Over the weekend, the Illinois Legislature met to pass its budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, and wrapped up their work until the fall. Sadly, they failed to fully fund the Chicago’s Regional Transit Authority (RTA), which faces a massive deficit in the coming year thanks to expiring federal aid. Even if the legislature makes funding transit its top priority in the fall, the RTA will have already slashed service by up to 40 percent and fired roughly 3,000 transit drivers.
In a better world, Chicago’s disaster would be a wakeup call for California, which has several transit agencies, many located in the Bay Area, facing a similar catastrophe. California is heading for a repeat performance.
While there are legislative leaders trying to make headway, the Governor’s Office is providing the opposite of leadership. I don’t want to wake up on June 16, the day after the state budget session ends, and wonder how draconian the statewide transit cuts are going to be.
The statement by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is astonishing for the lack of leadership he demonstrates. In a post-budget press gaggle, the billionaire governor revealed that his office took a backseat in negotiations, made little-to-no effort to lobby the legislature, and blamed the agencies for their deficits. He seemed particularly annoyed by an ad-campaign RTA ran in the capitol city with facts and figures about their budget needs.
Pritzker’s callousness towards the nearly 2 million people that ride on RTA everyday, but if California finds itself in the same place in two weeks it would be a more severe act of political malpractice and climate arson.
In Illinois, the legislators that were fighting for transit were desperately trying to find new money to fill RTA’s budget chasm. A tax on deliveries, tolls, reallocating other sales takes…all of these fixes were proposed and shot-down. Some lost in a floor vote. Others died in the backrooms.
There are two big differences between the crises. First, we have the money to fill the hole. Second, the legislature could also pass legislation for the Bay Area that would allow them to vote directly on a tax in 2026 to fill their budget gap. So California is just looking for a temporary fix, and then the voters can decide the next steps for themselves.
Agencies in California are facing a nearly $1 billion operating deficit for next year, most of which would be in the Bay Area where agencies such as BART, Muni, AC Transit, and Caltrain are more reliant on transit fares to pay for operations and less on sales taxes. While agencies are seeing ridership close to pre-pandemic numbers, they're still not back to levels from 2019.
Bay Area legislators Senators Jesse Arreguín, Scott Wiener, and Assemblymember Mark González, have proposed allocating $2 billion over two years to support transit agencies while they work on a ballot measure; but Governor Gavin Newsom went the other way in his budget proposal.
Instead of riding to transit’s rescue, the Governor rejected the temporary funding measure and cut $1.5 billion from the state’s Cap-and-Trade program from transit funding to instead fund the state fire department. That also cuts a quarter of a billion from LA Metro. And it’s not just the big cities that will be hurt.
“A long list of projects up & down the state will be in jeopardy if these funds are withdrawn,” warns Wiener, who is also the Senate Budget Committee Chair, on BlueSky.
Fixing the Cap-and-Trade allocation is just the first step. Second would be cutting the amount of money being spent on highway expansion, the number of which is in the billions, and redirecting that to helping agencies balance those operating budgets.
And a final appeal to the legislature: do not wait until June 15 at 11 p.m. to vote on transit funding. Pritzker and some in Illinois pointed to the late hour of the votes on transit funding, which happened separate and after the state budget was passed near midnight before the deadline. There's no need for California to wait until the literal final hours to get a deal done. Make saving transit a priority that gets taken care of this week.
