Daily Herald opinion: The dark vocabulary of public transit: RTA fund transfer is indication of what lies ahead if lawmakers don’t act

Fiscal cliff.

Death spiral.

The vernacular of public transportation funding in the Chicago area grows increasingly ominous by the day.

Last week, the Regional Transportation Authority transferred $73 million from Pace and Metra to help the Chicago Transportation Authority avoid a 40% cut in services while the General Assembly works to get past stumbling blocks that derailed a potential solution to the $771 million shortfall facing the three agencies.

Without legislative help, all three services will have to impose draconian service cuts and cost reductions to remain solvent next year. That deadline has long been referred to as the “fiscal cliff” toward which the transportation system is driving, created primarily by a combination of the scheduled end of COVID-related federal assistance and declining ridership numbers that have not rebounded from pandemic-era losses.

At the end of the regular legislative session, lawmakers failed to pass a proposed solution that, among many organizational and financial measures, would replace the RTA with a new 20-member board called the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, create a real estate transfer tax and add a statewide sales tax on motor-vehicle food deliveries. Their next opportunity to revisit the issue will come in November during what is traditionally called the fall veto session.

At last Thursday’s RTA board meeting, director Brian Sager asked, reasonably, "Why isn't it better to force our legislators right now to see the reality of where we are today with CTA?"

Why, indeed. Would that there were some hope of that. But lawmakers dragged their feet throughout the spring regarding a crisis they knew was coming and fell just short of a solution with a proposal in the waning hours before adjourning May 31. Unfortunately, that left RTA with no alternative but to, in board member Dennis Montero's words, "buy the time so our leaders in Springfield may come up with a sensible solution."

The key problem, of course, is that lawmakers don't have much time to buy, as the RTA’s funding transfer to CTA amply demonstrates. If they don’t solve the fiscal crisis this November, the entire public transportation system will enter what Montero called a "death spiral" of service reductions.

The truth is that, without lawmakers’ help, the funding transfer - supplemented by increased fees and decreased services to disabled riders the RTA board also approved - could come to be seen as the first stage of that spiral.

It was hardly surprising that a complex, comprehensive makeover of the entire regional transportation system thrust upon legislators at the last minute in the grand tradition of Illinois General Assembly brinkmanship met a chilly reception. But leaders have had three months now to hear detailed concerns from diverse stakeholders - including suburban mayors who expressed a variety of complaints in a joint letter this summer - and have still two more months to reach alternatives to get them to that “sensible solution” public transportation throughout the Chicago region is counting on.

Sensible solution. Wouldn’t that be a nice replacement for the dark vocabulary that has ruled the transportation system for the past year and a half?