"I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone"
- "Boys of Summer" by Don Henley, 1984
Local transit workers, riders, and advocates have been exhorting the Illinois General Assembly to hold an emergency summer session and vote on transit funding. They will be disappointed to hear that's probably not going to happen.
But in a conversation with Streetsblog today, Illinois House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch promised me, "We're going to get it done" during the fall veto session in October. Before we get to the interview, here's a quick rundown of what's happened so far with Chicagoland's $771 million transit fiscal cliff.
With federal COVID stimulus funds slated to run out in 2026, the CTA, Pace, and Metra will need to cut roughly 40 percent of service and lay off some 3,000 workers if that budget gap isn't adressed soon. At the end of the the spring legislative session on May 31, the Illinois Senate passed the HB 34338 transit funding and reform bill, sponsored by Sen. Ram Villivalam. He said it would have not just preserved but upgraded Chicagoland transit service by raising roughly $1.5 billion, plus another $200 million for Downstate systems. But the House didn't vote on the bill that night, so the future of Illinois public transportation is still a question mark.
Recently, I've interviewed several Springfield lawmakers about the issue. "We're looking forward to having the conversation with the House and [Gov. JB Pritzker's] Office," Sen. Villivalam told me. "If they have a better plan, we're all ears. If there's no other plan, we'd like to see our legislation move forward."
Senate President Don Harmon recently said to Streetsblog, "If stakeholders don't like the revenue plan the Senate adopted... we need people to come back with counter-proposals that allow us to build that transit system that residents deserve."
This morning, I asked House Speaker Welch, who lives in west-suburban Hillside, for his perspective on the effort to get a transit bill on the governor's desk.This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
John Greenfield: Obviously we are in a transit funding crisis right now. And if one wants to know what might happen if Springfield doesn't take bold action to save the Chicagoland transit system, you just look at what happened in Philadelphia. Recently, their local transit system, SEPTA, announced 45 percent service cuts because the Pennsylvania legislature failed to pass a transit funding bill in time.
Now, Pennsylvania is kind of a purple state nowadays. Fortunately in Illinois, we have a lot of transit supporters in the Statehouse. Would you consider yourself to be someone who is pro-transit?
House Speaker Welch: I'm a transit supporter. The Forest Park Blue Line station is in my district. CTA is very important my district. Pace and Metra are also important to my district. And these things are important to our region and our state. So I'm extremely pro-transit. I think it's important that we get it right.
JG: Do you support passing a bill to raise $771 million to save the Chicagoland transit and/or coming up with 1.5 billion to upgrade the system? And if so, why?
HSW: First of all, let me say to you, John, what I've said to everyone the last year. I think it's important at this moment that we get this issue right, and I think that before we ask taxpayers to put more money into the system to fix a problem, we need to get reforms right, and the House has had a working group on this issue since last summer, led by Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado and Rep. Kam Buckner, both members of our leadership team that have rolled up their sleeves and been hard at work at tackling these governance questions.
And we're real close on that. I think that we're going to see some serious reforms when it comes to structure, and then it's when you should turn and talk money. But we're not going to ask voters to pay for something, to keep doing the same thing. I think this is something that we want to get right. We don't want to be talking about this again in five years, 10 years, 15 years. We don't want to be Philadelphia. We want to be Chicago, the best big city in America for the eighth year in a row, and we want to make sure transit continues to be a big part.
JG: Now, all the Springfield folks who are pro-transit that I've heard from have the slogan, "No revenue without reform," kind of a mantra they kept saying over and over again. And when I talked to Sen. Villivalam, he said the Senate worked out the reform situation, and it seemed like there wasn't a lot of opposition to it. He suggested creating the more powerful Northern Illinois Transit Authority to replace the Regional Transportation Authority. There was some pushback from suburban legislators and local municipalities. But that passed the Senate.
So we're really running out of time. The transit agencies have to turn in their budgets for next year in early October. And if nothing changes, they're going to have to do those 40 percent transit cuts, 3,000 layoffs, which, as you know, would be horrible for our region and the state.
According to a study from Argonne National Laboratory and MIT, if they have to cut $771 million from the RTA budget, it could cost Illinois' economy $14 billion, a huge number. So clearly it would be an awful thing if we don't pass this transit legislation.
