CHICAGO (WBBM) - No project the CTA has undertaken in recent years has drawn the controversy of the Block 37 superstation, under construction downtown. Wednesday, the CTA's governing board decided to apply the brakes to the project.
But the pause will continue only until it can find a private partner to operate an equally controversial Airport Express service.
CTA President Ron Huberman told WBBM's Bob Roberts it makes sense to stop, and let the private operator decide how to build out the station.
"We're going to finish the shell and the tunnel," he said. "So if you think of it as a house, even though it's underground, it's as though we're building the foundation, the walls and the roof. We're just not finishing the inside."
For now, the half-built station won't even get the tracks that could facilitate the transfer of equipment between the Red and Blue Lines, a maneuver now possible only by running trains over the Pink Line's out-of-the-way Paulina Connector.
Even mothballing it at that point in the construction process will cost the CTA an additional $45.6 million, on top of the $175.6 million already spent, a figure Huberman said was inflated because of unanticipated costs in removing debris from previous buildings on the site and the costs of relocating utilities beneath the streets bordering it.
The original cost estimate in 2005 was $130 million.
The additional expense angers transit advocates, such as Michael Pitula, who said construction never should have begun and who called it "good money thrown after bad."
He argued that the CTA has far more urgent priorities for its scarce capital funding.
"We could be using this amount to avoid further derailments and accidents," he said. "It can be used to buy more than 1,000 new buses."
Pitula said the excavation and relocation costs should have been anticipated.
Huberman provided no clear time line for selection of the partner, saying only that he hoped it would be done "as soon as possible."
He said the goal was to have the line in operation long before 2016, when Chicago hopes to host the Summer Olympics. But he said the CTA has no plans to interconnect the Red and Blue Lines using the Block 37 link.
The vice chairman of the CTA's board, Susan Leonis, has long been a critic of the plan. She said Wednesday the board was misled by former CTA President Frank Kruesi, who said repeatedly that he considered the project a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."
"This project has been a disaster," Leonis said as she cast the lone dissenting vote to mothball the project but seek the private capital to complete and operate it.
Even supporters on the board voiced reservations, board member Nicholas Zagotta calling it "terribly distasteful."
Pitula also criticized the public-private approach.
"Transit should be public," he said.
Suspension of the project leaves the future of CTA's shuttered Washington/State Red Line subway station unresolved.
The station was closed to allow tunneling to take place.
Huberman told WBBM that it would be addressed "within a few months," including the pedestrian walkway that links the Red and Blue Lines at Washington.
"There will be some form of Washington station," he said.
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