How Oregon’s Ambitious Transportation Plan Went Nowhere

The cuts are coming fast for Oregon transportation.

This week, the Oregon Department of Transportation notified nearly 500 workers that they’ll be losing their jobs at the end of the month. ODOT also says it’s eliminating another 450 vacant positions, with the cuts adding up to about a fifth of the agency’s workforce. The effects of the cuts will start appearing immediately on Oregon roadways, a department spokesperson says, with fewer crews working on pothole repairs, road striping, brush clearing, litter cleanup and storm response.

It’s the opposite of what Oregon’s legislative leaders were hoping to see this summer.

Earlier this year, the legislature began debating a transportation funding package that it hoped would help clear a backlog of deferred maintenance on state roads and bridges, while supporting public transit and other modes of transportation. A growing share of state-owned roads are listed in fair or poor condition. The initial outline from top Democrats, who control both legislative chambers and the governor’s office, would have raised billions in new transportation revenue through a series of increases on the state gas tax and vehicle registration fees. Unlike previous deals, including the last major transportation package the legislature passed in 2017, this year’s proposal was focused much more on maintenance than capital investment.

But in the weeks before the session ended, the deal imploded in dramatic fashion. More accurately, there may never have been a deal in the first place. Even while Democrats had solid majorities in both chambers, they had no votes to spare to achieve the three-fifths majorities required to pass such a revenue package, with Republicans united against big spending increases. There was tension within the transportation committees hashing out the details of a bill, which bubbled over at times and led to turnover in committee leadership. The funding package wasn’t finalized in a bill until three weeks before the end of the session, by which point it was becoming clear that Democrats weren’t united behind the deal. In the last hours of the session, Democrats tried to pass a stopgap measure to prevent layoffs at ODOT, but Republicans wouldn’t agree to a suspension of the rules to allow the measure to go through. The session ended bitterly for many lawmakers, despite the efforts of Gov. Tina Kotek, who reportedly spent hours with legislators on the final day of the session trying to make a deal.

“It’s a huge disappointment,” says Jim McCauley, legislative director for the League of Oregon Cities. “There’s no question we felt that the transportation package that was offered was something that every community was going to benefit from.”

Blame is being cast in all directions: From Democrats to Republicans for not supporting a stopgap measure; from Republicans to Democrats for trying to do too much at once; from some swing-district Democrats to party leaders for trying to go it alone.

“I think you build a package not for 36 and 18, I think you build a package for 40 and 20,” says Democratic Rep. Paul Evans, referring to the number of representatives and senators needed to make a deal. “Make everybody complicit in the process so that it is bipartisan in nature. It may not be as big as you want but at least it’s united.”

Evans was one of the Democratic lawmakers who backed away from the funding deal, asking to be removed from the transportation committee in the waning days of the legislative session. He reportedly was seeking greater oversight of local allocations of gas-tax funding, as well as funding to complete a bridge repair in his district. In an interview with Governing, he said cities and counties deserved some blame for the current crisis because they opposed the last-minute measure to prevent ODOT layoffs. (McCauley, of the League of Oregon Cities, says the group opposed the measure because it didn’t allocate a portion of revenue for localities, which own most of the roadway miles in the state. “It wasn’t a great position to be in,” he says.)

Other Democrats had different ideas about what killed the deal. “I think there was too much effort in the early part of the session in trying to get some Republicans on board, and more or less ignoring that the Democrats were going to have feelings or thoughts about the package. We’re not a monolith, and we certainly aren’t in lockstep,” Rep. Mark Gamba, a transportation committee member, said in an interview with the news site Bike Portland after the end of the session.

An overarching theme during the debate, promoted primarily by Republicans but echoed by some Democrats, was that Oregonians are overtaxed and that ODOT doesn’t spend money efficiently. Some Democrats are seeking to push back on that narrative.

“It’s comfortable, magical thinking to think that ODOT is just so inefficient that if they just were more efficient they could do all these things we ask of them without any more money,” Gamba said in the Bike Portland interview.

Sen. Khanh Pham, who took a leadership role in the transportation committee in the last weeks of the session, said after the deal fell through that Oregon doesn’t spend enough on transportation. “Oregon ranks dead last among the seven states in the American West for the amount of money we put into our transportation system,” she wrote. “If we had passed House Bill 2025, we would have been sixth lowest out of seven Western states.”

Now, Kotek is weighing whether to call the legislature into a special session to try again to work out a transportation funding deal. Without more funding, ODOT says it will have to make even more cuts at the beginning of next year, and impacts on the transportation system will begin to accrue as the state moves through wildfire season and into winter. But Evans says there’s still not a clear path forward to unite Democrats, let alone make a bipartisan deal. Republican leaders on the transportation committee were not available for an interview.

“The needs haven’t changed,” says Indi Namkoong, an environmental justice advocate in Portland who helped convene Move Oregon Forward, a coalition of advocacy groups. “That mandate is going to be the same for legislators and for leaders coming back to get this done — whenever that happens.”