RTA approves funding estimates in final meeting before being replaced by Northern Illinois Transit Authority

Regional Transportation Authority board members met for the final regularly scheduled meeting of the agency’s more than 50-year history Thursday morning, approving transit funding estimates for next year and waxing poetic about the governing body’s imminent obsolescence.

The RTA, which oversees the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace, will be officially replaced by the Northern Illinois Transit Authority on Sept. 1, pursuant to transit reform legislation approved by state lawmakers last fall.

When lawmakers passed the transit legislation in the middle of the night last October, they averted a looming fiscal crisis that had threatened to cause drastic cuts to transit service in the Chicago area. The legislation is expected to raise more than $1 billion for the region’s mass transit systems annually with the help of a sales tax hike and a diversion of the state’s sales tax on motor fuel to public transit.

“No funding without reform” was the mantra in Springfield as lawmakers debated potential funding measures last year, and the law also restructures how the region’s transit systems are governed.

NITA, as it’s called, is intended to become a more powerful version of the RTA. Advocates hope the new funding and governance structure ultimately lead to more frequent, safer transit service — and better coordination between the CTA, Metra and Pace. The agencies have historically planned transit service independently even though transit riders often use more than one service — for instance, taking a CTA bus to a Metra train station, or transferring from a Pace bus to the CTA.

Current RTA board members’ terms expire Sept. 1, although a handful of current board members have been appointed to the NITA board that will replace it. Thursday was the RTA’s final regularly scheduled board meeting. Members of an RTA transition committee are scheduled to meet again next week.

The outgoing board members Thursday approved operating funding estimates for the CTA, Metra and Pace through 2029. All in all, the region’s operating budget is estimated at more than $4 billion next year — with about $1.3 billion coming from new NITA Act revenue, the RTA’s manager of budget and analysis, Geoff Bishop, told board members.

The CTA is expected to receive just over $2 billion in operating funds next year, with Metra getting nearly $944 million and Pace receiving close to $335 million. Pace also operates paratransit service, which is funded separately from the agency’s own budget, for the entire region.

Also Thursday, the RTA board approved estimates for the region’s five-year capital funding program. Capital funds for the region next year are expected to total more than $2 billion, a bucket made up of cash from federal, state and local sources.

“Thanks, Brian,” Board Chair Kirk Dillard said after the RTA’s capital program manager, Brian Lowenberg, presented the funding plan. “Isn’t it nice to have money?”

Throughout the meeting, leaders expressed a general sense of optimism about the more liquid NITA era.

“The RTA was created to do something that at the time, no other regional body had been asked to do, and that was to manage, coordinate three distinct, diverse transit operators across a large and complex region,” RTA Executive Director Leanne Redden said.

“That mission required a board willing to balance competing interests, tight budgets and an enormous amount of public responsibility,” she said, adding that the RTA board had done its job “often in the face of chronic, insufficient funding and authority.”

Outgoing board member Bill Coulson, who was first appointed to the board in 2007, used a vehicular metaphor to express his thoughts on the transition.

“In my two decades on the board, the RTA kind of lurched from one crisis to another,” Coulson said. “We were driving an old Model T Ford that kept sputtering along. But now with NITA we have a brand-new Cadillac with all the bells and whistles,” he said. “And under the law we turn it over to our teenage son to drive.”

“I’m so excited that there’s going to be a governance body that has both the funding and the oversight power that the RTA has always sought,” Dillard said during his own remarks.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Dillard said as he thanked board members. “I’ll still be around, especially as a rider.”