SPRINGFIELD — Minutes before the clock hit midnight and the calendar flipped to June 1, the Illinois Senate advanced a much-watched legislative proposal to reform and fund public transportation in the Chicago area and prevent dire cuts to service.
But Chicago Democrat Sen. Ram Villivalam’s Hail Mary attempt to avoid cuts was downed short of the end zone as opposition mounted to the bill’s revenue plan, particularly its creation of a $1.50 package delivery fee in the state. The House declined to take up the transit funding bill, as the stroke of midnight meant the chamber required a three-fifths majority vote to advance any legislation that would take effect before June 2026.
Chicago’s public transit agencies are now entering an uncertain future. Public hearings on service cuts could begin this summer, but lawmakers say they are dedicated to finding solutions.
“The funding doesn't run out until Dec. 31 of this year,” House Speaker Chris Welch, D-Hillside, told Capitol News Illinois for the latest episode of the “Illinois Lawmakers” program. “We have time, so I think it's important to take our time and get it right.”
The transit agencies will each run out of pandemic relief funding at various points in 2026, creating deficits in their budgets if lawmakers don’t find new funding sources.
Meanwhile, Senate President Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, acknowledged he had reservations about the proposal’s revenue-generating measures, which include the delivery fee as well as a statewide tax on electric vehicle charging and the expansion of a Chicago tax on real estate transfers to the suburbs.
“Frankly, I don't like them all that much,” Harmon said of the revenue measures in an interview with Capitol News Illinois. “I wish there were better alternatives. But if you don't like them, come and tell us how you'd pay for it, because this is going to be expensive and most of the stakeholders seem to be worried about protecting or expanding their own power and having somebody else pay for it.”
The impending cliff
While there’s technically time before the funds run dry, transit agencies say they’re planning next year’s budgets now.
Regional Transportation Authority spokesperson Tina Fassett Smith said in a statement Sunday that agencies will move forward on evaluating their budgets based only on funding that the systems are “confident” they will receive in 2026. Right now, those budgets collectively contain a $771 million shortfall as pandemic relief funds expire.
Read more: Senate’s transit funding, delivery tax proposal stalls in House
Both the RTA and Chicago Transit Authority have meetings scheduled next week where talks will presumably focus on how the agencies will maintain a balanced budget in 2026. The RTA previously projected that if lawmakers fail to deliver funding, it would lead to thousands of layoffs and 40% service cuts.
Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson told Capitol News Illinois the end of October appears to be a clearer deadline for legislative action, because the agencies finalize budgets in November.
“This is a sooner-than-later exercise because the closer we get to the next budget cycles of the service boards themselves, the more that this gets driven by doom-and-gloom scenarios – which are correct scenarios – but they’re going to be an effort to drive the revenue imperatives without the reform imperatives,” Ferguson said.
The agencies are federally required to have public hearings before enacting service cuts.
Why reform failed
Both legislative chambers introduced separate plans late in the final week of May, which although similar in many ways, contained key differences showing lawmakers were still apart on a deal. The differences only became more magnified as labor organizations and suburban communities opposed a series of taxes designed to plug the funding shortfall.
That new funding proposal surfaced in the Senate on Saturday afternoon, hours before the legislature was scheduled to adjourn. The plan did away with proposed toll increases and a diversion of sales tax revenue away from collar county governments. Instead, it proposed the new statewide tax on deliveries, and kept a statewide tax on EV charging, as well as suburban taxes on real estate transfers and rideshares.
Lawmakers negotiating the bill had vowed “no funding without reforms,” a pledge they remain committed to, Villivalam told Capitol News Illinois, noting they should be tackled at the same time.
The two chambers are generally in agreement on transit reform, which includes giving new decision-making authority to the RTA to set fares and schedules and renaming the agency to “Northern Illinois Transit Authority.”
But when the adjournment deadline came, the House wasn’t prepared to take up a bill addressing funding even after months of negotiations, Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado, D-Chicago, who is leading transit reform for House Democrats, told Capitol News Illinois.
“We spent hours and hours and hours in negotiation, so our reform bills were very similar,” she said. “What we didn’t spend hours and hours and hours talking about was the revenue.”
Villivalam said the tax increases and other revenue solutions in his plan would raise $1.5 billion – enough to plug the budget hole and fund transit at a level that the RTA says would significantly improve public transportation. But House Democrats didn’t have time to review the funding options.
“Based on my conversations with members, they needed to know more,” Delgado said. “They needed to understand more and, you know, that is now my job is to make sure that whatever revenue plan we come up with, it’s communicated, and people understand what it is.”
Despite facing an uncertain future in the House, Villivalam said the Senate voted on the bill because “we believe in responsible governance, and we believe in avoiding 40% cuts to service and more than 3,000 workers getting layoff notices.”
Reaching a deal to stop cuts
With November being the next pressing deadline for action, lawmakers could return to Springfield for a special session this summer or wait until the annual fall veto session to act on transit reform.
Whenever the General Assembly reconvenes, they will need broader agreement, as the three-fifths vote requirement remains in effect through the calendar year. While the House could still send Villivalam’s bill to the governor’s desk, it passed the Senate on a 32-22 vote – short of three-fifths of the chamber. Several Democrats voted against the plan, foreshadowing the headwinds in the House.
Gov. JB Pritzker hasn’t expressed an opinion on the proposed taxes. He told reporters on Sunday he learned about the taxes at the same time Villivalam unveiled them to the public.
“We were not the leaders of that endeavor, but we were at the table, listening and helping whenever we were asked to,” Pritzker said. “And again, I think there's significant work that will need to be done over the summer and in the fall to make sure that it gets across."
The tax increases were nonstarters for Republicans, who haven’t proposed their own funding plan – and Democrats don’t need their votes to reach a three-fifths majority.
“We need to look at things holistically and restructure rather than continuously adding more taxes to pay the bills,” House Minority Leader Tony McCombie, R-Savanna, told Capitol News Illinois.
Senate Minority Leader John Curran, R-Downers Grove, told Capitol News Illinois lawmakers should not be depending so much on new taxes.
“We would put out a much more constrained proposal ... there'd be a little more skin in the game on efficiencies and fares, and then we would be coming to taxpayers last in that,” Curran said. “And, quite frankly, we'd be taking a more regional approach on that, and not a statewide approach.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.