Here we go again. With less than 48 hours to Doomsday, Gov. Rod Blagojevich pulled a wad of money out of his hat on Friday to keep the Chicago region’s buses running while he and legislative leaders continue to bicker over a permanent funding solution.
The governor managed to free up $27 million in federal capital dollars to be spent instead on operations, forestalling drastic service cuts planned for Sunday that would have affected roughly 100,000 Chicago Transit Authority and Pace bus riders.
“There is no question that we need to address the mass-transit issue and it needs to be done quickly,” Blagojevich said, conjuring up memories of another magic moment, only seven weeks ago, when he said and did exactly the same thing.
That time, it was a $91 million advance against next year’s operating revenue, offered with a promise to get the problem solved before that money ran out. But it’s spent, and the transit agencies had warned that they wouldn’t — couldn’t — dig their hole deeper by accepting another loan.
Not to worry, Blagojevich announced Friday, when he realized that driving the system to the brink in hopes of getting his way wasn’t going to work this time, either. “The short-term funding is not a loan,” the governor’s office said in a news release. “It is new money.”
For a minute we took that to mean Uncle Rod was going to write a check, but no. It turns out he was able to persuade the Federal Transit Administration to let the transit agencies spend $27 million in federal capital funds on operations. Because the federal dollars will be replaced by untapped state capital funds, the transit agencies won’t lose money.
But someone will. It wasn’t clear Friday who that might be, but its possible some of those untapped state funds would have found their way Downstate, where a coalition of Senate Democrats have declared they “can’t support one more nickel for Chicago” without a statewide public-works program. (“Mass transit in Chicago may be important, but not south of I-80,” Sen. John Sullivan, chairman of the Democratic Downstate caucus, said at a news conference Thursday.)
Blagojevich and his allies have been holding the transit bill hostage to their $25 billion capital plan, which relies on a massive expansion of gambling, including at least two new casinos. And Blagojevich has continued to threaten to veto the transit bill — even if the capital plan passes — because it would be financed largely through a regional sales tax. No wonder nothing got done.
If the legislature had passed the transit bill currently on the table, the CTA would have realized far more than $27 million in savings by now, mostly from reduced retiree benefit costs. The CTA won those concessions from its unions, but they are contingent on passage of a funding bill.
The governor’s latest bailout should put Doomsday on hold till the first of the year, roughly the same reprieve it bought last time. But why should we expect anything different between now and Jan. 1?
Though everyone has pledged, again, to buckle down and get the job done, the only thing we can count on is that the state will be out $27 million.
