All eyes are on Salem as impacts of the legislature’s failure to pass a bill last week continue to ripple out across Oregon.
Emotional and indignant city leaders, frustrated advocates, sullen labor union leaders — these are just some of the groups directing pressure toward Oregon Governor Tina Kotek in hopes she will call a special session to pass transportation funding legislation.
At a meeting of the Portland City Council Transportation and Infrastructure Committee this morning, a staffer from the Office of Government Relations grew emotional when they recounted how the session ended. Government Relations Manager Evyn Mitchell said, “We were heartbroken,” when Democratic party leaders unveiled a last-ditch effort to pass a three-cent gas tax with a bill (HB 3402) that would have directed zero funding to cities.
“It was disgusting to think that we would be left behind… we were shocked. I don’t want to be overly emotional, but it was pretty appalling,” Mitchell continued.
At the outset of the meeting, an Oregon Department of Transportation bridge inspector and engineering union representative named Kyle Lewis urged committee members to persuade Governor Kotek to come back to the negotiating table.
“[The Association of Engineering Employees Oregon] believe the best and easiest solution for everyone is a special session before the damage is done,” Lewis said.
And Zachary Lauritzen, executive director of the nonprofit Oregon Walks wrote in a member newsletter Sunday that, “The legislature must return to the table to address these problems.”
In response to the legislative failure, the T & I Committee rushed a resolution onto their agenda calling for the City of Portland to launch a public process that will find, and then implement, a new local transportation funding mechanism.
City Councilor Mitch Green passed an amendment to the resolution that made it clear the City of Portland remains for help from the state. “City Council urges the Governor to call a special session as soon as possible,” reads the resolution. “To pass a comprehensive statewide transportation funding package to avoid further reductions to PBOT operations and maintenance budget, as well as those in other communities statewide.”
During the T & I meeting, PBOT Director Millicent Williams added to the urgency by telling councilors that, “If we are not successful in identifying ways to address the budget shortfall,” she will begin issuing layoff notices to 50 employees starting Monday, July 14th.
There’s still no word from the Governor’s office about if — or when — a special session might be called. Obviously it’s not a move she’d make unless she could guarantee something would pass.
One theory for why the bill failed is because moderate Democrats from purple districts were afraid of voting for a large tax increase and there was not enough time (between when the bill was introduced to when votes were expected) for party leaders to convince them otherwise. If Governor Kotek is doing that work now, she could very likely get something through the House; but it’s hard to see a path forward in the Senate.
Democrats need all 18 of their members in the Senate to support a bill for it to move forward. Then there’s the issue of quorum. In order to pass a law, the Oregon Senate needs two-thirds of its members present. So even if they got Senator Mark Meek back into the yes column, they would still need need at least two Republicans to show up in order to make a deal. We learned how hard that will be on Wednesday when Senator Floyd Prozanski shared in his constituent newsletter that Democrats had secured a “yes” from a Senate Republican, only to see that person frightened off by a “taunt” Meek posted on X that they’d “cut a deal” with Democrats.
It’s difficult to see a path forward for Kotek, but it’s even more difficult to see a path forward for Oregon if she doesn’t take the first step.
UPDATE, 2:00 pm: Governor Kotek just released a statement saying that layoffs have begun and serious consequences to the state’s transportation system are “imminent.” The statement linked to a detailed FAQ on ODOT’s financial situation that looks to dispel popular narratives about the agency’s budget.
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If I was the governor, I’d simply give Mark Meek a friendly call and ask him if there’s any conditions in which he would vote yes to a likely Democratic transportation proposal – if the answer is “no”, then why bother with a special session?
If you were the governor, you’d have a record decade of experience as Speaker of the House and knowing how to get things through the legislature. No one else served as long as Kotek.
So there’s really no need to mansplain anything.
While I’d agree the friendly call is a good first step (and one that’s undoubtedly happened multiple times), it’s a lot more complicated than you put forth.
