After the CTA’s latest whopping misstep on its controversial Brown Line reconstruction project you’d think it would have come up with a new strategy for winning public support. But no change in attitude has been on display, certainly not at a March 2 hearing at Lane Tech High School. “The CTA had a chance to make inroads,” says 47th Ward alderman Eugene Schulter, whose ward includes a long stretch of the Brown Line, “and they blew it.”
It took CTA officials and Illinois politicians a couple years to round up federal funding, which covers roughly 80 percent of the project’s costs: $423 million comes from the feds, $50 million from the state, $56 million from bonds floated by the Regional Transportation Authority, and $1.1 million from the CTA. In March 2004 the CTA asked for bids on the construction portion of the project (the other major portions are land acquisition and demolition). But by the May deadline only two companies had submitted bids, and their estimates were at least $152 million more than the CTA had budgeted.
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Schulter says the officials’ response was, Don’t worry–we know what we’re doing. He says they also promised him that no stations would be closed.
Under pressure from local merchants, Schulter demanded that the CTA hold a hearing. That’s why Kruesi and Brown and their staff came to Lane Tech on March 2.
After the meeting Max Reising, a north-side resident, said he wasn’t buying the apology. “Telling us that the stations would remain open wasn’t a mistake,” he said. “It was a strategy.” He was sure that CTA officials had decided at the beginning that they had to say stations would remain open, whether they believed it or not. “Did they flat out knowingly lie from the beginning about the station closings, or are they so unbelievably incompetent in their estimates?” asks Oberman. “I don’t know the answer. But neither answer is very reassuring.”
“We’re very serious about this,” says Schulter, who’s called for City Council hearings. “We’re not going away. I expect the CTA to go back to the drawing board and come back with another proposal–and finally do this thing right.”
