IL: Transit reform measure shifts CTA control from Chicago mayor. Lawmaker says that’s an ‘asset.’

Illinois Democrats last week saved the Chicago Transit Authority from drastic cuts, and Mayor Brandon Johnson from taking further heat from public transportation advocates — but they permanently took his hand off the throttle in the process.

As state lawmakers raced against the clock to pass a sweeping $1.5 billion plan to overhaul regional mass transportation, the mayor’s office lost control over the CTA board. That board will itself cede some authority over one of the nation’s largest transit agencies, which will now be overseen by a new, more powerful body that will govern transit throughout the entire Chicago region.

Johnson and his allies say that’s a worthwhile price to pay to keep CTA trains chugging along. During a sit-down with the Tribune last week, the mayor cast the shift as a welcome sign that the days of ruling City Hall with an “iron fist” are over.

“I mean, I’m not a fascist. I don’t know what to tell you,” Johnson said when asked to react to losing majority control of the CTA board. “The most important thing is they have a system that’s funded. … I don’t sit around counting the status of how much power is concentrated in one seat.”

As lawmakers worked to avert the transit “fiscal cliff” — a financial crisis that loomed next year as the CTA, Metra and Pace started running out of federal pandemic aid — a mantra of “no funding without reform” emerged in Springfield from lawmakers and advocates who felt they were long overdue to address perceived inefficiencies within the existing system.

That rallying cry was amplified further thanks to growing calls for Johnson to fire then-CTA President Dorval Carter following years of service complaints after the coronavirus pandemic. Carter ultimately stepped down at the start of this year, but the damage was done. As the subsequent spring legislative and fall veto sessions unfolded, legislative and transit leaders treated the endgame of wresting CTA control from the mayor’s office as a foregone conclusion, with or without Johnson on board.

Springfield sources said they did not observe much resistance from Johnson lobbyists over the governance changes. The mayor’s spokesperson said this week his team did raise the issue to lawmakers throughout this year but did not elaborate on specifics.

While Johnson is now signaling he doesn’t care who keeps the power as long as the CTA got the money it needed, his earlier position suggests City Hall may have also seen the writing on the wall had they resisted further.

Days before Carter stepped down in January, Johnson delivered a warning to lawmakers seeking to tie a bailout of the CTA’s finances to changes in leadership among the regional transit agencies: “Any attempt to hold hostage the people of Chicago for anyone’s political gain, we’re certainly not going to acquiesce to those levels of constraints.”

During early conversations on transit governance reform, some wanted to fully combine the CTA, Metra and Pace and their current oversight body, the Regional Transportation Authority. After opposition from organized labor, a more moderate solution emerged: Lawmakers decided to create a new oversight body intended to have more power than the RTA. That body, the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, will have the power to set fares and service standards across the entire region.

NITA will be governed by a 20-seat board of directors. Five will be appointed by Chicago’s mayor, five by the governor, five by the Cook County Board president and five appointed by the chairs of each collar county board.

Currently, the CTA board is staffed by four mayoral appointees and three gubernatorial appointees. Under the new NITA paradigm, the mayor will get three picks while the governor and Cook County Board president will each get two — effectively taking away the mayor’s majority control of the board.

And as it pertains to appointing the CTA president, described as the executive director under the new law, the CTA board must obtain “the advice and consent” of NITA, according to the legislation.

It’s not just a loss of political clout. Chicago’s mayor has long been the one who catches most of the blame from riders frustrated by bad CTA service, and now Johnson and his successors will have less ability to unilaterally do something about it.

But state Rep. Kam Buckner, one of the architects of the transit overhaul, said this week that the shift is about “collaboration, not control.”

“Some folks saw this as a liability, but I see it as an asset. For the mayor, it makes the job a little easier because it takes the politics out of the day-to-day,” Buckner, a Chicago Democrat, said. “In today’s mayor-heavy version of the CTA board makeup, there were still problems with getting the votes on CTA president. I don’t know if this makes this tougher.”

