I don’t know about you, but I’m still fascinated by the complete political breakdown that happened at the State Capitol five days ago. With so much at stake, and so much work done to fix the state’s structural revenue challenges, the fact that they came away with nothing is boggles my mind. I feel like the better we understand what happened, the easier it is to cope with and the less likely we are to fail so dearly again next time.
On that note, this morning I interviewed House Representative Mark Gamba to get a detailed perspective from someone who had a front-row seat to the drama surrounding House Bill 2025. Rep. Gamba is a member of the Joint Committee on Transportation Reinvestment and former two-term mayor of Milwaukie. He has a well-earned reputation as an expert in transportation policy and was the lead author of the Safe, Modern, Affordable, Reliable Transportation (SMART) Framework — a progressive policy package that garnered significant support from top Democrats and eventually became an amendment to House Bill 2025.
I’ve edited the interview for clarity, but left most of it in tact so you can learn as much as possible and delve into Gamba’s thinking beyond typical sound bites and prepared statements.
Jonathan Maus/BikePortland
How are you feeling right now?
Representative Gamba
I’m still pretty disturbed and how badly that was all handled. I am very concerned for Oregon, we were already the lowest taxed state of all the western states in terms of transportation funding (according to this comparison prepared for the Joint Committee on Transportation by ODOT Finance and Budget Director Daniel Porter), and not just by a little bit. I mean, we’re a little bit less than Montana, but otherwise, all the other states are significantly more than we are — two to four times more.
BikePortland
Going into this session, what was your goal when it came to funding transportation?
Gamba
If you go back to 2017 [when the last transportation funding package was passed] they knew that t get ODOT caught up to where they had the money they needed to function with just basic operating expenses, they needed to raise the gas tax at that point by about 70 cents. And they raised it a dime, and simultaneously said, ‘Oh by the way, go do a bunch of these really expensive projects.’ They said you can toll. That was their big give on how we were supposed to pay for all that. But that whole tolling thing was mishandled, so now we’re in a situation where we have a couple of the big projects under construction and they’re paying for those out of the State Highway Fund, which means they’re putting less into preservation and maintenance than they should be by a long shot.
I was told that during the 1960s we were replacing around 50 or 60 bridges every year. Now we’re replacing two or three every year, and there are more older bridges now than there were in the 60s. A lot of our bridges are very old, and we should be replacing them — if you just do the math there’s over 7,000 bridges in the state and ODOT is responsible for a little less than 3,000 of those. If you divide that by 100 [bridge lifespan], you find out that we need to be doing about 30 of them a year just to keep up. And like I said, we’re doing two or three right now.
So that is the state of things we walked into this session. And cities and counties are in a similar boat.
We knew we needed a real package this year. We needed to move back up to where the point where we were spending a significant amount of money on maintenance and preservation and all the other things we should be doing. We should be starting to move our transportation system in a direction that is lower carbon. So there’s a variety of ways you do that. You increase transit, you increase bike/ped, you need charging infrastructure more readily available, you start to help people switch to EVs with rebates, both for cars and bikes, all those kinds of things to reduce greenhouse gases because 35% of greenhouse gases in this state are transportation-related.
And that’s not even touching safety. We have hundreds of people dying in just the metro region every year in predominantly bike/ped versus car accidents. And there are solutions to that… So it’s stuff like that that we need to be going through systematically and fixing. There needed to be significant investments in those things.
BikePortland
So what happened?
Gamba
We voted on a really solid bill, got it out of committee, and then had a significant amount of pushback from within Democratic part of the legislature, and had to negotiate that down. We still had a decent bill coming out of that — no greenhouse gas reductions — but certainly some good safety investments and moving the needle on, catching back up, but not nearly what it should have been.
So we negotiate with the handful of Dems, get something that they can live with. And we end up negotiating with the car dealers so that they don’t refer it to the ballot, and we finally land on something that, while it’s not awesome, starts to move the needle on some of those things. Then we didn’t have the votes in the Senate to get it out.
BikePortland
Do you think mistakes were made? If so, what were they?
Gamba
Yes I think there were mistakes made. 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.
So when that bill came out with 10 days left in the session and there had been eight hours between the time the bill dropped and the time we were supposed to vote it out of committee, people were rightfully angry. I do not blame them for being angry about that. My team was very steeped in it because we had been deeply engaged early on to try and create the dash 15 amendments [which Gamba authored with a bloc of progressive Dems including Portland Senator Khanh Pham], to sort of set the bar of what we should be doing right now. So my team was very deeply involved and we were able to go through that bill in those eight hours. But it was a struggle, and I had four people, so I can imagine that everybody else on that committee was really angry.
