July 18, 2024
The Chicago Community Trust and the Civic Federation in partnership welcomed a dynamic moderated panel of regional transit experts at the Federation’s July 12 Board of Directors meeting, hosted by The Chicago Community Trust. Panelists included state Sen. Ram Villivalam, state Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado, Regional Transportation Authority Chair Kirk Dillard and Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning Executive Director Erin Aleman. Erik Cempel, president of Cempel International Transportation Consulting, served as the panel’s moderator.
The panel, which spoke to regional transit governance and funding, was the Federation's latest effort to elevate the discourse on the subject following our participation in the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning's 2023 transit steering committee, which resulted in a Plan of Action for Regional Transit and subsequently inspired the Federation’s April position paper, Reforming Mass Transit Governance in the Chicago Region. The paper calls for making major transit governance reform a condition of the increased funding that will be needed to meet a looming $730 million fiscal cliff following the spend-down of federal COVID relief dollars.
Proposed legislation co-sponsored by Delgado and Villivalam that is now under consideration by the Illinois General Assembly calls for the consolidation of the Regional Transportation Authority and its three service boards into a new Metropolitan Mobility Authority. Villivalam said broad consensus across the State will be critical to the legislation's success.
"There’s a whole rest of the state that we need colleagues to vote ‘yes’ on this," he said. "As we go through the process, we want to understand their public needs in their districts.”
Aleman spoke to the broad-ranging positive impacts a reformed mass transit system could bring.
“We think that transit is a really important tool to improve our economy, to think about how we address our pressing climate needs, and then also how we think about transit as a tool for economic equity and really helping to support our communities and our residents across the region,” she said.
Delgado likewise spoke to the critical implications transit can have for equity.
"Equity has to be at the center of our conversation," she said.
In the photo: State Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado (center) discusses the future of mass transit in Illinois during the Civic Federation's panel at The Chicago Community Trust on July 12. Left to right: Erik Cempel, state Sen. Ram Villivalam, state Rep. Delgado, Kirk Dillard and Erin Aleman.