It’s been a week since Oregon Democrats’ road-funding hopes imploded, but the fallout from that failure is still hitting home.
At the Oregon Department of Transportation, hundreds of workers were expected to begin learning this week that they might be laid off as soon as Monday.
Cash-strapped cities and counties are scrambling to figure out what projects — or in some cases, staffers — may have to be laid off. Transit agencies are planning for a future with fewer routes, or less frequent service.
And above it all — still — is a question.
A proposal to juice money flowing into the transportation system by nearly $2 billion a year may have died when the Legislature adjourned last week, but how dead is it?
Gov. Tina Kotek hinted strongly over the weekend she is willing to call lawmakers in for a special session to find at least enough money to avoid upwards of 600 layoffs at ODOT.
“I don’t care how tired you are, I don’t care what your vacation plans are,” Kotek said, referring to lawmakers. “We are going to solve this. You’re going to be spending a lot more time with me. We need to get this figured out.”
For now, no answers have arrived.
But in Portland, the consequences from the bill’s failure could be swift. The city’s transportation bureau had expected $11 million for maintenance and operations.
Cody Bowman, a spokesman for Mayor Keith Wilson, said “without this critical funding, dozens of essential city infrastructure jobs are now on the line.”
The city says 300 streetlights might remain unrepaired this year, and officials expect to delay upgrading traffic signals in busy parts of the city. Job cuts could prompt the city to postpone safety projects and other maintenance that have already been funded.
“I am deeply disappointed the state legislature failed to make the critical investment our transportation system needs,” Mayor Wilson said in a statement earlier this week.
“Vital infrastructure jobs are on the line, and our ability to deliver basic safety services like filling potholes and improving traffic conditions is at risk. I urge the legislature to act quickly and deliver a solution that supports all Oregon communities, including Portland.”
The city increased a tax on rideshare rides like Uber and Lyft, which “will help mitigate some of the shortfall,” but it won’t be enough to replace the $11 million Portland expected.
Meanwhile, advocates for safer streets warned of a steep cost. They’d cheered money lawmakers had proposed to calm busy streets.
“Families will be forever changed when their loved ones are killed on dangerous roads that could have been fixed,” Sarah Iannarone, the executive director of The Street Trust, an advocacy group, wrote in legislative testimony. “The financial toll of traffic crashes on households and our health care system is devastating.”
Here’s a rundown of how some of the other entities that were most counting on transportation money are preparing.
Hundreds of state layoffs coming
Kris Strickler, the director of ODOT, didn’t waste any time laying out what lawmakers’ failure might mean for his agency.
In an email at 12:22 a.m. Saturday morning — about an hour after lawmakers adjourned for the year — he laid it out in striking terms.
“This is the hardest message I’ve ever had to send in my career,” Strickler began, before offering a synopsis of why the agency now faces a funding gap of more than $300 million.
“We are using vacancy savings wherever possible in order to minimize the number of layoffs, but we will still lose over 600 of our coworkers and teammates,” he wrote. “I know you know this, but I’m going to say it anyway: this reduction is shortsighted and fails to account for the cost of inaction.”
Those costs include roads that are more often in poor or unsafe conditions, Kotek and transportation officials say.
While urging lawmakers to act last week, the governor suggested that mountain passes will go unplowed, potholes will go unfilled, and motorists will be left stranded on the side of the road if layoffs move forward.
Oregonians “expect ODOT to be there,” Kotek said. “That’s what’s on the line.”
The stakes for ODOT in this year’s transportation debate were always high. With rising costs and flattening revenues, the agency has long argued for a fundamental rethinking of how the state pays for its roads.
It got much of its wish in House Bill 2025, the massive funding proposal Democrats put forward in the last three weeks of session.
Via hikes to a wide array of taxes and fees, and shifts to ensure electrical vehicle drivers are paying equitably for roads, the bill would have sent a huge amount of new money into the state’s highway trust fund. It would have set aside more money to prop up flagging transit agencies, pay off a pair of massive highway projects, make busy urban arterials safer, and more.
When it became clear, on the session’s last day, that the proposal could not pass, lawmakers scrambled to save ODOT the pain of layoffs. A last-minute push to hike gas taxes by three-cents-per-gallon would have filled the agency’s funding hole in the short-term — but it too fell short.
Now the agency will act swiftly to eliminate hundreds of positions in the next four weeks.