BikePortland
Who pushed that early collaboration with Republicans? Was it the committee leaders, or did Democratic party leadership come in and take control of the package away from the committee?
Gamba
I don’t think it had much of anything to do with the committee chairs.
BikePortland
So pretty early on, party leadership was saying, ‘Let’s get Republicans in the room.’ And you feel like there was time spent on that and that it didn’t go anywhere?
Gamba
And not only that, the more frustrating thing is that there were a lot of bills that were given consideration this session — that were given hearings and work sessions and passed out of committees — that should have never seen the light of day in a state as blue as Oregon. There were a lot of bills that died on the altar of appeasing Republicans.
BikePortland
You shared a long list of all the things that Dems wanted to accomplish with the bill. And Republicans’ main point of criticism was that it simply asked too much of Oregon taxpayers. Do you have any regrets about coming out with such a large bill?
Gamba
My attitude is: That which is necessary can’t be impossible. Right? If we have things that we absolutely have to do. I mean, for me, climate change is in that category. It doesn’t really matter if it’s hard, or uncomfortable, or bums people out — the reality is we’ve got to do it. We can’t keep kicking the can down the road and then hoping for some kind of miracle. They did that in 2017 they kicked the can down the road, and here we are today — in a situation where our system is going to start falling apart. Are voters at that point going to say, ‘Oh, geez, sorry. We should have known better, and you guys should have taxed us; but that was our bad because we didn’t want to be taxed.’ No, they’re just going to say, ‘You guys can’t run a state. You don’t know how to govern.’ So it was a Hobson’s choice. There really was no choice in this.
BikePortland
What you described is sort of like a Democratic doom loop where Dem party leadership is tries to collaborate with Republicans, then Republicans want to starve the system of funding, rally around “no new taxes,” and then criticize the people who run it as being incompetent. What can the Dems do to get out of that loop?
Gamba
I have only my experience at sort of the city level to lean on. In Milwaukie [where he served eight years as mayor], when we needed to do something big, when we needed to do something that we need to raise people’s fees on the water bill or whatever, we put a lot a lot of time and effort into helping them understand why. And that was my frustration early on in this session. We spent months in committee condemning ODOT, saying, ‘ODOT is so terrible, they’re so inefficient,’ and then we knew we were going to be turning around and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, we need a bunch of money for this organization that we just you how terrible they are.’
BikePortland
A framework for HB 2025 came out in early April, but the bill itself wasn’t released until June 9th — just 18 days before the session ended. Why do you think there was such a delay?
Gamba
I wasn’t in the room, so can only judge it from the outside. If you were to ask the official line it would probably be something like, ‘It takes a long time to calculate the Highway Cost Allocation Study numbers.’ First of all, bullshit. Secondly, so what? Even if that was the case, that shouldn’t keep you from from putting out a concept and telling us, ‘Okay, this is broadly what we’re thinking about, you know, raising taxes this much so that we can start to move the needle on all these things that we need to be fixing.’ You can totally do that, even if you don’t have the exact calculations for HCAS yet. And, and that’s what should have been happening, in my opinion.
BikePortland
There’s a very strong current of criticism from Republicans that ODOT is simply inefficient and irresponsible and that they should focus on trimming fat in order to balance their budget. Now there’s an online, Republican-aligned punditry ecosystem that’s saying ODOT should eliminate DEI and social equity programs to pay the bills. What do you think about that?
Gamba
Let’s say ODOT is super inefficient and they could be doing all these things that they’re supposed to be doing with the money they have right now. Well, if that’s the case, why is every other state in the west (other than Montana) spending two-to-four times what we are on transportation? (See chart below). We have more bridges. Think about all the rivers in this state, and bridges are crazy-expensive infrastructure. So if it’s purely inefficient, then why are all these other states having to spend so much? It does not hold water.
It’s really easy to sell that to people, because it just seems like so much money. And people like to assume that government sucks, and, you know, government doesn’t help itself. It often does suck! But it’s also not as inefficient as people think it is. Could ODOT do better? For sure, particularly on delivery of small projects, like bike/ped projects, those tend to cost twice as much as they should.
The fact is construction across the board since 2010 or so has been escalating in costs about 15% per year, so every six years you double the cost of projects.
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. And yes I know that relative to the cost of living in Oregon, wages are crap. The bottom half of the population is barely hanging on by their fingernails. No question, that is absolutely true. Is the solution to that, to let our bridges start falling down? Or maybe should we look at other solutions, like either putting some downward pressure on people’s biggest costs, i.e. housing or put some upward pressure on wages, right?
