Kirk urges using Skyway deal to bail out CTA
Congressman calls transit service key

By Virginia Groark
Tribune staff reporter.


Instead of changing the region's mass-transit funding formula to fix the Chicago Transit Authority's budget woes, Chicago should tap the $1.8 billion it expects to receive from privatizing the Chicago Skyway, a congressman said Monday.

"It would seem to make sense that we would use part of that windfall to address critical needs," said U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.).

The City Council is expected to vote Wednesday on the contract, which would lease the Skyway to a Euro-Australian joint venture for $1.82 billion. City budget officials want to use the money to pay off Skyway and city debt and establish a long-term reserve fund, and are consulting with financial experts to develop recommendations on how to use the remaining money.

Kirk, who spoke at a special Metra board meeting, said maintaining CTA service should be a top priority. CTA President Frank Kruesi and CTA Chairwoman Carole Brown have said they will have to cut service by 20 percent Jan. 2 if the agency doesn't get $82.5 million from the state legislature next month.

"Making sure that we don't have the kind of service cuts that Frank [Kruesi] threatened would seem to be a good use of public money," Kirk added.

But Brown said the agency's financial problems stem from the funding formula.

"This is a structural problem that doesn't require a one-time fix," she said before a budget hearing in Evanston. "We are not looking for a short-term solution."

Brown would not offer suggestions on possible revenue sources but said she would like a performance-based formula.

How to measure performance is a sticking point. In a presentation to the Metra board, Executive Director Philip Pagano said CTA uses unlinked passenger trips to claim it provides 80 percent of service in the region. But Pagano said Metra and Pace provide 50 percent of all service in terms of passenger miles.

Metra officials called the meeting because they are concerned CTA may try to take some of its share of the regional funding formula, a charge Brown denied. Instead, Brown said, the CTA wants to increase funding for all three transit boards.

Kirk and U.S. Reps. Phil Crane and Judy Biggert, along with collar-county leaders and suburban mayors, fear changing the formula could upset the balance between the city and suburbs and send the region's mass-transit network into the kind of turmoil it experienced in the early 1980s.

Several officials also warned that changing the formula could be costly to the CTA. Pointing to job and population growth in the collar counties, they said an argument could be made that more funds need to go to the suburbs, not the city.

Hoffman Estates Mayor Bill McLeod said infighting could jeopardize federal funding for projects like Metra's proposed suburb-to-suburb STAR Line.

"If we're splintered, if we're split, that money is going to go somewhere else," he said.

Copyright© 2004 Chicago Tribune Company