With today’s release of Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s 2025-2027 budget, the contours of big debates about transportation funding and priorities are coming into focus.
Kotek’s budget puts funding for the Oregon Department of Transportation at $7.3 billion over the next two years — that’s about $1.75 billion over what ODOT is asking for. That gap doesn’t mean ODOT gets more money. It means Kotek assumes the legislature will make up the difference in the 2025 session when they hammer out what’s expected to be a massive transportation funding package. That package is being viewed as a necessity, not just to build and maintain infrastructure, but to keep ODOT afloat.
ODOT says they face a severe financial crisis due to three main causes: declining gas tax revenue, high inflation that makes projects more expensive, and many strings attached to available funding.
The agency’s requested budget of $5.7 billion includes unprecedented layoffs and other cuts they say, “would be devastating to ODOT’s ability to maintain and operate Oregon’s transportation system safely and reliably.” To balance their budget, ODOT says they’d have to fire 1,000 employees — including 164 staffers from Region 1 alone. ODOT is dependent on the Governor and lawmakers to bail them out and the next eight months will reveal how political considerations mesh — or don’t — with state priorities.
With this challenging road ahead, members of the state’s Joint Committee on Transportation spent their summer break hosting 12 town halls and roundtable discussions in cities across Oregon. They heard a bevy of concerns and perspectives from over 1,100 Oregonians and are now using that feedback to inform in-depth discussions about what to fund — and how to fund it — in three months of meetings hosted by JCT members.
13 meetings have been held since mid-October. Three workgroups meet twice a month and are focused around three categories of interest. The workgroups are named: “Back-to-Basics Maintenance and Preservation”; “Public and Active Transit,” and “Finishing 2017 Priority Commitments.”
That last workgroup is grappling with how to fund the “unfinished business” of House Bill 2017, which are two mega-projects included in the previous transportation package and are billions of dollars short seven years later. ODOT and some lawmakers maintain that voters were “promised” the completion of expansions to I-5 through the Rose Quarter and I-205 through Clackamas County and Oregon City (including a new Abernethy Bridge). While some experts disagree about what was promised, the conventional wisdom in Salem is that getting those projects done in the 2025 package is essential to rebuilding trust in ODOT and the legislature.
I’m still working my way through the 13 meetings (they’re about 2-3 hours long each) and will be reporting out what I’ve learned from them in the days ahead.
As for the Governor’s budget, it doesn’t include any ideas for how to raise new transportation revenue. And the legislative workgroups haven’t made any official proposals yet either. But those are coming soon as conversations sharpen in the coming month.
Some of the ideas I’ve heard tossed around are: indexing the gas tax to inflation, expand the payroll tax to fund public transit, expand the current “vehicle privilege tax” (the one half of one percent tax dealers pay on sale of new cars), a bicycle tire tax (yes, seriously), EV charging taxes, congestion pricing, fees tacked onto home deliveries, and many more.
As ODOT triages its budget and difficult votes loom over lawmakers, we are entering a very interesting phase of debates about transportation funding and priorities that will shape our state for years to come. Strap in and stay tuned.
NOTE: 8:45 am on 12/4: There’s always confusion around ODOT and state budgets because planning is done on a two-year cycle. In this case, I’ve learned since this was posted that the Governor’s number of $1.7 billion is an annual estimate of what ODOT needs and ODOT estimates they need about twice that number. That means the number the legislature might ask for could be upwards of $3 billion.
