Pritzker announces his appointments to the new Northern Illinois Transit Authority board

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker announced his Northern Illinois Transit Authority board appointments Friday, ending speculation about the final composition of the new board that will soon possess broad authority to govern the CTA, Metra and Pace.

NITA will officially replace the imminently defunct Regional Transportation Authority in less than two weeks pursuant to the state’s transit funding and reform legislation. All current transit board members’ terms expire Sept. 1, when they will be replaced by the new members.

Pritzker’s NITA board picks are Nedra Sims Fears, Rosa Ortiz, Bashir Qaasim, Vanessa Uribe and Nirali Shah. The governor also reappointed current CTA board member Neema Jha to serve only on the board of the CTA. Pritzker’s appointees will need the approval of the Illinois State Senate.

Fears, who will serve on the CTA and NITA boards, is the executive director of the Greater Chatham Initiative, where she works to “promote neighborhood investment and economic growth on Chicago’s South Side,” the governor’s office said. She holds an MBA and previously served on the board of the Metropolitan Planning Council, according to the governor’s office.

Ortiz is an urban planner who has served on the CTA board since 2021 and previously worked as managing deputy commissioner at Chicago’s Department of Housing. Ortiz will now serve concurrently on the boards of NITA and suburban bus agency Pace, but will no longer serve on the CTA’s board.

Qaasim is vice president at The Whole Group, an AI technology consulting firm. Qaasim’s work involves “[advising] large organizations through transformation,” the governor’s office said. He is nominated to serve on the boards of both NITA and Metra. The governor’s office said he also serves on the board of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Chicago.

Uribe is associate vice president for people and operations at The Chicago Community Trust and has previously worked for both Cook County and Illinois state government. At the state, she served in the Illinois Secretary of State’s Executive Office and the Department of Commerce and Economic Activity. Uribe will serve only on the NITA board.

Shah, who will also serve only on the NITA board, is a senior director at the Obama Foundation. Shah “oversaw procurement for several aspects of the construction of the Obama Presidential Center,” the governor’s office said, and she previously worked in procurement, contract administration and compliance at the CTA.

Jha, who has served on the CTA’s board since she was first appointed by the governor in 2022, is a director at the consulting firm Charles River Associates, where she “leads the firm’s practice advising large organizations on technology infrastructure modernization,” the governor’s office said. She previously worked at Amazon Web Services Professional Services and at Tribune Media.

The governor, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have now appointed five members each to the new NITA board. Preckwinkle and Johnson’s appointees were approved by the County Board and Chicago City Council respectively. The other five NITA board members are collar county appointees.

In a statement, Pritzker said his appointees “will play a critical role in modernizing Illinois’ transit systems so we can continue to strengthen operations, make necessary upgrades, and better connect communities across our state.”

NITA was created by the state’s transit funding and reform legislation approved by lawmakers last fall, which is expected to raise more than $1 billion for the region’s mass transit annually. The new governing agency is expected to act as a more powerful version of the RTA, with greater authority to coordinate service throughout the region — and more cash on hand.

Pritzker’s choice of CTA board appointees, Fears and Jha, means new members on the agency’s board will outnumber reappointed members by one. Johnson, not without some pushback, appointed two repeat members to the board — Lester Barclay, an attorney and the board’s current chair, and Michael Eaddy, a pastor — along with Oswaldo Alvarez, who is new to the CTA board but currently serves on the board of the RTA. Both of Preckwinkle’s CTA appointees, Tom Kotarac and Ann Kalayil, are new to the CTA board, although Kotarac currently serves on the RTA board.

The new CTA board members will have some authority to approve a permanent president for the CTA, which has been led for a year and a half by an acting president, Nora Leerhsen.

The new transit board structure removes some of the power the mayor of Chicago has historically had over the leadership appointment process at CTA, including by diluting the mayor’s number of appointments on the CTA board and by requiring that the NITA board, too, give its “advice and consent” for the appointment of any new leader.