Legislators start statewide tour on transportation needs and funding

As legislators begin to consider Oregon’s next multibillion-dollar transportation funding plan, how road maintenance and driver services are funded may overshadow what highway, bridge and other projects are included.

Members of the Joint Committee on Transportation heard plenty of comments on both aspects during the first of 12 planned hearings across the state over the next four months. The first one was June 4 at the Cascades campus of Portland Community College. The final hearings are Sept. 26 in Happy Valley and Sept. 27 in Hillsboro.

Lawmakers hope to replicate their process from eight years ago, when similar hearings helped them achieve a 2017 plan that funded not only road and bridge work but also public transit and other transportation modes.

But Kris Strickler, director of the Oregon Department of Transportation, said Oregon no longer can rely on simply increasing the state’s historic mainstays of fuel taxes, weight-mile taxes on trucks, and driver and vehicle fees to pay for road work and licensing and registration services. Oregon voters decided back in 1980 to earmark those sources for road and bridge work

But ODOT had to turn to the Legislature for $19 million from the tax-supported general fund just to pay for highway maintenance this past winter. Fuel taxes still generate a lot of money at 40 cents per gallon, but fuel efficiency of newer cars and trucks has resulted in declining returns.

According to the state’s own studies, truckers are paying more and motorists less than their shares of responsibility for road maintenance. The trucking industry has gone to court to enforce a constitutional requirement that voters approved in 1999.

Strickler said some driver and vehicle fees are not covering the cost of their services, let alone generating money for road work.

“As we think about the long-term availability of funding and what that means to our system, I can assure you that these three legs of the stool won’t serve us into the future,” Strickler said in an opening presentation, which will be repeated in future meetings. “In fact, they are already starting to decline today.”

Alternatives that the committee is likely to consider are tolls and a system based on vehicle miles traveled, each one having its critics.

Strickler said the potential gap between currently available money and future maintenance and service needs could be as high as $1.8 billion annually of a $2.8 billion estimate.

Those estimates exclude the completion of projects that the 2017 Legislature approved in House Bill 2017 but did not fund, such as the Rose Quarter interchange of Interstates 5 and 84 in Portland, and seismic reinforcement of the George Abernethy Bridge and related work on Interstate 205 in Clackamas County and Portland’s eastside. (The bridge work between West Linn and Oregon City is underway. Strickler said ODOT is committed to finding a way to keep the work going.)

“We simply do not have the finances to finish them,” he said, and it would take between $2.1 billion and $2.6 billion to do so.

The 2017 list also excludes the replacement for the Interstate 5 bridge across the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver, Washington, and the Boone Bridge that carries I-5 across the Willamette River between Wilsonville and Aurora.

Legislators heard a potpourri of comments during 90 minutes of public testimony, some of them focused on the Rose Quarter project.

“We have yet to see much progress made on the Rose Quarter, which is arguably the most critical trade route in the state and the worst bottleneck,” said Diane DeAutremont, president of Lile International, a relocation company based in Portland. “We must move the Rose Quarter project forward if we want to address congestion and get our economy moving forward again.”

Federal grants topping $500 million have been announced for the features that will reconnect Lower Albina, a largely Black neighborhood split by construction of the original I-5 in the 1960s — and lawmakers just approved a bid by ODOT to seek $750 million more in federal aid toward a project that will cost $1.7 billion to $1.9 billion overall.

But the project’s critics have continued to focus on the proposed expansion of traffic lanes, though not of the reconnection features, whose champion is U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Portland who is retiring from Congress this year.

“Racial justice and climate justice are not opposed to each other,” said Ada Crandall of Sunrise Movement PDX, who led protests outside ODOT’s Portland regional headquarters for a year. “It’s both or nothing.”

Josiah Kelly, who is Black, told lawmakers: “Given that many hundreds of African Americans have been displaced by the construction of Interstate 5, more freeway means no more Black people.”