I don’t think the solution is to let our infrastructure completely crumble.
BikePortland
Have you heard any substantive ideas or solutions from Republicans that would fund our system, build bridges, and be able to solve the problems that you’ve laid out?
Gamba
No. Full stop. The Republican proposal was basically to steal the STIF [Statewide Transportation Improvement Fund] from transit, stop spending any money on bike/ped anything, take the money from Safe Routes to School, take the money from everything, and go back to just the core services of keeping the roads and bridges repaired and plowed and all that stuff. So you know, obviously, when you have a third of your population that can’t or won’t drive, that’s problematic.
BikePortland
In an interview on Oregon Public Broadcasting Tuesday, Senator Mark Meek implied that a major reason he opposed the bill was because he didn’t see how it funded operations and maintenance. Can you set the record straight and explain how HB 2025 would have funding operations and maintenance?
Gamba
The bill would have increased revenue for the State Highway Fund, and operation, maintenance is, as you know, the largest single line item in the highway fund. So, yeah, I’m not sure what he wanted in there. Did he want it called out specifically that we’re going to spend this much on highway maintenance and preservation?
He’s also the same guy that claimed that there was still tolling in the bill, so his ability to read a bill is a little suspect.
BikePortland
How frustrating was that to have Senator Meek not just vote no, but to, in multiple instances, not really seem like he understood what the bill actually did?
Gamba
Very frustrating, but you a little bit get inured to that in the legislature, because so often we’re in these committee hearings with Republicans who do not — in any way, shape or form — understand the bill that they’re looking at and you just have to sit there and listen to them ring on about stuff that’s just not even remotely accurate and move on with your day.
BikePortland
Clearly there was a handful of Democrats in the House that voiced concerns with the bill too. What do you think were there objections?
Gamba
It was variety of things. They were absolutely swing seat folks and taking a big tax vote was going to be tough for them. No question. You know, that propaganda works. It works on Democrats as well as it works on Republicans. There were also Democrats who opposed it and who don’t live in swing seat districts and I never got an honest answer from them. I got their talking points, but those were clearly not why they really opposed it.
BikePortland
You mentioned how the propaganda was effective. I think Dems in general are overlooking the fact that there’s a really powerful online media ecosystem that supports Republicans. This mirrors what I think is happening at the national level where we just saw the national Democrats say they they want to find the left’s Joe Rogan. Is that something you’re aware of and think should be a bigger issue?
Gamba
I absolutely think about all the time. Part of the problem some Democrats have, is Democrats tend to try and be accurate with the things that they say. There is more of a tendency towards that with Democrats and there is with Republicans. Republicans will say whatever emotional message will get their story across, so it’s really easy to gin up emotions when you don’t have to have any concern whatsoever for the truth. And we are losing that battle.
It’s 10 times harder to gin up an emotional response and to have people viscerally understand something when you are also at the same time trying to be accurate. That’s what Democrats are going to have to put a whole lot of thought and effort and probably money into, is learning how to, and hiring people, that know how to message hard things in a way that people can wrap their heads around them and have an emotional impact. Because, you know, there’s that old saying about speeches: People don’t care what you say, they care how you made them feel. If you have no concerns for the validity of what you’re saying, it’s easy to make people feel certain ways.
BikePortland
What do you think the Democrats should have done differently?
Gamba
I think they should have been spending a lot of time and effort helping Oregonians understand the state of our transportation system and why it was so very important to start catching back up financially. That’s what needed to happen. Secondarily, I would say there needed to be a lot more time and effort into helping our own caucus understand those same things, and there was very little, if any, time and effort spent towards that.
BikePortland
What does the failure of the transportation package mean for the I-5 Rose Quarter project?
Gamba
Rose Quarter needed this bill to happen. I don’t know how they start actual construction on the Rose quarter now, without some bill that begins to create that level of funding just to pay for the bond.
BikePortland
What do you think are the chances of something getting passed in a special session? And something big enough to actually address Rose Quarter and other needs?
Gamba
I would be gobsmacked if we could, in a special session, pass a funding mechanism big enough to I to help the Rose Quarter, and to ensure that we have sufficient funds without further eating into our already depleted money for maintenance and preservation.
Could something be passed that maybe keeps us from firing a whole bunch of ODOT workers? Maybe. But what they were proposing [with HB 3402, a last ditch, failed effort to pass a three-cent gas tax] was completely cutting cities and counties out.
BikePortland
Do you think ODOT and the governor are bluffing on these layoff threats?
Gamba
No. They’re very sincere. There is somebody within the power structure that I have really good relationship with and that I trust implicitly, and in no uncertain terms, she’s convinced that layoffs were going to start immediately.
