CHICAGO — Illinois lawmakers ended their spring legislative session without finding a way to plug the gaping $771 million budget gap facing the Chicago region’s mass transit systems next year.

Thousands of jobs hang in the balance.

The Regional Transportation Authority has estimated that nearly 3,000 workers could lose their jobs if lawmakers don’t fund the transit system. The CTA alone could lay off more than 2,000 workers, acting CTA President Nora Leerhsen said at an RTA board meeting this year. “It’s a scary number to look at, and I hope we don’t come anywhere close to it,” Leerhsen said at the time.

There’s still time for legislators to go back to Springfield and avert the fiscal cliff before the end of the year.

In the meantime, the CTA, Metra and Pace are planning for drastic 40% service cuts next year. If those scenarios are realized, some rail lines and bus routes could be eliminated. Chicago could end up with fewer bus lines than Madison, Wisconsin, or Kansas City, Missouri, according to RTA estimates.

With the cuts would come job losses.

“My members are in a frenzy right now,” said Pennie McCoach, the president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308, which represents CTA train operators, in an interview with the Tribune last week. “They’re in a panic.”

Antonio Adams, the president of ATU Local 1028, said the workers he represents, who drive for Pace, are “very worried.”

“Half of them are going out looking for additional work,” he said.

Keith Hill, the president of the CTA bus operators’ union, ATU Local 241, said he also has been fielding calls from workers wondering if they should be looking for other jobs. “I am convincing people to hold on,” he said.

Legislators could return to Springfield either in a special session this summer or during veto session in the fall. But their task to fund transit is now more difficult than it was before midnight on May 31, because any laws meant to take effect before June 2026 now require a supermajority in both chambers to pass.

Meanwhile, CTA, Metra and Pace are preparing 2026 budgets that, by law, must include only the funding they are sure they will receive next year.

Tiffany Rebb, a bus operator who drives throughout the South Side for the CTA, said she and her colleagues are worried, with some putting big plans on hold.

Rebb and her husband have tabled plans to buy a new house because of the uncertainty surrounding her job, she said. Some of her co-workers are talking about finding other work.

People are scared to leave the CTA, said Rebb, who has worked for the agency for seven years. But they’re also scared to stay.

“It’s really like a gamble at this point,” she said.

The RTA has said that layoff notices could be issued as soon as September and October.

That means it’s possible that some workers could receive layoff notices and then, weeks or months later, be told that they do have a job after all, depending on when the legislature acts, if it does so.

A labor coalition led by the Illinois AFL-CIO and the Chicago Federation of Labor had lobbied legislators hard to fund the system by May 31 to avoid that situation.

Tina Fassett Smith, a spokesperson for the RTA, said the agency’s timeline for layoff notices was based on an estimate that notices would go out starting 90 days before layoffs were to take place.

The timeline for layoffs, she said, would be “dictated by the 2026 budget preparation and the terms of the collective bargaining agreements between the service boards and their unions.”

Hill said conversations about the fiscal cliff weren’t addressing how the situation could affect transit staffers not just as workers but as people.

The union head said he has members who were laid off as part of mass cuts during the Great Recession “who mentally never recovered from that.”

In 2010, the CTA laid off more than 1,000 workers, most of them union members, in efforts to address a budget deficit that saw service slashed significantly. A year later, the Tribune reported at the time, about half of those workers had been rehired due to attrition, even though none of the service cuts had been restored.

In a letter addressed to CTA employees last week, Leerhsen, the CTA’s acting president, struck a measured tone.

“In the coming weeks, as we begin to plan for next year’s budget, we will be required to share specific plans with the public about what potential service reductions in 2026 would be needed if we did not receive the funding we need for next year,” she wrote. “I recognize that seeing these details will be hard to stomach for all of you and our riders — but the goal remains to avoid them all.”

The CTA did not respond to a request for comment.

Pace spokesperson Maggie Daly Skogsbakken said the agency was “committed to doing everything possible within our budget to minimize the impact of funding shortfalls.”

State Sen. Ram Villivalam, a Chicago Democrat who led the effort for transit reform in the Senate, indicated he understood the urgency to resolve the situation in an interview with the Tribune last week.

“We’re not Donald Trump, we’re not Elon Musk, we’re not DOGE,” Villivalam said.

Villivalam said transit reform needed to be wrapped up as soon as possible, but did not directly answer a question about whether he thought legislators would be back in Springfield this summer.

“This needs to be concluded ASAP, so that whether it’s a bus operator or train conductor, they don’t have anxiety about whether they can purchase school supplies for their children come September,” Villivalam said.

At CTA, the threat of layoffs comes as the agency has mostly pulled itself out from under a staffing crisis that dogged it following the pandemic.

John Brockway is a CTA worker who recently started training to become a rail operator. He’s also a union steward with ATU 308 who has lobbied for transit reform in Springfield. Among members of his operator training class, Brockway said, the fiscal cliff is “a little bit of an awkward topic.”

Some members of his class have mentioned that they might go back to trucking or to working at the airport if the looming massive cuts come to fruition. But most people, Brockway said, are trying not to think about layoffs.

“I do think that they will come through with the funding, but it does make me feel uncomfortable to have that weigh on me as I go through all this training,” Brockway said. “Everybody’s thinking, ‘Why am I taking all this training and passing these tests if, at the end of the year, I’m going to be let go?’ ”

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.