SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — A new proposal to fund Chicago’s transit agencies was introduced on Tuesday (Oct. 28) in the state’s House of Representatives. By Wednesday, it appeared to be dead.
Gov. JB Pritzker said at a Wednesday event that the bill was “not going forward” in its current form because he had issues with the funding methods, including a new tax on billionaires, a 7% entertainment tax on such items as tickets to concerts and sporting events, and a $5 surcharge on tickets for large events in the Chicago area. Buyers of those tickets would, in turn, be able to use the event tickets for public transit to the event. Wider use of speed cameras, which currently only exist in Chicago, was also part of the proposal.
Capitol News Illinois reports that Pritzker told reporters following a Wednesday meeting with farmers that the bill proposed by Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado (D-Chicago) “sprung a whole bunch of things that have never been seen before” which raised questions about the bill. The 4.95% tax on billionaires for unrealized gains on investment, he said, has “never been done before by any state. Never been done before by the federal government. …. you don’t even know how it would work or if you could actually collect on it.” He also called the speed cameras “a bad idea,” saying “there’s been corruption around them.”
Pritzker’s opposition makes it highly unlikely a solution can be found to the funding issues for the Chicago-area Regional Transportation Authority, and its components, Metra, the Chicago Transit Authority, and Pace, before the General Assembly’s six-day veto session concludes today. The state Senate passed its own bill to address transit funding at the conclusion of the regular legislative session in May with its own funding ideas [see “Chicago-area transit faces major cuts …,” Trains.com, June 1, 2025]. The House never considered that bill, with Delgado introducing her own legislation on Tuesday.
The RTA subsequently called for its agencies to develop budgets including a fare increase of at least 10%. Metra’s proposal calls for overall fare increases of about 13%, but would avoid service cuts that had previously been projected, and said it was avoiding those cuts through measures that have extended federal COVID relief funds longer than expected and otherwise provided savings [see “Metra budget for 2026 …,” Trains.com, Oct. 10, 2025]. The CTA proposed three different budgets; the “baseline budget,” which is what the agency would use if there is no legislative funding relief, calls for two rounds of service cuts, in August 2026 and February 2027.
