The Regional Transportation Authority might be straining the CTA financially by not providing enough public-transit funding to the areas that pay the most taxes toward it. But Illinois lawmakers can’t agree on where those areas are.
The RTA’s funding formula, which was created in 1983, distributes revenue from Chicago-area sales taxes to the region’s three transit agencies: CTA, Metra and Pace.
The taxes were intended to benefit the areas where they were generated. Thus, while almost all the taxes from Chicago would go to the CTA, taxes from the Cook County suburbs would be split between CTA, Metra and Pace. Cook County taxpayers are charged at a rate of 1 percent, while those in Chicago’s collar, or outlying, counties — Lake, McHenry, Kane, DuPage and Will counties — have a rate of .25 percent.
But a report from the Illinois State House of Representatives’ Mass Transit Committee found that tax money does not necessarily return to the areas it comes from.
State Rep. Julie Hamos, D-Evanston, the committee’s chairwoman, said she wants to re-examine the formula over the next 18 months to create a long-term solution for CTA’s problems, as well as find more money for Pace and Metra.
The report also found that when combining sales taxes and system-generated revenue, such as fares, the three service agencies together get a total of $103 million to $124 million more from the Cook County suburbs than they spend on transit service in the area.
But not all legislators agree with the report’s findings. State Rep. Michael Tryon, R-Crystal Lake, who is from McHenry County, says the committee’s report is just Hamos’ preferred interpretation of the numbers.
“If you analyze the formula, you can look at these numbers and it really depends on whose decoder ring you use,” Tryon said.
He said that the collar counties — which receive only Metra and Pace service — are actually subsidizing the CTA. He pointed to the RTA’s discretionary fund, to which 15 percent of all of the sales taxes generated in the collar counties go. In 2003, 74 percent of the fund went to the CTA, but few commuters from the collar counties use CTA services, because they are more likely to take Metra than CTA trains to their jobs in Chicago, Tryon said.
Sales tax revenues from Chicago do not fund Metra, but Hamos’ report says Metra accounts for 4 percent of all morning public-transport boardings there.
The best way to get more money for CTA and Metra is to raise sales taxes and adjust them to reflect changes in different areas around Chicago, said Alex Sproul, a member of transit advocacy group Evanston’s Transportation Future.
“We’ll have to raise taxes everywhere, but at different rates in different places,” Sproul said.
But since changing tax rates is an unrealistic goal for the state legislature to set for itself this year, it must look for other ways to prevent CTA cuts, Sproul said.
“What they’ve got to do this year is bail out the CTA,” he said.