BikePortland
Do you think what happened at the state gives more political inertia for cities to pass new funding mechanisms to make up the gap?
Gamba
I certainly think they’ll try. They don’t have much of a choice. I mean, there as between a rock and a hard place as ODOT is. You’ve got really great leaders in a lot of cities that are not going to just go, ‘Oh well, guess it’s just going to fall apart,’ and then walk away. They’re going to be doing everything they can to keep it from falling apart.
Unfortunately, one of the many things we didn’t do this session that was give cities and city councils the right to pass a gas tax in their city without having a public vote.
BikePortland
I saw that. Can you help me understand how you respond to people that say, ‘Gosh, that’s horrific. How can the government just raise my taxes without asking me first?’
Gamba
Well, there’s a whole lot of places where that is the case. When was the last time the federal government asked you about a tax increase they were going to put on you?
Our revenue system in the state is so broken. Most states have a three-legged stool. They have property tax, income tax and sales tax. If you look at those charts that I was referencing that show the revenue that’s being spent on transportation in seven western states, about half of the money going towards transportation in many of those states is sales tax money. Oregon decided at some point that we just weren’t going to have sales tax as if it’s not going to have any effect on anything whatsoever.
And the only thing that allows groups like Oregon Business and Industry or the Portland Metro Chamber to claim that we’re the second highest taxed city in the country is because they’re ignoring sales tax. It’s like we’re going to ignore a third of the income of every other place and say that we’re the highest. It’s pure crap. They are not telling the truth. Not only do we not have a sales tax, but in the early 1990s we passed Measures 5 and 50 which artificially limited property tax. Property tax is where the bulk of the income for cities, counties, special districts, fire districts, parks districts, and schools used to come from. Since then, the State of Oregon, out of the general fund, has had to put more and more money into education. As of this year, more than 50% of school funding is coming out of the state budget. Before Measures 5 and 50 passed, only 10% of the state’s school funds were coming out of the general fund.
So when people go, ‘I’m paying all these taxes! Why can’t you just pay for it out of these taxes I’m already paying?’ it’s because you’re not paying much in the way of taxes relative to the cost of things.
BikePortland
Is there anything you’ve seen in the media or discussed in the public that you want to correct or set the record straight on?
Gamba
The condemnation of ODOT, how it is this incredibly inefficient entity, and that they could do what they’re supposed to be doing with what they have now — that is, by far and away, so inaccurate.
The local media is spending a lot of time saying how we’re one of the highest taxed states in the country, and ignoring a third of the taxes that other places pay. That is destructive. And it’s, you know, it’s the same stuff that’s happening at the federal level, right? They’re cutting all these services that working class folks need, in order to fund tax breaks for the rich, and then spinning that as, ‘We don’t need those things because you’re overpaying already.’
So that is a big piece, because if you tell people over and over and over that you’re already over-taxed, that your government is just inefficient, and nobody pushes back on that; well, then you start to believe that that’s all true. And it’s very convenient. Most people love that thought, because then, you know, in a righteous world, they wouldn’t have to pay more taxes.
BikePortland
In the absence of Democrats suddenly waking up and being awesome at comms and media messaging, do you think that the material consequence of all this policy failure will eventually be so acutely felt by Oregonians in the form of service cuts and road conditions that maybe they’ll come around to helping pay for it?
Gamba
Well, it’s a slow burn, right? Bridges aren’t going to just start falling in the river tomorrow. And by the time it’s really noticeable for people, it’ll be a totally different governor and a totally different legislature.
And it will be unfixable.
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And the Legislature just voted to give PSU bonding authority for an $85 million theater and a $ 52 million parking garage.
Not a budget item, but public funding better dedicated to other projects nonetheless.
That’s coins in the sofa cushions compared to what was in the transportation bill.
Especially bonded over however many years. Big commercial buildings, so at least 30 years, maybe 50?
It’s not coins in the sofa cushion for PSU though – an institution which is cutting staff, facing reducing enrollment, and generally gets starved from state funding. My thoughts on this are deeply influenced by my time as PSU, so I’m fairly biased here, but graduate workers at PSU get basically no benefits and far lower pay (compared to those at OSU and U of O), and at least in my former program the administrative strategy has been “admit as many students as possible while staying in the good graces of accreditation”, then fill core class teaching roles with adjuncts. I enjoyed the program I was in, but there are deep structural problems with PSU right now, and a $52M parking garage is outrageously bad policy imo – even if it’s fully funded by a ticket surcharge or something. PSU is on shaky financial ground right now, and taking on $100M+ in debt while doing professor layoffs just makes me angry
Gamba, former 2-term Mayor of Milwaukie now a member on the Joint Committee on the Transportation Commission. Gamba’s earned reputation as expert in plans and proposed projects that prove to be absolutely thee worst engineering imaginable for Portland. RoseQ mess, IBRP (CRC) bridge project fiasco. Thank god Barbur Blvd MAX to Tigard got voted down. Couldn’t Burnside just retain the lifts? I’m not getting much of an answer. Done deal. Bearing false witness aren’t we too much of the time?
