The CTA held the last of its 2025 budget town halls yesterday, allowing more members of the community to voice their concerns and opinions about the looming $771 million regional transit fiscal cliff. The event took place at Malcolm X College, 1900 W. Jackson Blvd. While officials acknoewledged the budget crisis, it was a "good news and bad news"-style meeting.
One of the good things Acting CTA President Nora Leerhsen metioned was further developments at the Forest Park Blue Line station. "Being centered in welcoming places means that we are also focused on creating a welcoming, inviting environment for our riders in many different ways," she said. "So this comes from capital projects of a grand scale, like our accessibility projects, similar to our Austin Green Line station that's getting work on it right now, soon to be reopened with accessibility for the first time in its history. We're also very focused on the Forest Park branch going west, that 290 corridor, where we know that slow zones are impacting the service, and we want to invest there and continue to plan and be ready for investment when it comes."
As with the town hall last week at Truman College, there weren’t any groundbreaking announcements. On Saturday, during one half of the fiscal cliff talk double header last Saturday, CTA Vice President of Legislative Affairs Sam Smith said, "We only have a limited amount of levers that we can pull to address the budget." Similarly, at Malcolm X, CTA Budget Director Lisa Smith said there are three potential scenarios for the transit system. These are: fill the gap with $771 million and maintain the status quo; improve local transit with a proposed $1.5 billion in additional annual state revenue; or do nothing and fall over the fiscal cliff, Philadelphia-stye.
As Streetsblog did for the previous CTA town hall in Uptown, we’ll mostly let other officials and citizens who attended speak for themselves. Here are some memorable quotes from the public comment portion of the meeting. Our apologies if anyone’s name was misspelled; Feel free to email editor John Greenfield at jgreenfield[at]streetsblog[dot]org and we’ll get that rectified.
State Rep. Theresa Mah
"My constituents depend on public transit, and so it's really important to me to be here and to let you know that in Springfield, when we go back for [the October] veto session, my hope is that we will have a transit package that will address the budget needs that CTA has just described to you. We hope that we'll have something that the majority of our colleagues can all agree on. I don't know if you know that after May 31 the vote threshold goes up from 60 votes in the House to [a supermajority of] 71 votes. And so it becomes a little more challenging. We have to find something that everyone can agree on. Otherwise, wait until after January 1, when the vote threshold goes back down to 60. And so those are some of the challenges. We plan to go back to Springfield the second week of October and then the final week of October."
Brian Bailey
Before and after the meeting, Brian handed out flyers concerning a news article about transit from World Socialist Web Site.
"The idea is totally absurd that the money isn't there. Just in the last two months, the top ten richest people in the country blew their wealth by seven hundred and 40 billion dollars. We're only facing a billion dollar shortfall. It really presents that the issues in society for the working classes aren't the priority for the politicians. We need to face this serious crisis, but at the end of the day, as long as they're going to fit in the buildings, you know, whatever happens with us is just business on the side. You know, I really think that, you know, the working class in this city shouldn't take this sitting down."
Fabio Göttlicher, cofounder of Commuters Take Action
"We saw on the slides earlier that the number of buses and trains going out every day is increasing. That's good, but what has not improved is the consistency of the service. If you run three trains in five minutes, then nothing for 20 minutes, it just means you're running full service. Let's take some lessons from cities on average, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, and see how they do it. If you want to say the CTA is a CTA that isn't able to run trains every five minutes on the train tracks that it owns and has full control over, then maybe this isn't the CTA that's worth saving.
Declan McAndrew
"I grew up in Chicago, and have been here pretty much my whole life. I don't own a car, so I utilize CTA for everything that I do, and I'm always on it over the weekends to visit friends and family. I find it really frustrating that it is facing this funding crisis, and I think everything should be done to preserve service and reliability. But given that it is such an economic driver and it creates so much value in communities and neighborhoods, I feel like there should be a way for us to put that back into CTA as well, just so it can continue to grow. Additionally, I think, like everyone here tonight, should be bothering their representatives and senators in Illinois.
Rep. Mah again
"I wanted to just say a few words, because there were some misconceptions about the General Assembly of the Illinois legislature that were mentioned. And so I just want to reassure you that, okay, so the legislature is made up of 177 members, 118 in the house and 59 in the Senate. The majority in both chambers are Democrats. The majority of us understand that we need to avoid this death spiral. We need to come up with a plan to fill this budget gap."
Later, she added:
"If you call your state legislators, tell them how important it is to get this done in October, because that'll prevent us from having to go too deep into these doomsday scenarios. And it'll avoid the risks of going over that cliff. And we do not want to go over the cliff. Everybody's committed, even the governor, so the governor is going to sign the bill. He has never said he's not going to bail out Chicago[land]. This is a regional commitment to keep the economic engine of the state running. So we hear you, and I am committed to doing what we can. We will pass a transit bill in the state legislature. We're not going to let CTA go over the cliff."
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