Following the Trail of Transit Dollars leads back to City Hall

Before the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group led the charge to demand the repair of the CTA Green Line (Lake Street/Englewood/Jackson Park Ls) in 1992, the public had little information or awareness about how public transportation funding and services worked.

The average Jane Q. Citizen was aware of the bus route or L line, PACE bus, or Metra train she depended upon to get around town.  If riders and members of the public were concerned about the price of fares, the quality or accessibility of transit services, their complaints and concerns were aimed at the three individual transit agencies.  And for most Chicagoans, that means CTA.

But did you know that. . .

• The Mayor of the City of Chicago plays a critical role in shaping the policy directions and priorities at CTA?
• City Hall itself seeks funds and spends hundreds of million of dollars in federal, state, and local funds on public transportation?
• City Council has a committee on "Transportation and the Public Way," to which CTA sometimes testifies?

Choosing the Leadership Team for Public Transportation

The presumed "firewall" or political and administrative separation of CTA and City Hall was a myth that NCBG and the grassroots Community Green Line Coalition dispelled during its hard-fought organizing campaign in 1992-93.

NCBG and its community allies quickly discovered that the majority of the most influential decision makers at CTA are chosen by the Mayor.  As a matter of law, the Mayor of the City of Chicago is responsible for appointing four out of the seven people who serve on the CTA Board of Directors.  The Mayor also selects the Chairperson of that board, and the individual who heads the agency.  The Governor of the State selects the other three Board members.  There is no public input into the Mayor's and Governor's selection of these appointees.  For decades, the CTA President (chief executive officer) and the CTA Board chair have usually been former City Hall commissioners or influential aides to the Mayor, before going to the transit agency.  Many key CTA staffers as well transfer back and forth between City Hall departments and the CTA bureaucracy.

City Dollars for Transit 

In the mid-1970s, State law established a mandatory funding formula for public transportation that directs a share of city sales tax revenue to the CTA.  In addition, State law requires that City Hall contribute a minimum of $3 million per year to the CTA's operating budget.  However, that amount is discretionary, and City Hall has chosen very deliberately NOT to increase that amount since the formula was instituted.  Unlike other major cities around the nation, the City has not appropriated any more of its own resources to support the vital transit services that make Chicago a city on the move.  And when you consider that the CTA spends over $900 million a year to provide bus and rail service to the people of our city, $3 million isn't even the proverbial "drop in the bucket."

Other cities have taxed real estate transfer transactions, particularly in their central areas, or imposed special sales taxes, or shared Downtown parking revenue with their local transit agencies.  But not Chicago's City Hall. 

However, City Hall and CTA have developed a partnership on funding transit infrastructure.  Over the past decade, City Hall has applied for transit federal grants to make improvements to Downtown subway lines and stations. The City took the lead in applying for the funds for the CTA Orange Line, and then designing and overseeing its construction.  To its credit, the City completed the project ahead of schedule and under budget, and CTA began operating the line in 1992.

In 2002, the City took the lead to contract with a private firm for "street furniture," including 2,200 new bus shelters, at no cost to the CTA.  In recent years, the City also used nearly $40 million in Tax Increment Financing funds from Downtown TIF districts to make subway improvements. But TIF Districts in Chicago's outlying neighborhoods have not been tapped to provide additional resources to add L stations or make neighborhood transit improvements.  The Neighborhood Capital Budget Group and its transit initiative, the Campaign for Better Transit, have urged both City Hall and CTA to use TIF funds to expand neighborhood access to CTA rail lines, proposing that the City share at least $50 million in TIF dollars for new neighborhood transit stations.

Setting the Tone: The Mayor who said, "Transit has lost its constituency."

Perhaps most importantly, the Mayor of our City sets the tone for our vision of Chicago.  In the early to mid-1990s, City Hall referred frustrated transit riders  to the CTA's Merchandise Mart headquarters whenever people complained about public transportation.  The Mayor was silent when CTA drastically cut services and raised fares in 1992.  Once the cutbacks were approved, he tapped a friend from the corporate sector to take over the agency.  IN 1995, the Mayor appointed his former Chief of Staff, who had also served as commissioner of two vital city departments, to head the CTA.  Again in 1996, when the CTA announced plans for another painful round of bus and rail service cuts, City Hall stood by, and let CTA take the heat.  In 1996, the Mayor actually said that "public transportation has lost its constituency," setting the tone that the people of the City didn't really care about public transit any longer.

But City Hall isn't always silent on questions of public transportation.  In the early to-mid-1990s, the Mayor was an ardent support of a project known as the Central Area Circulator, a new "light-rail" line that would ferry people around the Loop to North Michigan Avenue and to McCormick Place.  The project had an estimated cost of at least $750 million, and City Hall used its considerable influence in Congress to seek federal funding for the project, at the same time convincing downtown businesses to tax themselves to pay a local match.  But the missing piece, a commitment from the State of Illinois, eluded the Mayor, in part due to public outcry against the project as a misplaced priority that overlooked much less expensive alternatives.  NCBG helped lead the skeptics, and eventually, the project was cancelled, but not until the City had spent $59 million on lobbying for and designing the line. 

Now, with City Hall's new "Central Area Plan," the City is proposing billions of dollars in new downtown transit improvements, including a subway and the "Circle Line."  This new "Outer Loop" line itself would be a massive public works project, with an estimated price tag of $1 billion.  It has now been a decade since the City and CTA joined forces to support any major neighborhood transit investment, but City Hall is clearly ambitious about its plans for Downtown transit.

The bottom line:  City Hall and public transportation are intricately and unavoidably linked, legally, financially, and politically.  The question is:  For whom will City Hall build public transportation?