Think 1993-98 N/S MAX to Milwaukie, drains the library pond in a 180′ degree Loop north then east to glorius CTC shoparama. Well, that worst harm didn’t happen with the Orange Line, hopefully its temporary terminus extends a mile or so to Oak Grove (in a median). My question: When did Gamba recognize good engineering from bad? The IRBP, CRC, RoseQ I-5 mess, the worst engineered among them is the SW Barbur Hwy99W MAX to Tigard.
Rep Gamba is such an amazing advocate and champion for safe streets in the legislature. We are so lucky to have him there. Thank you for this interview and the awesome coverage of the transpo bill in the legislature.
He’s my Rep and I’m a big fan!!!
Gets popcorn ready for “reading the comments” time. 😉
I don’t disagree with Rep Gamba on principle – but politically speaking, Hobson’s choice is a terrible framing. People are at varying stages of understanding and accepting the reality of how bad this situation is (I suspect the good people of Clackamas may be a bit further behind on average). If your message is “this is so bad that we can’t not act”, you are effectively informing voters that there is a gun to their heads.
That message also doesn’t do anything to inspire hope. It’s not that voters are against more taxes, it’s that they are against paying more and having nothing change (or things just getting worse). The gas tax used to be a popular tax – drivers paid it happily because they believed in the government’s ability to take that money and make things better (ie paving roads and building bridges).
You make some good points here, but it’s not Gamba or Dems who are pointing a gun at taxpayers’ heads – it’s the crumbling infrastructure that has been built over the past 100 years that is pointing a gun at our heads. We really have no choice but pay to fix it if we want to keep using it.
When I was a kid, a major bridge-replacement project shut down a critical bridge in my town for an entire summer. I’ll never forget my parents having to drive a 17-mile detour just to take me to swimming lessons or a friend’s house. We had to program 45 extra minutes of driving time for the simplest errands. That kind of inconvenience will become commonplace in the next 5-10 years – or worse – if we do nothing, which is what we’re doing now. Or bridges will collapse and people will die – and not just Dems or Repubs.
Make Boone’s Ferry great again! And fantastic news for the Frog Ferry peeps!
This is my favorite framing by far. “Give us your money, or you’re going to be super inconvenienced or die.” Okay, how about I just move to a place that quizically provides civilization at half the cost of here. It is just perennially weird for Portlanders in particular to find out other places exist.
That’s a great interview – thanks. Too bad Gamba wasn’t leading the committee. I wonder if Gorsek has completely tanked his political career? I’m guessing he is finished.
“What you described is sort of like a Democratic doom loop where Dem party leadership is tries to collaborate with Republicans, then Republicans want to starve the system of funding, rally around “no new taxes,” and then criticize the people who run it as being incompetent. What can the Dems do to get out of that loop?“
How can you blame the Republicans when the Democrats have a supermajority and a Democrat as governor? This was a failure of the Democratic Party in Oregon, nothing less.
Umm that’s not what I’m doing there. My statement you cite is not assigning blame. It’s describing behaviors.
You ask: “How can you blame the Republicans when the Democrats have a supermajority and a Democrat as governor?”
It seems that 95% of Democrats in the legislature supported the package and 3% of Republicans did.
So that’s how you blame the Republicans.
The Rs did nothing more than propose an approach that would have had 30% support in the legislature. The Ds proposed something that had 55-58% support in the legislature when it needed 60%, due to our strange supermajority requirement.
The Democrats fell a vote or two short in the Senate, and the Republicans apparently couldn’t provide more than a single vote for it in the House, and zero in the Senate.
Blaming the “Democratic Party” for not being lock-step 100% but not the Republicans seems just wrong.
It’s easy to say no and complain – it’s hard to build a supermajority of support for things.
If the Republicans had proposed something that would have received a supermajority support, or helped craft the proposal in a way it would have received a supermajority – they’d be receiving lots of thanks and credit. We need more Javadis and McCalls.
Smug Portland residents who refer to Vancouver as “Vantucky” might want to look at that graph and ask themselves who is going to get the last laugh.
