(The Daily Southtown posted the following story by Guy Tridgell onits website on October 22.)
CHICAGO — For three evenings, Metra customers will have a chance to comment on the state of commuter rails in the south suburbs.
Metra tonight hosts the first in a trio of town hall meetings designed to take the pulse of the south suburban rider. The meeting starts at 7 p.m. in the Palos Heights Village Hall.
Subsequent meetings will be in Homewood and in Matteson. A fourth meeting is in the works for riders on Chicago’s South Side.
“This is an opportunity for us to listen,” Metra board member Carol Doris said. “It is never too late to listen to people.”
Metra is opening the floor to discussion after a difficult year that has alienated longtime riders and infuriated south suburban leaders.
The trouble started when plans were unveiled for the STAR Line, a $1 billion proposal for the first suburb-to-suburb route in the Chicago area.
South suburban officials had a problem with the plan: It did nothing for south suburbs clamoring for more mass transit. Metra also was blasted for stalling plans for the SouthEast Service Line between Chicago and Crete, an omission later characterized as an “oversight”
Responding to the criticism, board chairman Jeffrey Ladd declared that Metra was “not a social welfare agency” concerned with unemployment and access to jobs in the south suburbs.
Cook County officials, surprised at the insensitivity of the comments, followed by replacing two Metra board members with south suburbanites: Elonzo Hill of Country Club Hills and Brad O’Halloran of Orland Park.
The meeting tonight is part of a study ordered by Ladd to determine if the south suburbs are ignored by Metra.
The board committee compiling the report is composed of Hill, O’Halloran and Doris. An email address — adhoccomm@metrarr.com — has been created to receive input.
The meeting tonight is expected to attract mostly SouthWest Service Line clients.
The other two meetings are in towns along the Electric Line, where customers have complained for years about the lack of bathrooms, the filthy conditions at the Chicago terminus on Randolph Street and the use of ticketing turnstiles found nowhere else on Metra.
Jill McAvoy will be at the Homewood meeting. McAvoy noticed inequity among Metra lines after a weeklong outage this summer on the Electric Line forced her to use the Rock Island District Line.
“We pay first-class fares and are getting less than coach,” McAvoy said. “We are paying for steak and champagne. We are not even getting unsalted peanuts.”
Doris said she is confident Metra will be able to fix some of the complaints that surface at the upcoming meetings.
“There are some things we can do sooner rather than later,” Doris said. “We exist as a public agency to assist the riding public. We must make them happy.”
Doris would not elaborate on what steps Metra could take to pacify disgruntled riders.
She did, however, refer to the Metra board decision last week to spend $4 million to outfit 26 new Electric Line cars with bathrooms — the first cars with toilets on the fleet. The move, Doris said, shows Metra is trying to be flexible.
“It was a very good sign,” she said.