In the News

Northwest Herald, February 19, 2011

A local legislator’s fight to reform the Chicago area’s mass transit agencies has escalated with a bill to consolidate them into one.

House Bill 1548, filed this week by state Rep. Jack Franks, D-Marengo, seeks to combine the Regional Transportation Authority and the three agencies under it into one agency overseen by one board.

The Northeastern Transit Authority would absorb the RTA, Pace, Metra and the Chicago Transit Authority and put it under one board, whose members would be unpaid and ineligible for state pensions.

Franks said that one board and one structure would go a long way toward eliminating corruption and waste that he alleges has plagued mass transit agencies that compete with one another rather than work together.

“I don’t think anyone in their right mind would develop the system we have now. It’s antiquated, inefficient, and often the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” Franks said. “It doesn’t make any sense how they’re structured.”

The bill is the latest of several filed by Franks aimed at the agencies in the wake of corruption allegations against former Metra Executive Director Phil Pagano. Pagano killed himself last May by stepping in front of a Metra train hours before his likely firing. Subsequent investigations revealed that he improperly had taken at least half a million dollars from the agency.

If approved, the bill would create a single mass-transit agency led by a 16-member board, rather than the individual boards that now run Metra, Pace, the RTA and CTA.

Five members each would come from the city of Chicago and Cook County, and one from each of the collar counties. They then would appoint a chairman, the 16th member.

Franks said he was working on a subsequent bill with state Sen. Susan Garrett, D-Lake Forest, that would set qualifications for board members, such as requiring that they have experience with mass transit. Garrett, a vocal critic of Metra in the wake of Pagano, successfully has pushed legislation to create an inspector general to monitor the RTA and its subordinate agencies for corruption and mismanagement.

She supports the idea of consolidating the agencies. Metra officials and McHenry County’s representative on its board, Jack Schaffer, could not be reached Friday for comment.

“I think it just makes a lot of sense. It will save a tremendous amount of money and manpower, and the result will be a much more efficient operation,” Garrett said.

But County Board Chairman Ken Koehler, who appoints the county’s representatives to mass transit boards with the board’s consent, disagrees. While he supports the added oversight, he said each agency had a unique set of skills and expertise, and that combining them would be detrimental.

“There’s a whole different level of expertise running an agency like the CTA, a whole different level of expertise running Metra, and a whole other level of expertise in running Pace,” Koehler said.

Koehler also opposes a Franks bill that would give county boards or voters the power to opt out of the quarter-percent sales tax for road improvements imposed on the collar counties in 2008 as part of a separate sales tax to help fund the RTA. The bill cleared the House Mass Transit Committee on Thursday by a 14-10 vote.

McHenry County uses the tax’s proceeds to help pay for needed road improvements and maintenance, and an expanded Dial-a-Ride partnership started a year ago. Koehler said Franks “never talks to anybody [about proposed bills] before he does them.”

But Franks defended the idea.

“I wanted to at least give the citizens the choice to opt out of a tax that no one asked for and no one voted for,” Franks said.