Seattle
The people who get the last laugh will be those who have a bicycle to ride, and a bus, streetcar, or MAX train to ride over Tilikum Crossing.
Anyone who doesn’t have a bridge on their way to do stuff will be smiling.
When the I-5 falls down, some WAshington drivers will have to take I-205, a 32 minute, 20 mile detour
I don’t agree with this: our transportation funding helps pave the roads we ride, not just car-only bridges. I e-bike to work and I am very, very conscious of pavement quality after crashing on a pothole last year, breaking my arm, and being out of work for 5 weeks. This shit is serious.
Perhaps you should speak to Mr Meeks and the republicans in the State Legislature. I take this shit seriously as well.
This region consistently fails to invest in, and prioritize the safety of people who walk, bike and ride transit. And now the State Legislature is failing us too. Many people here, including me, have crashed on potholes. I hit a pothole last night on my ebike and thankfully did not crash. I love riding bikes in Portland and I also have a car.
Will I be impacted by the I-5 falling down? probably.
Is it my problem? probably.
Am I responsible for not securing the funding to replace it and fund other important safety projects? No, I am not.
Mr Meeks and the legislature are responsible, including the republicans who voted no. Their districts will suffer too when their bridges, roads and other infrastructure crumbles away.
My worst crash injury ever was from a pothole, and I’m thankful to have recovered from it without a big medical debt. I did lose about $3500 from unpaid time off, which would cover a new e-bike with a suspension fork. For the same money I’d have a new bike and a lot less pain and inconvenience.
Given the current state of Portland bike routes and our future prospects, if I were getting a new ‘daily rider’ I’d take a hard look for something with suspension. A bike might seem expensive but a crash injury keeps taking while the bike just moving you around for almost no money. The marginal cost of an additional trip on a bike is ¢. Even the copay on a PR visit is $ and they will make you sweat.
Is Vancouver getting more bike infrastructure soon?
Indeed it is – Vancouver’s Complete Streets policy was adopted back in 2016 and bike/ped/transit projects have been steadily implemented since then. Recently there has been a few significant legal wins for the program, too.
Thank you for this interview, Jonathan, and great work on this whole story. Rep. Gamba sounds like a capable representative of his district.
Interviews like this make me wonder whether the value of having experienced, knowledgeable politicians outweighs the opportunities that term limits and alternatives to elections (like sortition, similar to jury service) provide. Career politicians should ostensibly be able to handle high-dollar bills like this much more capably and swiftly than complete novices who’ve been randomly selected to serve their state, but when debacles like this happen it sure makes me wonder if regular folks could come up with something a little more imaginative. When one’s “political career” isn’t hanging in the balance, legislators tend to be braver.
Good points, Paige. I would like to echo your gratitude to Jonathan for his excellent coverage of this session (and generally!). What I find so flummoxing about this whole affair is how absolutely incompetent the democrats come off. Green or seasoned, I would expect competent politicians to be able to negotiate among themselves and at least prepare for the possibility of opposition to such an important package. Leadership knew the calendar; they knew that the republicans would not support anything worth passing; they knew the backwards supermajority requirements for new revenue existed; they knew this meant they could not lose any votes; they knew ODOT would be screwed w/o new funding. Do they not have a whip operation? Did anybody ask Meeks if he was pissed off enough to blow the bill up? It’s not like you need a crystal ball to know there will be plenty of squealing when you raise the gas tax. And then the lack of messaging after the bill fails! They at least owe their supporters, who elected a supermajority of democrats so that they could actually get something done, some explanation of why they failed at their basic duty to fund transportation.
100%, excellent questions!
I nominate Micah for the Oregon Legislature!
I’d love to see the same graphic for a couple some typical commercial vehicles. A 24ft straight truck and a semi pulling a 53ft trailer would be a good start that ignores Oregon’ allowance for three trailer combinations.
Me too.
I suggest trying something different: DO JUST WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT & NEED:
Quoting the article: “go back to just the core services of keeping the roads and bridges repaired and plowed and all that stuff.”
The people know best how to spend their kids lunch money and it is not on pet projects like ODOT now specializes in.
We get it Jim, you support the Republican position. The GOP doesn’t appeal to enough Oregonians though and would have to become a much different party to get back in power in this state. Hold your breath on that.
People also need better transit and non-car options to choose from. Focusing only on cars, which already have plenty of space to roam, ensures less choice for people, thus less freedom. Remember freedom isn’t free.
We have very good DOOR TO DOOR services for the non driver – we just need to subsidize the low income who cannot afford a taxi/uber/lift ride.
