Battle lines drawn at RTA may have scuttled meeting
Regional Transportation Authority administrators abruptly canceled a Friday meeting amid friction between board directors over the mission of the agency and funding for the CTA, Pace and Metra.
The sudden decision announced after 6:30 p.m. Thursday caught some directors including Bill Coulson by surprise. The Glenview attorney said he still intended to show up and “do the statutorily required people’s work.”
The move may indicate a lack of consensus over some crucial budget issues that have pitted the suburbs against Chicago. But there’s also undercurrents of dissatisfaction with the direction the RTA is going from Chicago leaders and an ongoing probe by a state task force that could recommend restructuring the RTA, CTA, Pace and Metra boards.
Numerous RTA officials fired salvos this week, among them Director Al Jourdan, who represents McHenry County. Jourdan suggested in a letter to the Daily Herald that five Chicago board members should step down after they opined in a Chicago Sun-Times oped section that the RTA was an ineffective and “expensive bureaucracy” that should be downsized.
Jourdan shot back that “the Chicago appointees continue to read from their prepared script that says that the CTA should be allocated more and more of the region’s money and at the same time they tell the public to trust them that the CTA is run perfectly and needs no oversight. Certainly the (CTA’s) excessive bonding, continuous budget woes and numerous operational problems suggest they need greater oversight.”
Chicago RTA Directors Anthony Anderson, James Buchanan, Phil Fuentes, Christopher Melvin and Sarah Pang, who are appointed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, said they disagreed with proposals from RTA Chairman John S. Gates to expand the agency’s powers.
The concept had not been discussed with the board, they noted.
“The RTA doesn’t operate a single train or bus. It is a bureaucracy only and has grown well beyond its original mission. The RTA diverts a minimum of $33 million annually from the operating budgets of CTA, Metra and Pace with little evidence of positive impact,” the directors wrote.
“We will not support any future growth of the agency’s role that leads to an increase in the agency’s budget.”
Gates has proposed new laws to increase the RTA’s oversight authority and tighten ethics provisions for directors. Gates also wants to consolidate the planning departments of the CTA, RTA, Pace, Metra and the Chicago Metropolitan Planning Agency into one.
“I believe greater authority must be given to the RTA to ensure it can perform its role,” Jourdan said in his letter. “If my colleagues don’t see the value of the RTA, and aren’t willing to be the leaders this public transit system needs, they should step aside.”
August budget talks served as a precursor to regional tensions with a stalemate between suburban and city directors over the RTA’s plan to issue $100 million in bonds for capital projects.
Officials wanted to give the CTA 50 percent, Metra 45 percent and Pace 5 percent.
Another issue of interest is the RTA’s proposal for divvying up so-called discretionary funds among the three transit agencies. RTA administrators propose giving the CTA $185 million, Pace $3.8 million and Metra nothing.
Discretionary funding produced a major turf war in 2012 that led to gridlock among all four agencies and caused the RTA to narrowly miss a mandated state deadline to pass a budget.