Buckner was referring to how Johnson struggled to exercise control over the CTA board even under its current setup. Earlier this year, the mayor was rumored to be planning to appoint his chief operating officer, John Roberson, to head the CTA, which has been without a permanent leader since Carter resigned in January.

But Johnson, under pressure from transit advocates who were calling for a full national search for a new CTA leader, never took Roberson’s appointment to the CTA board for approval, a sign that he wasn’t confident he could shore up support among even the mayoral-controlled body.

Tensions over that stalled appointment came to a boil when Ald. David Moore showed up apparently unannounced to a spring CTA board meeting to vouch for Roberson, his former ward chief of staff, and admonished members to “work with the mayor that put you here.”

“Don’t be a backbiting snake,” Moore, 17th, said.

During that same meeting, three board members said they backed a national search for Carter’s replacement. Two of them were Gov. JB Pritzker appointees, but one, Roberto Requejo, was installed by Johnson.

In an interview this week, Requejo concurred that the palace intrigue over appointments and power struggles was old-fashioned.

Instead of focusing on which politicians or units of government are gaining or losing power, Requejo said, the focus should be on how the agencies can now work together to better serve riders, particularly those who have historically had the fewest options within the system, including people of color, people with disabilities and working-class people.

“The question to us here is how do we keep every board member … accountable to serving the people who most need and deserve public transportation connections,” Requejo said.

The transit governance changes tie into a larger, ongoing trend of the Chicago mayor’s power steadily weakening since the days of Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Democratic machine. Some of that has been at the hands of an emboldened City Council, some from Pritzker and other Springfield leaders.

A much more dramatic scene of state legislators stripping authority from the mayor’s office unfolded under Johnson’s predecessor Lori Lightfoot when the Illinois General Assembly voted to establish an elected school board for Chicago Public Schools by 2027. That bill was championed by Johnson and the Chicago Teachers Union, though its implementation has so far been bumpy for the freshman mayor, to say the least.

Ald. Daniel La Spata, a Johnson ally who broke with him by endorsing calls to fire Carter, suggested the expiring model of CTA’s governance didn’t inspire enough healthy scrutiny over mayoral appointees. Spreading the power over a regional board “makes sense,” he said.

“What concerns me less than who is doing the appointing is the quality and the qualifications of the folks that we’re appointing. That’s what matters more to me than whether it’s the mayor or the governor or whoever,” La Spata, 1st, said. “We’ve voted on a lot of people two floors down from here who view riding the bus as an embarrassment.”

The sweeping measure passed last week saved transit riders from drastic cuts to bus and train service. It will be funded by a stream of revenue from the state’s sales tax on motor fuel as well as interest on the state’s road fund and a likely sales tax increase in the Chicago metro area. To offset dollars diverted from highway projects, the bill also includes a toll hike, funds from which will go toward the Illinois Tollway.

Advocates also said the CTA stands to benefit from changes to the region’s funding formula for public transit that will serve to make the city whole. The CTA accounts for about 84% of the region’s public transit ridership but receives only about 50% of its funding, according to the agency’s most recent budget.

That is expected to change under the new paradigm. The new bill calls for NITA to allocate regional funding in part by weighing certain factors, including total number of passenger trips, that are expected to direct a greater proportion of funds toward the CTA than the agency has received in the past.

Denise W. Barreto, the CTA’s chief equity and engagement officer until September, said she argued that changing the funding formula was a more important priority than holding on to control of the CTA board.

The old formula, Barreto said, “was an injustice that was codified in law.”

In a statement, CTA spokesperson Catherine Hosinski said the transit legislation “provides a transformational level of funding” and that the agency was looking forward “to leveraging the additional funding to expand upon the tremendous progress we’ve made so far this year in providing our riders a cleaner and modernized transit experience.”

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