Metra lobbying, fare plans deliver all the shock riders need

How thoughtful that Metra plans to install defibrillators on all of its commuter trains.

And how fitting that the agency’s defib announcement was made a few days ago in the same heartbeat as its likely 20 percent fare increase.

At least Metra won’t have to install the heart-zapping machines in ticket offices. For commuters, just seeing the new prices will be shocking enough.

Once again, the train line that claims 81 million passenger trips per year is living up to its reputation as The Way to Really Fly by the Seat of Your Pants.

The agency that delivers suburbanites to the city and vice versa, has been paying lobbyists in Washington and Springfield for years. Millions of dollars have been doled out to these middlemen, for the purpose of making sure Metra got a heaping cut of the transportation funding pie. I suppose it was working because fare increases have been sparse — even though service has been noticeably lame as of late.

Of course, along the way, Metra’s late Executive Director Phil Pagano overindulged himself. When Pagano walked in front of a commuter train 15 months ago, his suicide exposed a nest of financial misconduct. Some of it involved the agency’s Washington lobbying firm that didn’t file required federal paperwork.

In April, mostly-new Metra officials paid a $90,000 fine because of the lobbying mess.

Nevertheless, Metra is still playing the lobbying game. And with fares now poised to surge, you have to wonder why.

The commuter rail service has paid more than $5.5 million to lobbyists since 2004. Last year Metra spent more than $1 million on lobbying, and so far this year this year authorized $200,000 to two firms. One of them, a lobbyist name William Lipinski, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars the past few years by Metra and affiliated transit agencies. Lipinski is a former Southwest suburban congressman and transportation committee heavy whose son, Dan Lipinski, currently represents his former district.

A Daily Herald investigation in April found that lobbyists hired by Metra and other Chicago transit agencies shuffled almost $2 million into the election warchests of Illinois lawmakers, raising questions of odd influence peddling by one government agency to another.

In defense of the spending, Metra spokeswoman Judy Pardonnet told the newspaper that “These people are acting as our eyes and ears in Washington and Springfield. We don’t have staff in either of those locations. What they do is monitor legislation, strategize and help us navigate the funding process.”

Whether or not you take Metra, ride the CTA or have ever stepped foot on a PACE bus, you pay for it. They all get our tax money. And all of them exist under the umbrella of the Regional Transportation Authority, the RTA.

Since 2004, the RTA and its under-agencies have spent nearly $13 million on lobbyists, sometimes employing the same firm, according to public records.

The RTA has even started posting its contracts with vendors and daily checkbook entries on the Internet. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid out each month to lobbyists, law firms and consultants of many varieties, the list of where your tax and fare money is going has some interesting other components. For instance, the RTA regularly cuts six-figure checks to an outside vendor for senior citizen and disabled ID cards. There is a $13,500 payment to a company to “search death master file.” And $2,500 for “soundproofing board conference room.” It doesn’t say whether that is to keep sound in or out.

There is a rule of thumb, generated by conventional wisdom and other measures as accurate as any public opinion poll, that all public agency budgets are at least 30 percent waste, corruption, fat and other perks that could be eliminated and no member of the paying public would ever know the difference.

Metra wants to raise fares 20 percent.

So instead of raising fares, if the transit agency chopped 20 percent out of its budget, there would still 10 percent to divvy up for nice hotel rooms, succulent meals out and a few bones to the lobbyists.

The day that actually happens though, I hope to be headed downtown ... on a train with the defibrillator fully-charged.

Ÿ Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ChuckGoudie