In blocking a transit deal for Northeast Illinois, House Republican leader Tom Cross is following a tradition, though not necessarily an honored one. He’s logrolling.
You want more money for mass transit, he was saying, you have to give me more money for roads.
Result: A bill to reform and fund the transit system — the first real overhaul in 25 years — fell 10 votes short of the 71 needed. Only five Republicans voted for it.
Cross said his people are holding out because mass transit is “one component of a two-part problem” that needs to be fixed all at once. Train and bus riders are looking at serious service cuts and fare hikes beginning Sept. 16. But Cross said, let’s not forget about those suburban highway commuters who are “sick and tired of sitting in traffic.”
Translation: Gimme road money. We don’t expect many brownie points for supporting a deal that spares Chicago Transit Authority riders. What’s in it for us?
The state does need a capital bill to pay for roads, bridges and other projects. The last major road initiative, Illinois FIRST, expired in 2005. Failure to pass a new one is costing the state billions in federal matching funds while transportation needs fall further behind. But that shouldn’t hold up a bill that would keep the trains and buses rolling.
If Cross doesn’t take the brick off the transit bill, it could come back to bite him. His party has been losing seats in the suburbs — and hundreds of thousands of suburbanites ride the CTA, Metra or Pace every day.
Those constituents who are “sick and tired of sitting in traffic”? They won’t welcome more cars on the roads when the CTA closes bus routes to the suburbs and express runs to Metra’s downtown stations. Cross may figure his members have no constituency among CTA riders, but the CTA provides almost half of the transit trips that begin or end in the suburbs.
The House bill would overhaul the Regional Transportation Authority, empowering it to set and enforce performance goals for the CTA, Metra and Pace and to make sure the agencies work together instead of at cross purposes. It would provide a long-term funding source. It would give the suburbs more influence on the operating boards and adjust the funding distribution formula, which hasn’t changed since 1983, to reflect the growth of Chicago’s suburbs.
With the House’s failure to approve the bill this week, mass-transit agencies are looking at looming fare hikes and service cuts.
The agencies really ought to impose fare hikes anyway. Riders have a bargain, and they ought to share more of the cost of keeping the system afloat. That would make the legislation’s proposal for a six-county sales tax increase more palatable — or even allow for a smaller tax increase.
The campaign to reform mass transit has forced some long overdue changes, including a changing of the guard at the CTA and a hard-fought bargain with CTA unions to reduce pension and retiree health benefits. That deal is contingent on the transit bill becoming law. The bill isn’t perfect. If lawmakers need to tweak it to get more votes, so be it. But it needs to pass soon. Senate President Emil Jones said he’ll take up a bill next week, so maybe that will provide some momentum.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich is still making noise about vetoing a transit bill if it has a sales tax hike. But he’s largely irrelevant here. His rhetoric about closing “business tax loopholes” to fund transit has been rejected by lawmakers. The House and Senate need extraordinary (thus veto-proof) majorities anyway to put this measure into law right away.
So don’t blame Blagojevich if your bus isn’t running Sept. 17. Right now Tom Cross is in the driver’s seat on this one.
