Les Kniskern probably knows as much as anyone about the CTA’s Brown Line reconstruction project. A neighborhood activist in Ravenswood Manor, he’s been attending meetings, dickering with CTA officials, studying documents, and writing letters to the editor and blogging on the subject for the last several years. So now that the first phrase of the reconstruction is done–including Kniskern’s stop at Rockwell–I checked in with him for a progress report. Turns out that with the bad weather some problems have cropped up.
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One of the first stations to be shut down, Rockwell closed in February and reopened in August. “You have to give them credit for this–they only kept it closed for six months,” says Kniskern, who’s the president of the Greater Rockwell Organization, a local community group. “They said they would close it for no more than six months, and they kept their word on that.”
Kniskern isn’t entirely disappointed by the results either. He points out that though the old station was handicapped accessible, the new one is longer and easier for people in wheelchairs to traverse.
Overall, Kniskern says, he’s glad the station’s more accessible to people in wheelchairs, and he’s happy the construction’s over with. But if you ask me, it’s ironic that in the name of progress the CTA inconvenienced a community and spent several million dollars to take a perfectly functional platform and make it a hazard.
Nope. Thanks to an overlooked if quirky legislative rule, Fritchey and Lang needed ten more votes to pass the bill. The vote took place during the fall veto session, when the assembly convenes to consider overrides of gubernatorial vetos. During this period any bill meant to take effect immediately can only pass with a “super majority”–or 71 votes.
From the start Madigan has seemed to play it both ways with the bill, using his considerable power in the house to water it down, bottle it up, and pressure other legislators into voting against it, meanwhile voting for the cap when it came to the floor.
On January 7 the legislators return to Springfield for a three-day veto session, during which it would take only 61 votes to pass the bill. “That’s because this upcoming veto session falls on a new calendar year,” explains Steve Brown, Madigan’s chief spokesman. “The constitution says that after the first of the year the requirement for having a bill become immediately effective goes back to a simple majority, even in a veto session.”
