Peoria is on track toward the second step in pursuing passenger rail service to Chicago, although some council members are not on board with the idea.
The Peoria City Council this week approved funding for professional services to assist with Step 2 of the Federal Railroad Administration’s three-step corridor identification and development program.
“This has been a long project; it’s intended to be a long project. It’s something that doesn’t happen overnight,” said Mayor Rita Ali, who has been a major proponent of the rail line since taking office.
“Eventually we’re going to see this happen, it’s just slowed down a bit. We’ve had a change in [federal] administration that has slowed down grants, period. So the process is taking longer than we want, but it’s still going forward.”
Council members John Kelly and Alex Carmona voted against the measure, with Kelly calling the pursuit of rail service to Chicago a “boondoggle” and doubting it will come to fruition.
“If it ever happens, I think we will have that train for five years, and they’ll finally cancel it because of the lack of ridership,” said Kelly.
The preferred route goes north from Peoria to Bureau Junction before curving east and proceeding through Peru, LaSalle, Utica, Morris and culminating in Joliet, where Metra service would complete the final leg to Chicago.
Alternative routes submitted for the Step 2 analysis include a path that would turn east just north of Chillicothe and proceed past Streator and Coal City on the way to Joliet, and an option that starts out heading southeast to link with the current service in Bloomington-Normal.
“We feel pretty confident those alternatives are not as good as the one we’ve selected, but we will look at them in Step 2,” said Earl Wacker, senior project manager with Patrick Engineering, now owned by RINA North America, the firm hired through the council’s professional services agreement.
Kelly said he’d heard former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood quote a total cost of $20 billion to establish rail service to Chicago. LaHood co-chairs the project’s advisory steering committee with Ali.
“No, he wouldn’t have said that,” Ali said in response to Kelly.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. He did say it, and he said it twice,” he answered.
“I will emphatically say that I don’t know where that $20 billion number came from,” said Ali. “That is incorrect; it was never communicated. There was an estimate at one time of a $2 billion figure, and I’m sure that’s what Secretary LaHood said.”
LaHood has since confirmed to WCBU that he did say “$20 billion” during an appearance at the Peoria Rotary Club, but that he misspoke.
“I meant $2 billion. Clearly, I know what the cost of the project is,” he said.
Wacker, who’s been involved with the project from the outset in 2021, said the initial feasibility study had a price tag of $2.4 billion.
“That included 10 years of inflation, 40% contingency, and it assumed all the way from Peoria to Chicago. The project now is only Peoria to Joliet,” he said.
Kelly said he was opposed to the project at any cost.
“That $20 billion number shocked me to death because I had been thinking $2 billion all along. I don’t think this will add much economically to our city,” he said.
The completed first step, preceded by an Illinois Department of Transportation feasibility study, defined the scope of the work and outlined the project schedule and budget. The major component of Step 2 is to draft and submit a service development plan.
The total anticipated cost for the first part of Step 2 is $1.7 million, of which local governments in the project are responsible for 10% — $170,000. City Manager Patrick Urich said Peoria needs to pay for about 38.5% of that amount, which comes out to around $67,000.
“When we looked at the relative cost share and we looked at this and looked at ridership, we were looking at it that Peoria would be one of the largest users of the rail service,” said Urich. “That’s the reason why we looked at that cost share at that level.”
With some unspent funding already allocated for the first step, the city only needed to approve an additional $42,000 expense.
“That number then will increase as we move into Step 2-B, as we finish out the service development plan,” said Urich. “We’re estimating that the overall Step 2 budget is going to be roughly $4.6 million, so there may be another $3 million in Step 2-B, and then as we move into the third step, that’s probably $25 million.”
Urich said the third step, which includes preliminary engineering and environmental studies, would require a 20% non-federal match, which would amount to $5 million split among the participating communities.
Wacker said it will still be several years before the corridor approval reaches the third step.
“Step 2 is identified to take 19 months, and that’s something that’s been agreed to between the city and federal administration,” he said. “It’ll be at least that long, but it could be longer, mostly because the FRA has 77 of these corridor ID programs currently running in parallel, and they’ve got to approve all of them, and they don’t really have the resources to approve them all at the same time.”
