Sometimes bad things happen for good reasons. Case in point: It’s probably for the best that the scramble to reform the Chicago area’s mass transit agencies — while also scaring up new revenue — fizzled as the General Assembly closed out its spring session in the wee hours of the night.
Not that rescuing the system isn’t crucial. It is. When COVID-era federal relief funds dry up at the end of this year, local transportation agencies are set to hit a massive fiscal pothole. The Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace contend they need $1.5 billion in annual funding to avoid a collective $771 million 2026 shortfall and to fund needed infrastructure improvements.
But, as Crain’s Justin Laurence reported on June 6, an eleventh-hour push to invent new tax streams to fund a newly imagined replacement for the Regional Transportation Authority fell apart as the spring legislative session wound down. Every revenue idea that was floated — a tax on deliveries, tapping Illinois Tollway funds, diverting a slice of sales taxes to transit, to name a few — faced pushback from downstate and exurban lawmakers who wondered why their constituents should be asked to pay for a bailout of Chicago’s public transit mess.
Of course, as decrepit as some aspects of Chicago’s public transit system may be, the truth is that this city’s network of light rail alone — not to mention buses and regional commuter lines — is the envy of many other major metros, and has long been a selling point in the quest to bring employers and investors here. Keeping that network intact, and even improving on it, is in the interests of the entire state since, like it or not, Chicago remains the primary economic engine of Illinois and the Midwest.
Even so, a hastily slapped-together package of tax streams isn’t the answer.
To avoid the catastrophic outcomes that await the system, including a potential 40% cut to service and thousands of layoffs, Springfield lawmakers must get serious about crafting a comprehensive strategic plan to reform the RTA, break down the fiefdoms that dominate each agency, promote accountability, and adequately fund it all.
The "no revenue without reform" mantra that dominated the spring legislative session should carry over into the second half of the year.
On the reform front, Sen. Ram Villivalam’s proposed remaking of the RTA into something called the Northern Illinois Transit Authority appears to be a decent initial blueprint. By creating a board that grants appointees to the governor, the mayor of Chicago, the Cook County Board president, as well as the presidents of DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties, NITA would allow greater oversight of the individual transit agencies — and would also tear down the voting-power barriers that currently handcuff the RTA.
Statehouse leaders correctly want to know more about how deeply the Trump administration intends to slash federal support for state- and municipal-level transit programs before they fully commit to a new transit funding plan. But that doesn’t mean they can’t game out likely scenarios and start tackling the revenue side of the equation — and they need to start doing so immediately.
What’s the fairest way to deliver new funding to mass transit? What kinds of cuts and efficiencies can be achieved in the meantime? These are problems House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch, Senate President Don Harmon and Gov. JB Pritzker should be hammering out now, not later. Harmon and Welch must call lawmakers back to Springfield over the summer and treat the transit funding cliff as Job One. The last thing we need is another escape-room-style attempt to piece together a funding plan in the final hours of 2025, with our backs against the wall.
The transit funding crisis has been a long time coming. There’s no excuse for letting solutions wait a day longer.
