The Chicago area’s four transit agencies are staring down a budget gap that could lead to massive service cuts and fare hikes, and efforts in Springfield to address the challenges are set to heat up this year.
Discussions about the way transit is overseen and how to fund it are likely to gain steam during the new legislative session but the path forward is shaping up to be contentious. A proposal in Springfield to combine the CTA, Metra, Pace and the Regional Transportation Authority has been met with pushback, and a coalition of labor groups is working on an alternate option. The push to boost funding for transit could be complicated by a projected multibillion-dollar deficit in Illinois’ next budget and competing requests from Chicago, such as a potential ask for more Chicago Public Schools funding and a package for a new Bears stadium.
Hanging in the balance is the prospect of a 40% cut in service across the CTA, Metra and Pace, according to the Regional Transportation Authority, which is calling for a significant influx of new money for transit. That would turn a 15-minute wait for a bus in the city into a 25-minute wait, and a 45-minute wait for a bus in the suburbs into a wait of more than an hour. A Metra line that once had 90 trains per day would be cut to 54, according to RTA estimates.
That’s what could happen if the region fails to fill a $771 million budget gap the four agencies will face when federal COVID-19 relief funding dries up, the RTA warned. The agency, along with some other regional planners and officials, is calling on Springfield to not just fill the gap, but find $1.5 billion in new funding to overhaul the system.
With federal aid expected to dry up early next year, tackling transit’s challenges is taking on increasing urgency.
“It needs to be dealt with this (legislative) session, and hopefully in a meaningful way,” said Audrey Wennink, transportation director for the Metropolitan Planning Council. “If it’s not, then Pace and Metra and CTA will start doing the math and cutting all their schedules over the summer and then their budgets as they do budget season in the fall … and then we would have a collapsed system by 2026.”
The transit debate and whether to combine the CTA, which has faced discontent from political leaders and riders, with the region’s other transit agencies culminated last year in a trip by lawmakers and advocates to Germany to study the transit system there. But so far there have been few formal proposals about where to come up with the money to plug the budget hole, or generate the additional funding that planners and officials hope could improve the transit system.
State Sen. Ram Villivalam, a Chicago Democrat who sponsored the measure to combine the transit agencies, said oversight of transit in the Chicago area needs to be addressed before talk of funding can take place.
“Let me be unequivocal: There will be no funding before we address reform, and a governance that allows us to hold accountable and make sure they’re transparent, these public service agencies,” he said.
Villivalam’s proposal would create a new Metropolitan Mobility Authority to oversee buses, trains and paratransit, laying out how Chicago, Cook County, the governor and other suburban counties would be represented on the new board. He plans to reintroduce a measure to combine the agencies during the legislative session this spring, though there could be some changes from the previous proposal based on testimony during a series of hearings in the fall, he said.
Consolidation has been met with pushback from the region’s transit agencies, and recently several organizations of suburban communities weighed resolutions opposing the concept. Groups such as the Northwest Municipal Conference raised concerns that combining agencies could limit suburban input in transit and could complicate “operational and budget issues” unique to each transit service, such as debt, liabilities and labor contracts. Several groups said they supported additional funding for transit.
DuPage County Board Chair Deb Conroy said the consolidation bill fails to ensure regional representation. The suburbs are seeking a voice in transit issues, including key concerns such as paratransit service, better connections in bus service and the ability to use one pass for all types of transit. Also of concern is bridging the distance between transit lines and offices or warehouses as many people commute into DuPage for work, she said.
Villivalam’s initial bill amounts to the suburbs losing representation, she said. It also requires a straight majority of board members to approve any measure, which she said would effectively take away the suburbs’ say in transit issues. The RTA requires a supermajority of the board to approve certain big-ticket items.
“We’re making sure that it ends up being equitable and fair, and it’s a little bit disproportionate in the language that’s been put out there so far,” she said.
RTA Chair Kirk Dillard has instead called for a stronger version of the RTA, writing in a mid-December letter to the Tribune that it could “act as an empowered regional coordinating agency.” He agreed that lawmakers should not provide funding without reform of the system “that ensures new money will be spent in the ways that benefit riders across the system,” he wrote, saying the agency has pushed reforms that would strengthen the RTA.
“Currently, state law does not empower the RTA to proactively engage in these critical areas in ways that benefit riders across modes and geographies, and that must change,” he said.
An alternative to consolidation, backed by a coalition of Illinois labor unions, is also in the works. Details about the proposal remain to be determined, but Chicago Federation of Labor President Bob Reiter billed it as focusing instead on “coordination” between the agencies, with the goal of making improvements such as better transfers between Metra, Pace and the CTA and work on the gaps between transit service and job centers.
Operating a rail system like Metra differs from a rapid transit system like the CTA, whose city bus service is also different than a suburban bus system like Pace, Reiter said. Each system also interacts with separate unions, some of which are governed by state law and some by federal rules.
“Consolidation serves people with loud voices,” he said. “And consolidation can serve people with influence, but I don’t know that consolidation serves the mayor of a far western suburban town any more than it would serve an alderperson in the city of Chicago.”
Neither proposal is likely to initially have the support needed to pass the Senate, Villivalam said. But a working group of state representatives has also been meeting to draft ideas about transit. And they have committed to working with Villivalam, said state Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado, a Chicago Democrat and one of the group’s co-leaders.
Delgado supports the proposal to consolidate the transit agencies, but acknowledged compromise would be necessary.
“(The consolidation proposal) is a way to start having people take seriously, ‘when I say reform, this is what I mean,’” she said. “I mean something on this level of magnitude. But we also have to recognize that there are a lot of stakeholders in this industry that have different perspectives.”
Lawmakers are also being asked to come up with more funding for transit, and debate about how to come up with the money and how much to generate is sure to prove thorny.
Funding has been a key focus for CTA President Dorval Carter, who has criticized efforts to focus on transit oversight instead of funding. He has described the current financial setup as “discriminatory and racially charged.”
Conroy, from DuPage, also called for significantly more state money for transit. But she was clear she opposes certain revenue options, such as dipping into motor fuel tax money or increasing tolls, which she said could disproportionately hurt suburban residents.
Before talking new money, discussion should take place about savings, RTA board member Tom Kotarac said at a recent meeting. He also called for a clearer picture of what happens if the transit agencies go off the fiscal cliff, and what they’d get with $1.5 billion in new money.
“The savings and the efficiencies, and a plan to generate revenue — and one that’s very credible — has to be sort of first,” said Kotarac, also senior vice president at the business-focused Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, during the meeting. “And then the second piece is the reform.”
“I think the reality is that reform is a necessary condition for us to make the case for revenue,” he said later.
The RTA, for its part, said in a statement that finding funding for transit is urgent. The agency is pushing for “funding solutions to include governance reforms,” and any reform should connect to more frequent, reliable and safe service that benefits riders.
“The longer finding a sustainable funding solution takes, the fewer options we will have and the worse the consequences could be,” the agency said in a statement.
The transit reform and funding debates are likely to take most of the spring, or longer, to solve, observers say. But Wennink, with the Metropolitan Planning Council, sees the moment as transformational, one to look back on decades from now and pinpoint as the moment state leaders solved transit’s challenges.
“Transit really underpins people’s ability to make money and spend money, just to move around at all,” she said. “Because the Chicago region is really the economic engine of the whole state, we can’t collapse people’s mobility. The consequences for congestion would be just ridiculous. We would be paralyzed.”