* Senate President Don Harmon and House Speaker Chris Welch spoke at the annual Illinois Manufacturers’ Association/Illinois Retail Merchants Association lobby day last week. Among other things, they were asked these questions: “How do you see the transit playing out? Is it something that gets done this spring? Is it a Fall issue? Does reform come first and maybe revenue second? How do you see the transit solution coming together?”…
Harmon: Well, I have said from the onset, the cliff can be a crisis, or it can be an opportunity. And my starting point in this has always been we need to build the transit system for 2050, not try to rebuild the one from 1975. It’s just a very different world and we need to internalize that and make sure we’re thinking about the rider. And so for those reasons, I’ve been relatively agnostic on governance. Reforms are necessary. The rider-focused reforms. Any of our constituents should be able to walk out their front door and get anywhere in the RTA service area without worrying whether they were on a CTA bus or a Pace bus, CTA, L or a Metra train. They should have one app on their phone or one card in their pocket and one schedule. All of this needs to be focused on the rider, because you all need people to get to work. You need people to shop. You need people to be able to get around. So Senator Villivalam, our Transportation chair has been leading hearings on the Senate side, and has done a very good job. He certainly makes a case timing wise, that sooner is better than later. I would say that even if we tackle the reforms, I don’t know that there’s going to be a check cut on May 31st to the transit agencies. We are going to need to hold them accountable to reinvent the system so that it serves the people that we all represent who work for you all.
Welch: Let’s also make sure folks understand that when we talk about transit, we’re not just talking about the Chicago area, the Chicago metropolitan area, we’re also talking about downstate transit. We’re talking about transit systems throughout the state. And I think transit is extremely important to the business community. It’s important to labor and the workforce. It’s important to the environment, less cars on the road, if you get get the busses and trains running right. And so this is something in the House that, you know, we put a working group together last year that’s led by Eva-Dina Delgado and Kam Buckner, two of the leaders on my team that are really passionate about the transit issue. They’ve had a number of meetings with all of the stakeholders at the table. By all reports that are coming in to me, those conversations are going well. They’ve been some real tough conversations, and they listened to the charge that the President and I gave them, and they’ve been addressing reforms and governance first. I don’t even think you can talk about money at all until they agree on what those revenue, those reforms and governance issues are going to look like. […]
I think we’re on the same page in the sense that we’re not looking to give anyone a blank check. We don’t have blank checks to give out. We have to be able to leave here and explain it, you know, to a sixth grader. You know, here are the reforms. Here’s the governance structure that is in place that now makes sense compared to what was there. And here’s what we have to do to provide reliability for riders. Here’s what we have to do to make sure riders are safe. Here are the things that you know people have demanded, and we’re giving it to you. I think if we can demonstrate that people will will understand that you have to pay for it.
Harmon: Recognizing your point that this is a statewide issue. We are focusing to some degree on the RTA region because of the peculiarities of that system. I can walk out my back door a half a block to a CTA bus stop, or a half a mile to a Pace bus stop that will take me to either a CTA L line or to a metro station. It shouldn’t be that complicated. And the accountability issue is a huge one. There’s a deep lack of trust. I think it was more than a decade ago we mandated a unified fare card so that you didn’t have to get a different ticket for each of your transfers. That still hasn’t been done. So perhaps the greatest accountability is cutting off the checks, and I think that we’re trying to build into this, the funding comes only with rider focused reform.
Please pardon any transcription errors.
