In January 2008, Regional Transportation Authority officials faced a disastrous budget situation and threatened deep service cuts and fare increases.

State lawmakers, after some arm-twisting by then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, granted RTA the authority to raise taxes on the state’s northeastern counties and impose a new real-estate transfer tax. They also promised to continue funding a $55 million paratransit program and match a quarter of the regional sales and real-estate transfer taxes raised.

The rescue legislation added up to more than half a billion dollars, and RTA officials thank lawmakers for it to this day.

Now, the RTA, which helps fund the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra commuter rail and Pace suburban buses, is asking for more.

At their regular meeting yesterday, RTA officials said that if a proposed gas tax passes the state Legislature, they expect to receive about $2.7 billion in fuel-tax money for capital projects over five years. But that figure, while staggering, is merely half of what the transit officials said they want – and despite a national crunch in government budgets, they seem fairly confident that they could get it.

“We’re not there yet, but I think the sun and the moon and the stars are more in alignment now than they had been at any time since we’ve been working on this,” RTA Chairman Jim Reilly says. “The flipside, in a sense, is the state’s own fiscal situation is in an unbelievably bleak situation itself.”

Reilly is a major backer of a new gas tax proposed in the state House this month. The tax would raise an existing per-gallon tax by 8 cents, and it would fund capital projects related to transportation.

Motorists in Illinois already pay a 19-cent tax on each gallon of gas. But that tax, last raised in 1990, goes toward road projects.

Rep. John Bradley, D-Marion, who is sponsoring the new tax, said the additional 8 cents would help improve aging transit systems like Chicago’s. But when asked if state lawmakers could come up with the $5.5 billion to $6 billion that RTA officials say they hope for, he balked.

“I don’t want to undermine what Jim (Reilly) is saying,” Bradley says, but “that’s a lot of money.”

Bradley explains that generally, the RTA would have authority to bond 10 to 11 times the amount of anticipated tax revenue.

“If you took every nickel and every penny of motor-fuel tax and you bonded that entire amount,” he says, “you would be looking at $6 billion in bonding ability.”

That’s not going to happen, Bradley says. Even if his bill passes, funds from the tax would be split among road, bridge and public-transit projects. If, for example, 70 percent funds roads and bridges and 30 percent funds public transit – which Bradley says is among several proposals – then the RTA would fall short of its hoped-for amount.

That’s part of why the tax needs to be bigger, says Frank Beal, executive director of Metropolis 2020, a Chicago business-advocacy group. Beal says he supported a proposal to create a two-tiered tax, with 6 cents going to roads and 10 toward public transit.

Beal says that if the money is spent in a transparent and accountable manner, it can have a measurable effect on job creation and economic activity.

“The conventional wisdom is that businesses just oppose taxes as a knee-jerk reaction,” Beal says. “For us, it’s a strict economic argument: It makes economic sense for the region to increase its taxes to spend more money on transit.”

Still, the bill could face stiff opposition from legislators in border towns, where gas-station owners compete with others from neighboring states. The thinking is that if taxes are too high in Illinois, drivers will simply cross the border to fill up elsewhere.

Other opponents would likely include truckers' unions and petroleum producers.

Representatives at the Illinois Oil & Gas Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment left at their Mount Vernon headquarters yesterday.