As to you comment about Republican position, I am just saying that scarce money is best spent serving core functions, not pet projects that serve only a tiny minority, especially since most non-drivers and most transit riders are a choice, not a necessity due to handicaps, age, etc. As always we should ONLY be subsidizing the needy, not pet projects to reshape society to someone’s vision of paradise on earth.
I feel it is worth remembering low income people who can barely afford the cost of living and have to choose between heat, food, medicine and taxes (well taxes are not a choice). They do not have spare money for frills that are nice to have as opposed to really needed stuff.
This is ludicrously expensive to do, and anywhere with sufficient density to support a bus will be more economically served by fixed route service. It costs TriMet about $5/ride on a well-performing bus route. My home route, the #14, costs $4.60 a ride (a 40% farebox recovery even on a low income fare). Let’s say I want to go from my apartment to the art museum. A Lyft would cost me $11.50 right now, and if I paid the same $1.40 fare I do on TriMet, the public agency would have to pick up the remaining $10. On a typical weekday, TriMet allocates some $16,500 to operating the #14 – enough to pay for 1,650 subsidized Lyft rides (short ones mind you – it’s just 2.2 miles from my apartment to the Art Museum). Transitioning from a fixed route bus to a Lyft-based system would mean cutting some 2,000 daily rides out from service on the #14. Even though TriMet isn’t the world’s best transit agency, they can provide the same trip for well under half the price of a rideshare, all while paying a living wage to the operator.
TriMet already operates a cab-style service for folks with disabilities and the elderly in it’s demand response Lift service. It’s extremely expensive per-ride to operate, with total operating expense in 2023 coming in at $3.7M for 44,000 rides (sourced from the NTD) – that’s $84 per ride. It’s far more expensive than an Uber/Lyft/taxi because TriMet is serving people who often have physical disabilities which require specialized equipment – so they use the Lift vans you see around town, which are more expensive to operate than a passenger car, and because they pay higher labor costs than Uber/Lyft. If you actually are interested in providing door-to-door service for the folks who cannot drive, you have to realize that it’s simply not economical. Costs are directly proportional to ridership, and there are no economies to be found. Every car needs a driver, and this is just too expensive.
Maybe you can argue that in a place like Bend, where urban density is low and transit is anemic, that a cab-based service would make sense. But Cascades East spends $50/ride on demand response services, versus “just” $12.50 a ride on more traditional bus services. Sure, we could save money in absolute terms by doing some extreme means testing to allocate transit dollars only to the ones we deem most needy, but this system will be worse than the one we have now, while likely barely saving money in the most narrow sense. The economic impact of both direct job loss from transit workers, as well as direct job loss from workers who can no longer access jobs would be far, far larger than the short-term accounting gains for ODOT or whatever other public agency you consider.
Agreed.
Gamba reminds me of Han Solo: “it’s not my fault.”
I do not think your reading of this interview is correct. The bill failed in the Senate, right? And Gamba is a Representative, right? So, it’s quite literally not Gamba’s fault, right?
Thank you for a crazy good interview.
Perhaps legislators should come back to the table with a come to Jesus plan that eliminates ODOT mega expansion projects and allocates funds to maintenance projects. Name each maintenance project after the locale that it is going to and give it a line item that helps voters understand that their taxes are coming back to their region and not just being dumped into ten miles of I-5.
Also, it is hard to talk about what “voters want” when bad actors like Meek and Boshart are plugging into a disinformation campaign that is lying to voters, shaping their opinions and there are no consequences.
A little suggestion for Rep Gamba: don’t use ODOT’s or Republicans’ or even other Democrats’, for that matter, poor framing vocabulary. Doing so only perpetuates that poor framing and hurts your agenda to create a better, safer, and more effective transportation network. For a perfect example, see Jim’s comment directly above this one. Christine Drazan and the members of her caucus may think of roads and highways as ODOT’s “core services,” but that doesn’t mean that they actually are or should be. ODOT is charged with facilitating transportation within the state. That is the “core service” ODOT provides. That philosophy is, or should be, mode agnostic. Additionally, public safety is a core tenet of professional engineering ethics and also a major legitimate interest of state government, so efforts to improve safety, whether that be through separated infrastructure, road diets, or what have you, is also a “core service” that ODOT can and should (but often fails to) provide.
Spending more than other Western states? And then gives a chart showing tax revenue? I guess Gamba and Maus don’t know the difference between income and spending.
Without dedicated local journalism, we wouldn’t know most of what is going on in our communities. Well done, Maus.
Long winded interview failed to discuss the 1.1 BILLION dollar budget blunder by odot. Great job of not bringing up that this bill would of been the largest tax hike in Oregon history.
I’m not sure I understand.
