The veto session’s here — what will happen with transit crisis?
Five months after a dramatic stalemate in Springfield over the transit funding crisis, it’s back before the General Assembly as the veto session starts Tuesday.
What’s changed? The Regional Transportation Authority lowered the “fiscal cliff” facing Metra, Pace and the CTA in 2026 from $771 million to $202 million recently.
What hasn’t? There’s still support to provide up to $1.5 billion in funding for the system annually. And some third-rail new taxes are still alive.
On May 31, the Senate approved legislation to bail out transit and reform governance, but the House balked at voting on short notice.
So, what’s next?
Timing
“I don’t believe anything happens next week,” Republican state Sen. Seth Lewis of Bartlett predicted Wednesday. “It’ll be the last week of veto session (starting Oct. 27), that’s my hunch.”
Lewis, a Transportation Committee member, expects that rather than taking up the Senate bill, the House will offer its own version.
“I think it’s going to be completely different,” he said. “From what I heard of negotiations, there is potentially governance as well as tax changes, but it’s not the Senate bill that was passed.”
Democratic state Rep. Mary Beth Canty of Arlington Heights said it’s likely that more details of the legislation will be revealed this week.
Who’s in charge?
Most lawmakers want to shake up transit governance, and the Senate bill would replace the RTA with the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, which would have stronger oversight of Metra, Pace and the CTA.
Many suburban leaders pushed back against the proposed makeup of NITA, arguing that Chicago and Cook County would control votes on the 20-member board and inch out the Collar Counties.
Canty sits on a House working group that spent the summer negotiating a transit deal.
“Conversations have been going well,” she said. The group is making sure that the voices of colleagues and constituents, “in the suburbs, and especially in the Collar Counties … have been heard in the process and are reflected in the changes that folks will see. I think that’s been pretty critical this whole time, and we’re getting pretty close.”
The Senate legislation gives the governor five appointments to the NITA board. Republican state Rep. Brad Stephens of Rosemont, who also sits on the working group, proposed changes so that the governor would make one NITA appointment as would the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate.
“I have presented that and asked if that was something we could consider, and it wasn’t an overwhelming, ‘hell no.’ That also gives some bipartisan nature to how this is going to be governed,” said Stephens, who also serves as Rosemont’s mayor.
“Also, why not have buy-in from the legislature when we’re doing this?”
Funding
With COVID-19 funds running out in 2026, the RTA estimates shortfalls of $790 million in 2027 that will grow each year without relief.
The Senate-approved bill includes some controversial proposals: a $1.50 fee for most online deliveries dubbed the “pizza tax”; extending a Chicago real estate transfer tax to suburban Cook and the Collar Counties; and a 10% tax on rideshares, such as Uber and Lyft.
“Not all of those options were well received,” Canty said. “The House hadn’t had an opportunity to vet a lot of those things.
“Over the summer, we have made a lot of progress in committee, so we will be looking to fund the system that we are designing. We’re not going to leave anyone holding the bag,” added Canty, saying she didn’t want to give away specifics, but there should be “shifts from the spring.”
Republicans haven’t seen a draft of the bill yet, Stephens said.
Now that the fiscal cliff is around $202 million. “We can probably scare up the couple hundred million to get through 2026,” he said. “But there’s also got to be buy-in to get the new NITA board seated.”
So far, there “doesn’t appear to be consensus … to throw a billion and a half at an agency that’s going to be in transition,” he added.
Which could mean more legislation churn in 2026. Or not. Stay tuned.