“It is immediate, and it’s going to be within 30 days,” said Julie Brown, chair of the Oregon Transportation Commission, which oversees ODOT.
Since the bill died, Brown said she and the commission’s vice chair, Lee Beyer, have been pressing for action.
“We’re reaching out to legislators we know and saying, ‘Let’s push for this,’” Brown said.
Transportation commissioners aren’t the only ones calling for action.
“It was an unsatisfactory outcome for our members at ODOT and people who rely on safe roads,” said Melissa Unger, executive director of SEIU Local 503, the union that represents roughly 2,500 ODOT operations and maintenance workers.
“As people get laid off, we’re going to keep telling them to call their Legislators,” she said.
ODOT employees have a powerful advocate in the union, which has the ear of many majority Democrats. But as of Monday, Unger said the union wasn’t sure what happens next.
“We don’t know exactly what the answer is,” she said. “We know it doesn’t have to be the end. People should be thinking about how we save these jobs.”
Counties warn of crisis
The problems facing Oregon’s transportation system extend beyond ODOT.
Many county governments, which manage a sizable portion of the roads and bridges throughout Oregon, were already facing budget shortfalls, in part due to inflation and rising personnel costs.
Their local road departments rely on state dollars, receiving 30% of the funds generated by Oregon’s gas tax.
Without new investments, road departments — many of which are already short-staffed — could face layoffs, county officials said this week. They expect the cost of maintaining and preserving infrastructure to increase, exceeding government revenue and making it harder to quickly repair withered roads.
“There’s nothing that we’ll have to put the brakes on immediately,” said Chris Doty, Deschutes County’s road director. “But certainly projects that we’ve planned in the next five years won’t be able to be delivered at the time frame that we’ve represented to the public.”
This system was in rough shape to begin with. More than 4,400 miles of county roads — about 29% — were already in “fair” or “poor” condition, according to a September 2024 road study by the Association of Oregon Counties.
“Unfortunately, maintenance and preservation is not as sexy as building new projects,” said Doty. “That didn’t help. But political leaders need to understand that maintenance is sexy, because the opposite of that is very, very unsexy: potholes, ruts.”
What’s more: About three out of four county-owned bridges statewide were “structurally deficient.” Nearly 1,000 were restricted for heavy trucks due to these issues.
That could cause problems for community emergency services and local economies, said Mallorie Roberts, the legislative affairs director for the Association of Oregon Counties.
“Heavy trucks can’t drive over it, fire trucks can’t drive over it, school buses can’t drive over it, and the number of (deficient) bridges in counties is growing,” said Roberts.
County road departments have already cut down their staff to the “bare bones,” Roberts said, and now some expect further cuts.
The cuts could force longer response times for repairs on hard-to-reach roads in the state’s rural corners. In some areas of the Oregon Coast, where a single road sometimes connects one community to another, landslides and other weather-related closures can delay emergency response times and hinder local economies.
“We’re always on the edge, or a little behind it, in keeping our roads maintained,” said John Sweet, a commissioner in Coos County, where budget struggles prompted the county road department to slash its workforce in half over the span of more than a decade.
He added, “Right now we don’t do a very good job. We could do a better job. But we don’t have the resources, and to lose resources would be devastating.”
While it too has cut much of its road department staffing over time, Tillamook County has positioned itself to stave off immediate cuts.
In 2013, voters passed a tax on room rentals, dedicating about 30% of the region’s transient lodging tax to the county’s road system.
Still, the economic uncertainty from federal funding cuts and trade tensions could leave the county in a difficult position without additional state funding, said County Commissioner Erin Skaar.
“The state is not going to be in a position to step up and backfill,” said Skaar. “We will not be in a position to step up and backfill. We have the possibility of losing things like key infrastructure, like bridges, that we won’t have a way to replace.”
Some of the county’s bridges are still damaged after a 2015 storm. At least one state highway was not fog-striped two years ago due to a lack of funding. Now the county might have to put off maintenance on its lesser-used roads until there’s additional funding.
“We may not be paving this summer,” said Skaar. “That’s just a reality. As the cost of asphalt goes up, we may not be able to. So it impacts all of us in terms of the infrastructure that’s already on the edge.”
In Multnomah County, Oregon’s most populated area, nearly half of the county’s roads need to be rebuilt or replaced, according to county officials.
While the county didn’t bank on legislative action when piecing together its budget, the county is forecasting that costs associated with maintaining a healthy infrastructure system will cause a $63 million annual funding gap if something doesn’t change.
