Crisis, not necessity, is the mother of invention.
At least that’s how it works here in northeastern Illinois, where we don’t fix things, no matter how screwed up, until they are good and broken.
This I learned early on, as a lowly grad student trying to cover the transportation beat hereabouts in the early ’70s. Everybody knew public transportation–city and suburban–was doomed without some kind of permanent tax subsidy … the automobile having beggared the fare box. But nobody did anything about it until the Chicago Transit Authority went flat broke and the commuter rail lines, then run by profit-minded railroads, began filing petitions to discontinue money-losing passenger service.
From this near-wreckage was born the Regional Transportation Authority. It remains the RTA’s job to apportion public funds among the CTA, the Pace suburban bus system and Metra, the public agency created to run subsidized commuter rails. The other key ingredient back then, besides a regionwide crisis, was political leadership. We had the two Richards, Ogilvie the Republican governor and Daley the Democratic mayor, neither of them slaves to public opinion.
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Fast forward to the spring of ’05. We have a transit crisis again, though this time it appears only the CTA is on the ropes. Frank Kruesi, who runs CTA for our generation’s Mayor Daley, says his system is $80 million or more in the red. He’s threatening dramatic service cuts, fare increases or a combination of the two unless the state legislature comes up with more dough.
This prompts high anxiety among suburban Republicans who run Metra and Pace. They fear Kruesi and Daley are after a larger slice of the transit pie … at their expense.
Are they paranoid? Not when you consider that Illinois has a poll-driven Democratic governor whose “no new taxes” pledge appears to prohibit any enlargement of the aforementioned pie. Not when Democrats control both chambers in Springfield and have started hinting that the formula by which the RTA’s sales tax is collected and distributed needs to be “re-examined.”
But the Republicans have their own high cards in the hole–or, more precisely, in Washington, where their party controls both chambers and where one of their own, Dennis Hastert of exurban Yorkville, reigns as speaker of the House. In a business where the feds still pay for 80 percent of transit construction, it would be ill-advised to cross the speaker.
So things look bad for the CTA.
But don’t throw away those CTA owl-service schedules just yet–or buy a gas-guzzler because you heard Kruesi wants to add to his list of doomsday horrors a base fare that would increase to $2.50.
Turns out there’s more balance to this crisis than meets the eye. Turns out the Metra bosses are short a few million dollars–a few tens of millions, actually–to pay the obligatory local share of projects on their “to-do” list. Metra wants to upgrade rail service on its Heritage Corridor to Joliet, extend its Rock Island service to Minooka, extend Metra Electric Line service to the proposed airport at Peotone, push its Milwaukee Road service out to Rockford and, most ambitious of all, build a circumferential commuter line–connecting all its radial lines–using an old freight right of way from Waukegan to Joliet.
As of now, there’s no local match money to do any of that.
Then again, even if Republican legislators were willing to go along with raising taxes–a regional gasoline tax, say–to make the transit pie bigger, what about our “no new taxes” governor?
Here’s where a little legislative sleight of hand could go a long way. What if lawmakers don’t need to raise taxes? Not directly. And what if Gov. Rod Blagojevich doesn’t need to sign a new tax into law? Not directly. What if, instead, a law were passed to reorganize the Regional Transportation Authority and empower its appointive board, within limits, to impose its own taxes?
Voila! A new 1 percent regional gas tax would go a long way toward bailing out the CTA and giving Metra what it needs to expand. The way the price of gas has been going, who’d notice?
Other logs could roll as well. The civic-minded business group Metropolis 2020 has been lobbying to change the way our region coordinates–or doesn’t coordinate–real estate development with transportation services. Why not pull these regional planning functions into the new, souped-up RTA?
Meantime, look for a lot of hand-wringing in the weeks ahead. Look for Kruesi to threaten more bus routes and Metra Chairman Jeffrey Ladd to threaten phone calls to Washington. Then, when the crisis looks insoluble, look for Illinois Rep. Julie Hamos (D-Evanston), chairwoman of the legislative committee looking into all this, to quiet the alpha males and mother some invention.