Dems Working Group Chair: Reform Transit Before New Revenue
Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado (D-Chicago) is one of the co-chairs of a recently announced House Democrat working group to address reforms and funding for Chicago-area mass transit. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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If there’s an expectation of what issue may dominate the spring legislative session in 2025, many believe it will be a pending fiscal cliff for Chicago-area mass transit agencies.
House Speaker Chris Welch launched another of their partisan-only working groups to address the crisis, a group co-chaired by Rep. Kam Buckner (D-Chicago) and Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado (D-Chicago).
Delgado was a guest on this week’s The Illinoize Podcast. She addressed the concerns of riders over reliability and safety as part of the discussion.
“I do think that riders are frustrated right now, and there’s a lot of reasons why the service may not be what riders expect,” she said. “I think COVID really did affect the way people think about transit, and that dip in ridership I think has led us to a lot of the challenges we’re seeing right now.”
Delgado estimates if there’s no revenue to replace the anticipated loss in federal funds, the Chicago-area would face 40% service cuts in CTA, Metra, and Pace service.
But, Delgado admits, the push for structural reform, currently a tangled web between the funding source in the Regional Transit Authority and three service agencies, will likely antecede new revenue.
“The answer to your question is ‘can we get revenue without reform?’ I think the answer is no,” she said. “We need reform to be coupled with revenue and other changes we want to see to the services.”
But Delgado wasn’t willing to agree a major reform and funding package would include a tax increase.
“I don’t think we have an answer to that yet,” she said. “I think we still have to work through this process. It is going to be a long and collaborative process.”
House Republican Leader Tony McCombie (R-Savanna) criticized the working group for not including Republican voices, but Delgado said the GOP will be part of the final transit solution.
“This is going to most definitely have to be a bipartisan solution. That’s what I believe,” she said. “The reality is the working group process is not the legislative process, right? The legislative process is going to continue to be what it should be, which is also a collaborative and engaging process where everybody has a chance to have a voice. My door’s always open. I would love the solution to this to be bipartisan because transit is bipartisan, it doesn’t cut across party lines.”
None of the working groups organized by House Democrats in the past two years has included any GOP voices.
In March, House Democrats announced a teacher shortage working group. In January, the caucus announced a working group on “new arrivals,” migrants that had been shipped to Chicago from Texas.
The caucus previously announced a firearm safety working group and a public safety working group. Republicans were also excluded from those groups.
Here’s the video version of the podcast: