Divided Vote On Elmhurst Trolley; Equity At Issue

ELMHURST, IL – Last year, the Elmhurst Trolley received unanimous City Council support. On Monday, that dropped to a 9-5 majority.

During the summer and the holidays, the trolley takes residents and visitors to six stops in downtown and the Spring Road business district.

The council voted to spend $83,000 in hotel taxes on the program.

Dissenting aldermen said they wanted the trolley to include stops in other areas.

"I hear on council that people say it's a lovely program for everybody in Elmhurst. In reality, it is not," Ward 7 Alderman Rex Irby said. "It is a program for 17 to 20 percent of the households in Elmhurst. I really don't want us to kid ourselves on that issue."

A year ago, Ward 2 Alderman Jacob Hill started talking about what he called the city's "intransigence" in considering other trolley stops.

Recently, a city committee to which Hill belongs rejected his requests for stops in other places.

Hill recommended a year's hiatus for the trolley.

"It's a program that is static and dead in a sense because ridership is flat," he said.

Hill said each ride costs about $14, which he said was expensive. He suggested the city get businesses that benefit from the program to contribute to it.

With a year's hiatus, Hill said, the city could determine whether the business districts would suffer without it.

Ward 4 Alderwoman Noel Talluto also opposed the trolley, but for a different reason.

In recent months, she said, the city has asked a lot of residents, including enacting an increase in the sales tax by half a percentage point and a nearly 30 percent hike in water and sewer rates.

And now the city is considering raising parking fees, Talluto said.

"I believe we need to start looking at programs that are nice-to-haves vs. must-haves," she said. "In my mind, this is a nice-to-have program, and therefore, I will vote against this."

Ward 3 Alderman Michael Bram urged the city to consider other stops. He noted nearly 60 residents in a low-income retiree complex in his northside ward petitioned to add a stop near their home. Because of bus routes, they shop in Bensenville, but would rather go to Elmhurst's downtown.

"Why are we letting some of our residents shop elsewhere?" he said. "We should be encouraging various stops to pull our residents into downtown and the other shopping areas."

For his part, Ward 6 Alderman Guido Nardini supported the trolley proposal.

"The have, have-not equity canard I fundamentally disagree with. I think this is a feature to accentuate Elmhurst to its citizens and to tourists," he said. "It's not a luxury that one side of the city has that we deign not to the other side of the city."

Ward 7 Alderman Mike Brennan said the city has criteria to help it determine which stops are feasible.

"The program was not created or intended to be public transportation to different neighborhoods," Brennan said. "While I respect the fact that a number of residents signed a petition for a stop at their home, that's not what this program is about."

Voting against the trolley for this year were Irby, Hill, Bram, Talluto and Ward 2's Karen Sienko.