With that in mind, they passed this in the Senate. I know you said that you want to have more attention paid to reform, but it seemed like people were pretty much satisfied with reform situation. And they also came up with a way to fund it.
Now, in early June, Rep. Buckner told the Tribune that, in addition to not wanting to to derail the negotiations for the entire state budget, the House wasn't aware that the $1.50 delivery surcharge proposal [for restaurant and retail items delivered by motor vehicles, which Streetsblog calls "the burrito taxi tax"] from the Senate was a possibility. He said that's "why we never talked about [HB 3438] with our folks" or held a vote.
So obviously we're not worried about the general budget talks right now, and there's no lack of awareness to the delivery tax. You've had plenty of time to think about that. Do you think the time is right to hold a summer legislative session and call a House vote on Sen. Villivalam's bill?
HSW: First of all, let me say that the fiscal cliff, as we know it, isn't until December 31 and the legislature is set to go back October 14-16, again, October 28-30 [for the fall veto session]. That's plenty of time to address this very important issue, and my transit working group, led by leaders Delgado and Buckner, are still hard at work. They are well aware of the issues, and we're going to go back in October, and we're going to address this very important issue.
We did not vote on the Senate's bill in May because we hadn't discussed that as a caucus. It's important that our caucus discuss issues, and that bill was dead on arrival, because we hadn't even talked about funding at that point in the discussion, because we were solely focused the reforms. We will be ready to address the issue come veto session.
[To put this in context, at a June 12 RTA board meeting the agency's Director of Government Affairs Rob Nash argued that the six days during the veto session wouldn't be much time to avert the fiscal cliff. He also said that for the funding bill to kick in immediately, it will have to be approved by a 60 percent supermajority. That would also be the case with a summer session vote. Otherwise, the bill won’t take effect until June 2026. He added that winning a supermajority could be an uphill battle, because "as we saw in the Senate, we barely got a simple majority (over 50 percent)."]
JG: OK, my understanding is that the three transit agencies will get final approval for their budgets from the RTA in December. So if the state funding hasn't been approved by then, they're going to have to give pink slips to the workers. And so even if money shows up after that, they're not going to have workers. They're going to have to start rehiring. I don't know what the deal is with changing their budget and schedules to restore service, but they won't have the people to drive the buses and trains.
The RTA budget calendar that passed on June 12.
HSW: The Legislature is home doing a lot of work in their districts, talking to their neighbors, talking to their constituents, getting input from the people that send them to Springfield to do this work. We will be back in October, well before the December 31 deadline for the fiscal cliff to actually get something done.
The House has been working on this since last year, a very comprehensive working group with some some real transit policy wonks that Delgado and Buckner involved in this issue. This is a very serious issue. We're passionate about it, and we're going to get it done. We're going to take our time and get it right.
JG: The folks from the Senate that I talked to, Villivalam and Harmon, they said that they haven't gotten a counter-proposal from the House. When do you
expect to be able to be able to give them a counter proposal?
HSW: I'm not going to get ahead of my working group. Eva-Dina Delgado and Kam Buckner are doing a heck of a job leading the working group. My working group has done an amazing job to this point, and we're going to make sure the caucus is aware of the issues. We will give them a counter-proposal when we give them a counter-proposal.
Not unlike this old Paul Masson wine commercial featuring Orson Welles, who spent part of his youth in Metra-served Woodstock, IL (and whose father got rich by inventing a bicycle light), the Speaker said the House will present no counter-proposal before its time.
JG: Is there anything you can say to reassure panicked transit users like myself that we're not going to go over the fiscal cliff, that you folks will be able to land this airplane? [Sorry for the mixed metaphor here.]
HSW: Transit is very important to my district, the Chicago region, and the entire state of Illinois. It's not just a Northeast Illinois problem. This is an entire state issue. The downstate transit has an issue as well. We are keenly aware of the issue.
We're going to continue to do our jobs. We're going to be very thorough, and we're going to get it done, and we're going to get it done right. But we're not going to be rushed because of artificial deadlines.
Read Streetsblog's recent interview on this topic with Senate President Harmon here.
Read our interview with Sen. Villivalam on this subject here.
Check out our interviews with State Sen. Mike Simmons and State Rep. Hoan Huynh on the topic here.
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