Bill Seeks Extinction of South Suburban Transit Agency

(Berwyn, IL) – A south suburban transit agency is facing extinction by legislation moving through the Illinois General Assembly.

The measure, House Bill 2413 sponsored by State Rep. Will Davis (D-Hazel Crest), which seeks to dissolve the Chicago South Suburban Mass Transit District on January 1, 2021, has been unanimously approved by the Illinois House and is facing potential action in the Illinois Senate.

The legislation would transfer the district’s ownership of three commuter parking lots and any maintenance equipment to the municipalities in which the lots are located: Homewood, Olympia Fields, and University Park. The three communities support the district’s dissolution while the district itself is opposed.

During House floor debate on April 21, Davis noted that the district was originally established in the 1970s to support infrastructure projects for PACE and Metra, a role that has subsequently been assumed by the RTA. Currently, the district that Davis is seeking to abolish owns and maintains the three commuter parking lots in the three host communities, parking lots that PACE and Metra want to preserve.

“All they do, and I’m not trying to minimize them, but all they do is they maintain the parking lots for the purposes of commuter parking,” Davis said. “It’s an entity that has outlived its purpose.”

Davis told his legislative colleagues that the “has letters” from each community pledging to maintain the lots as commuter parking for PACE and Metra and to assume maintenance responsibility.

The legislation, however, has no language that enshrines into law the pledges by Homewood, Olympia Fields, and University Park to preserve the lots as commuter parking or to mandate maintenance responsibility on those communities, according to local government attorney Michael Del Galdo, managing partner of the Berwyn-based Del Galdo Law Group, LLC, who has reviewed the bill.

“In the absence of a contract between those communities and PACE and Metra or a mandate in the bill, written ‘pledges’ in the form of letters from the towns referenced by Davis in floor debate have no force of law,” said Del Galdo. “That’s no way to run a railroad or to preserve public infrastructure without guarantees and defined maintenance responsibilities written into the bill, because elected officials in those communities could change their minds, as elected officials are inclined and free to do.”

The bill is currently assigned to Senate Executive Committee’s Consolidation Subcommittee and its fate in the upper chamber is uncertain.

davidormsby@davidormsby.com