Evanston’s state legislators voiced cautious optimism toward the Illinois General Assembly allocating funds to avert the nine-figure fiscal cliff facing the region’s mass transit agencies during a town hall Monday evening, with the caveat that final action may not come until shortly before reaching its edge.

State Reps. Robyn Gabel (18th District) and Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz (17th); and state Sen. Laura Fine (9th) spoke to more than 100 residents from Evanston and nearby communities packed into the Council Chambers at Morton City Hall, 909 Davis St., which fittingly sits between stations for the CTA Purple Line and Metra UP-North line. Gabel, who also serves as house majority leader, opened the meeting by saying it and other town halls are being held because transit riders “have to shape the future” of the systems they use.

“Riders have the clearest insights into what needs to change,” Gabel said. “Reform must be built from the riders’ experience upward, not handed down from agencies protecting their turf.”

The trio of legislators were joined by Elizabeth Scott, a principal policy analyst from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), who presented major findings and recommendations of the agency’s Plan of Action for Regional Transit (PART). This policy document, published in December 2023, was commissioned by the General Assembly in anticipation of the fiscal cliff, a collective budget gap of $771 million faced by the CTA, Metra and Pace in 2026 and beyond created by reduced ridership since 2020 and the end of federal pandemic relief funds.

Creating transit ‘we actually want’

Scott explained that although financial stability was the chief concern driving the PART’s development, what they landed on was a “set of interconnected solutions” which seek to create “the system that we actually want,” in part to help sell major stakeholders like the state on putting up the funds necessary to close the budget gap.

“It was going to be really hard to have a conversation with folks about how we raise a great deal of money to support the transit system,” Scott said, “if it was to raise money to get us what we had last year, that people were somewhat unhappy with anyway.”

While the PART includes a wide range of recommendations, the largest and most central to the negotiations in Springfield is governance reform, which proposes some level of consolidation and coordination between the three service agencies and the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA).

While the RTA is just a funding and oversight agency, the PART recommends either fully integrating it with the service agencies to create a single public body for the entire Chicagoland region, or empowering the RTA to act as a stronger coordinating agency for high-level decisionsclike fare policies and capital planning while leaving day-to-day operations and service planning to the existing CTA, Metra and Pace organizations.

Scott said CMAP doesn’t view one option or the other as “inherently better,” but believes a significant shift is needed, since governance “goes straight to” system performance and rider experience through areas like service frequency, capital investments, fare structures, safety and cleanliness.

“We have hundreds of really wonderful, dedicated people who work in the transit agencies in this region, and this is not about criticizing any one of them,” Scott said. “It’s about creating the conditions for everyone to be successful, especially in the event that we make this transformational investment.”

Springfield talks are ‘somewhat optimistic’

But the clock is ticking on that “transformational investment,” as the state legislature’s spring session will adjourn on May 31. While further work could be done during the fall veto session, missing the end-of-May deadline will still force the transit agencies to begin developing their “doomsday budgets” to account for going over the cliff’s edge, likely resulting in overall service cuts of 30-40% which could greatly impact Evanston’s bus and rail service from all three.

Transportation committees in both chambers have been meeting since the start of the year to hash out solutions, but the chairs of both have taken hardline stances on reform. State Rep. Marty Moylan said earlier this month that he “won’t call the bill” in his committee until seven operational issues of his had been resolved, and state Sen. Ram Villivalam has frequently invoked a slogan: “There will be no revenue without reform.”

Nevertheless, Evanston’s delegation did not seem pessimistic Monday evening. Answering a resident’s question on where the legislature was at in their negotiations, Sen. Fine said that the colleagues she’s spoken to who are close to the discussions are “somewhat optimistic.”

“To me, that’s hopeful,” Fine said. “What that looks like? We’re not quite sure yet.”

The General Assembly will return from its spring break Tuesday with just six weeks left before adjourning, though legislators indicated that real movement may not come until late in the calendar when to how work tends to accelerate in Springfield once lawmakers are feel the heat of an incoming deadline.

“The interesting thing about Springfield is that things really don’t happen until there’s a lot of pressure,” Gabel said. “It takes [bringing] it to a point where there’s a lot of pressure and everybody feels like they have to give a little to make it work.”

Or, put facetiously by Gong-Gershowitz: “We’ve still got so much time!”

Asked by a resident what it would mean to miss the May 31 deadline, Gabel said there may be some “bubblegum and tape” solutions to hold things together, but assured residents that the state legislature is “taking it very seriously” and encouraged keeping up pressure on lawmakers to find a solution before reaching the cliff’s edge.

Long-term ideas for revenue, service

Past the looming budget crisis, however, residents in attendance had plenty of feedback and ideas on how to improve the region’s transit system in the long term.

In terms of adding service, Priscilla Giles said buses need to have a schedule that “can be depended on” and routes that take riders “where they need to go,” recalling the loss of bus stops when service changed from the Evanston Bus Company to the CTA in 1973.

On the flip side, Howard Oppenheimer suggested service schedules, particularly the Metra’s, be “more flexible on demand” to adapt to the rise of work-from-home scheduling, such as differentiating service between days of the work week or by season.

“There’s a lot of inefficiency there, because of the nature of a fixed schedule on a fixed system,” Oppenheimer said, “when our workforce is no longer on a fixed schedule on a fixed system.”

Other advocated for specific services: Stephen Hiatt-Leonard said cutting funding to Pace would “cut down on my independence” as a wheelchair user, and Gavin Settlemire and Carol Mark respectively suggested incorporating electric scooters and ridesharing as lower-scale options in the future. Still others brought up issues of safety and rider behavior, for which Aaron Athans said there should be a “real way to communicate non-emergencies” to transit staff without unduly delaying travel.

Most of all, though, residents focused on the core issue of revenue. Multiple ideas were suggested for raising the funds needed to sustain the region’s transit, from merchandise sales and transit line naming rights to vehicle congestion pricing and carbon taxing, but the one that got the most attention was to reallocate transporation funds that exist — particularly those given to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) for highway construction.

Janet Larson said transit users should receive their “fair share” of investment for paying into the state’s vehicle roads, and Bob Hoyer asked whether legislature is considering “shifting priorities” in IDOT’s budget, citing the $206 million proposed for the I-57 interchange in Will County as an “interchange to nowhere” which could be redirected to mass transit.

While sympathetic to the general idea, the legislators explained that the “lockbox amendment” approved in 2016 puts some restrictions on how transportation funds can be used. Fine said that although it “passed resoundingly,” it puts the state in “a little bit of a pickle” today with transit funding, and Gong-Gershowitz said it “falls into the category of ‘seemed like a good idea at the time.’”

“The referendum, which lockboxed those taxes to make sure that we maintained our infrastructure, is somewhat less flexible than perhaps meets the modern needs of today,” Gong-Gershowitz said. “Now we just have to figure out whether or not there’s a way to address that issue a little bit more flexibly.”

Gabel said that it “would take a certain amount of political will” to pull from these lockboxed funds, but suggested the fiscal challenges the state and region face might be able to move the needle.

“We are facing this fiscal cliff,” Gabel said, “and so I think everything’s on the table right now, and we’ll see.”