Daily Herald opinion: Necessary, yes; but rankling imperfections: Suburbs pay a heavy price for bringing public transit back from the brink

In the true spirit of compromise, the $1.5 billion bailout plan Springfield approved in the wee hours of Friday morning solves a problem, but with some feature for every stakeholder to feel unhappy about. In the end, it was good to see that lawmakers recognized the urgency of acting and, to some degree, made sincere efforts to accommodate interests that had opposed the solution cobbled together at the last minute of the regular session in May.

All that said, there is still plenty in the final resolution that can leave people in the suburbs wondering if they aren’t being asked to shoulder a disproportionate share of the pain, with little means for influencing whether others — most to the point, the city and the CTA — are managing their share of the system efficiently and fairly.

Cook County, of course, joins DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will in having to endure a quarter-percentage point increase in the public transportation sales tax that contributes just short of $500 million to the bailout, but in the collar counties especially, it remains troubling that the makeup of the 20-member board for the new Northern Illinois Transit Authority, which will replace the current RTA as the slightly more empowered overseer of Metra, Pace and the CTA, was not modified to provide some exurban influence in agency decisions.

Perhaps most annoying about the proposal, though, is the institution of a 45-cents increase in tolls to be used for tollway construction generally unrelated to the fiscal needs of the public transportation system other than the potential — not the requirement — for $200 million being pumped into the state’s Road Fund for public transit. Considering that suburban commuters are overwhelmingly affected by toll increases, this nod to the labor lobby is especially rankling.

Downstate lawmakers expressed a fair degree of pique that the Chicago-area bailout diverted away funds they wanted to help public transportation in their areas, but otherwise they were spared a previously proposed statewide sales tax increase that would mostly have gone to the benefit of the Chicago region.

St. Charles Republican state Sen. Don DeWitte supported using Road Fund revenues for public transportation, and as his party’s transit leader in the Senate pushed for a fairer deal for the suburbs, but ultimately the urgency of the crisis and the power of the Democratic Party majority won the day.

“We are changing our public transit system for the first time in five decades to be safe, to be reliable, to be accessible, to be integrated; making sure that we got the performance and we got the funding that’s needed to make a system of the next level,” said Chicago Democratic Sen. Ram Villivalam, who for more than a year led efforts to devise a plan to avoid the fiscal cliff awaiting Chicago’s transit agencies

That goal is important. The need to get the Chicago area’s transportation agencies back on track financially was real and urgent. And, to be sure, the end result of this long and difficult political negotiation is not as bad as it might have been. Still, it is an expensive deal for the suburbs with some unanswered questions. We are left to hope that if the restructuring succeeds sufficiently, there will be opportunities to eventually modify the system in ways that better satisfy commuters and other interests here.