More wealth has been amassed in the hands of people now than at any other time in history (granted it’s going to a nearly statistically insignificant number of those hands, but that’s a different story) and things are now more expensive than at any other point in history we have more cars, more people and more road miles now than at any other point in history.
Why would the price of building and maintaining our infrastructure follow a different model?
If you think it should, can you explain how that would work?
The reason for all this is clear as day “Read my lips, no new taxes.”
I pay tax on my house, tax on my income with multiple forms, and most of those forms would disappear if I was in Washington state along with the checks.
Someone who makes 20k a year has to fill a form and write a (big) check to Salem and almost nothing to Washington DC. In Vancouver, that person sends in nothing to Olympia.
Groceries aren’t subject to sales tax so who is paying all this sales tax that makes Gamba say Washingtonians pay just as much tax? And why is everyone moving to Washington and not Oregon?
Is Gamba saying I should ignore my lying eyes? I think he learned that line from his party.
The party that said Covid was definitely not leaked from a lab and that crime wasn’t going up in 2020 when murders tripled.
The total state income tax for someone who earns $20k/year in Oregon is $773, for an effective rate of 3.87% (source). The same person living in Washington would pay no income tax, but with an 8.8% sales tax in Vancouver (source), they would have to spend less than $8,785/year on taxable goods to pay less overall. In general, there’s a certain amount of base spending required for existence in society even outside of food (clothes, other durable goods, etc.). Maybe people can squeak by spending less than this, but I think we would be splitting hairs over how people in extreme poverty allocate very scarce resources. Oregon’s income tax structure is generally more progressive for low income earners than Washington’s sales tax structure.
This is generally concentrated at the higher end of the income spectrum, since the lack of state income tax makes a bigger difference the more you earn, and because wealthier households are generally more mobile (2023 study). But it’s still on the scale of hundreds of households per year in net migration from the Oregon tri-county area to Clark.
Hey donel! I hear what you are saying about feeling taxed every time you turn around. I emigrated to OR from WA several years ago and had to get used to sending the income tax check into Salem every year. Ouch. But I’m not sure your anecdotal observations paint a faithful picture of the relative tax and revenue situations of the two states.
The claims were about the gas tax (‘vehicle related taxes’), so the people that pay the tax are people that buy gas in WA. Pretty sure Gamba is correct that WA has a bigger gas tax than OR, but, in any event, the difference in gas tax rates is factual information that can definitely be established, not something to judge from one’s feelings. It’s also true that the sales tax raises a lot of revenue in WA, which allows us to conclude that things other than groceries and other tax-exempt items are sold in WA.
I think he is saying you should be more critical of arguments that Oregonians are overtaxed. So more like ignore your lying phone (or rather the algorithmically curated propaganda delivered via your phone). Republicans say that ODOT is broke because of DEI. Gamba points out that OR has less dedicated transportation revenue and spends less on transportation per capita and per mile than similar states. You respond with emotionally salient but factually and logically tenuously supportable tidbits. Makes me think there is something to Gamba’s comments about the asymmetric political information battles currently raging.
“We spent months in committee condemning ODOT, saying, ‘ODOT is so terrible, they’re so inefficient,’ and then we knew we were going to be turning around and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, we need a bunch of money for this organization that we just you how terrible they are.”
Great to hear Rep Gamba’s perspective. I think the above quote hits on an important problem. Many responsible legislators understand that transportation is essential and requires a significant percentage of tax revenue and therefore the faith of the electorate. However, the 2017 bill and many examples before and after this bill show an agency that has made huge missteps. And these instances have also shown that elected officials are happy to be cheerleaders for ODOT and kick the can down the road. The way that congestion pricing, light rail and tolling have been handled politically has been amateur hour on loop.
It is interesting that Kotek is happy to publicly battle with Multnomah county over taxes and, as a result, undermine voter confidence, but she doesn’t question the massive budget overruns runs and accounting errors from ODOT that are greater than any possible county tax mismanagement.
Dems need to bring a message of accountability and fiscal responsibility at ODOT to voters, and it needs to convince voters that everyone across the state is getting their fair share. The “back to basics” smear that republican democrats are pushing ultimately undermines their positions, because there are many places that transit and non-car modes of transportation are cheaper and more effective. The myth of the “DEI bike lane boogeyman” is only good for a small number of loud crack pots and only has traction because there is a lack of a coherent vision and message for transportation across the state.
Kotek and ORleg leadership need to show some discipline. Remove Strickler and other ODOT leadership. Create a message that responsible legislators can take back to their districts. Recognize that losers like Meek and others have shown that they can’t be trusted to be adults and they need to sidelined as much as possible not placated.