“I know that big packages like this, whether they’re transportation or otherwise, may take a few times to” pass, said Shannon Singleton, a Multnomah County commissioner.
“Yes, there’s a disappointment, and we know there’s going to be an impact. But also I don’t want to lose that hopefulness of we’ve learned a lot. Now, what do we put together and how do we move forward with a package that can be successful?”
Less bus and rail service?
Transit agencies throughout the state had been among the biggest boosters for Democrats’ transportation plans this year.
HB 2025 would have bumped up a tax that Oregonians pay out of their paychecks to fund transit — from 0.1% to 0.3%. But Republicans fought that proposal, arguing that the payroll tax should be repurposed for general road maintenance, and transit agencies should fend for themselves.
Currently the state tax pays out more than $100 million to transit systems each year. Tripling that amount, transit officials said, would have allowed agencies to close funding shortfalls as the cost of equipment and maintenance outpaces revenue.
“Many of our members are looking at 20-30% service cuts in the coming years unless we do something now,” the Oregon Transit Association said in testimony last month. “That can be devastating to local businesses, quality of life for seniors and people with disabilities and further negative impacts to the environment.”
If those cuts are coming, they may not be imminent in many places.
Allan Pollock serves as general manager of the Cherriots transit system in Salem, and as a board vice president for the Oregon Transit Association. He told OPB Wednesday that his agency didn’t anticipate a state funding increase in its current budget, and won’t need to take immediate action.
Neither will TriMet, which said in a statement that its most recent budget didn’t rely on HB 2025.
But both agencies say cuts are coming if lawmakers don’t act.
Without new state funding, TriMet is warning it could cut its bus service by 25% and light rail by 10% by 2032.
“This outcome will have devastating repercussions for our region, and it jeopardizes the progress TriMet has made to grow our ridership and improve our service coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the agency said in a statement.
In Salem, Pollock doesn’t foresee service cuts in the next two years. But he also doesn’t expect the agency to bolster its services. Other areas could see cuts later this year, he said.
“Each agency is now going to look and see: What does this mean to us as an individual,” he said.
Questions for major highway projects
With the transportation bill’s failure, looming questions about a pair of unfinished highway megaprojects only grew bigger.
ODOT is in the process of strengthening the Abernethy Bridge, where Interstate 205 crosses the Willamette River, to withstand an earthquake.
The agency plans to break ground this summer on a massive project to widen Interstate 5 through Portland’s Rose Quarter, and build a cap over the freeway.
Both projects were ordered up by lawmakers in 2017, when the Legislature last passed a transportation package.
The problem is there’s not currently enough money to complete either. HB 2025 would have set aside $250 million each two-year budget to help the state borrow money to fill funding shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Rose Quarter presents a special problem. The project has cobbled together about $863 million of a price tag that could hit $2 billion or more.
And the bulk of that money, $450 million, is in the form of a federal grant to pay for highway caps that are meant to stitch back together the Lower Albina Neighborhood. The historically Black area of the city was decimated to make way for I-5’s construction.
But many expect the federal money could be under threat as congressional Republicans look for savings in their massive budget bill.
“In the short term we’ve had to get comfortable in uncertainty,” said JT Flowers, director of government affairs at the Albina Vision Trust. The nonprofit is leading the effort to develop a neighborhood on the highway caps that are part of the Rose Quarter project.
Regardless of the current federal picture, Flowers says the Rose Quarter is becoming a national model for community-led urban redevelopment. Albina Vision Trust expects it to succeed in the long run.
“We don’t have definitive answers on this at present,” Flowers said. “What we can say is that this project remains a priority — not just for the state of Oregon and the city of Portland, but for the entire nation.”
ODOT says it has no plans to change course now that the transportation package has failed.
The first phase of the project, which breaks ground next month, is fully funded. The next phase, set for 2027, includes building out a portion of the highway cover, and will rely on the federal grant.
Despite questions, project spokesperson Rose Gerber said Wednesday the federal money is still on track to arrive.
After that, things are murky.
“Further project funding will largely depend on the Legislature passing a transportation package that includes funding for major transportation projects,” Gerber said.
The uncertainty around the project could be a subject of conversation when the Oregon Transportation Commission meets this month.
“I think at some point we step back and say: Is this still a viable project?” said Oregon Transportation Commission Chair Julie Brown, who was speaking of unfunded projects more generally. “Do we move forward?”
