder in a cardboard box. Committee offices are even more cramped and depressing: three workers share one desk; the choice must be made between natural sunlight and drafts or warmth and opaque plastic sheeting; wires and pipes gain entrance to these hovels through holes created by bazooka shot; carpets are a mosaic of types and stain patterns. Lead paint, asbestos and mice are constant companions.

The restoration plan calls for spending $6.7 million on health and safety corrections, $1.8 million to enhance accesibility; $700,000 to shore up the structure; $4.5 million to restore the public spaces; and $3.4 million to bring the capitol into the computer age.

Mitchell’s proposed $14 million bond issue last session was trimmed down by balky legislators last session to $2 million for safety and accesibility improvements, which voters endorsed in November.

That’s a start, but there’s much to be done. Mitchell now proposes using $8 to $10 million of the state’s revenue surplus (which now stands at $185 million), with another $3 to $4 million coming from the governor’s facilities bonding authority.

When the Legislature convenes next month, the argument over what to do with the surplus is sure to be loud and long, but restoring the State House to a condition that is presentable to the public and humane to the workers must be one area of consensus. Merely because it took decades for the building to fall into disrepair is no reason to take decades to fix it. The current condition shows what one gets with the Band-Aid approach — a lot of Band-Aids.

Many legislators, as well as the governor, already have said that some of the surplus might well be used for one-time expenses, paying cash in hand now instead of borrowing later. The State House project is just such an expense. Construction work only grows for costly with time; doing it now, while Maine has the money, is the fiscally prudent thing to do.