While Meek claimed he has a good relationship with Kotek on OPB, so I’d imagine she can give him a friendly call, she’s also got a strong history of arm-twisting and getting things through. So while Meek may have a position now, that’s likely a changeable position given all the different chits one could play.
Meek’s taken a position and so now it’s a puzzle of: is there a way to get to 18 votes with or without Meek? What’s the ability to get to 20/40 needed for quorum in a special session, and what’s the appetite for a long special session if each person is willing to be absent nine days? Will SEIU run a candidate against Meek in the primary? Who would be on what side of that primary battle? What’s the long-term damage to the party if the party is willing to support a primary challenge? What do the primary voters think of Meek?
How important is the transport package vs. retaining the seat in a way that will usually vote D, when it was won in the most expensive legislative race in the history of Oregon?
If not Meek’s vote, which R may come along, and would they be asking for something the Ds would trade for the transport package?
What projects in Meek’s district might be pulled if he doesn’t come along? How might that impact the Representatives in the district who are also in swing seats?
What if ODOT closed every road under its jurisdiction to all traffic, noting that without funding it cannot safely operate roads? Would that perhaps convince people throughout Oregon that they want their elected officials to find a way to fund ODOT?
It seems easy to oppose funding something that you are continuing to enjoy the use of, and easier to supporting funding for something you desperately need but cannot access because it is currently unfunded.
I was thinking along similar lines. If I were Kotek I would hold off calling a special session or doing anything until conditions get so bad that people demand their elected representatives take action.
Repubs have adopted such a scorched-earth policy of refusing to fund ANYTHING except car and truck infrastructure (no public transit, bikes, peds etc) that they would have nothing to lose in a special session. But have ODOT close a few bridges and highways, and drivers will start to howl and then Dems can then say, “Okay, come back to the table and you’ll get some of what you need if we also get some of what we need.”
I don’t think anyone in Oregon doubts that ODOT needs to be funded.
Even the Rs had a funding plan for it. The plan wasn’t great (or even good) and ignored critical infrastructure, but it was a funding plan. The travesty is that the legislature didn’t even try to craft a compromise with the Rs (who do want it funded, albeit differently than the Ds) or when down to the wire couldn’t even muster the strength to strong arm or bribe the necessary votes. It’s just an utter debacle,
The Rs want Kotek and the legislature to fail more than anything else. They didn’t even know what was actually in the bill, because they don’t care. They’ve spent the last decade casting dems in Salem as such an evil horde of monsters that a hint of cooperation will be seen as a betrayal of their supporters.
And there it is! Yes, that’s exactly what they want… they don’t care if they break everything in the process.
My 30 years in Portland planning transportation says otherwise, ODOT should be defunded. ODOT, PBOT, Tri-Met & Metro unanimously support terribly engineered CRC I-5 replacement bridge projects. The SW MAX to Tigard proposal was absurd engineering. The RoseQ I-5 so-called “improvement” is anything but; Traffic hazards, accident ratings worsen, both in number and severity. ODOT needs a good shake up. Strickler must go.
That’s a great idea!
I think giving a person named Kris Strickler (Appointed ODOT director) the power to close roads is fantastic!
Another person named Charlene Williams (appointed head dept. of Education) should be able to close schools if she thinks they don’t get enough funding!
Who needs democracy and voters to make decisions?
Our lives need to be ruled by people we have to look up on the internet.
Fascism is Fantastic!
Fixed it for you:
I mean, being held hostage by toddlers who aren’t getting their way is compelling and would certainly improve faith in the institution that there are adults running the show. But what if they attempted to convey respect for their position as stewards of public dollars and confirm they would use zero based budgeting, an annual audit for the organization as a whole, and individual audits for each project over $250M.
It’s not perfect, but it would at least confirm the organization is getting the funds they actually need to operate and provide the service they are supposed to.
Yes, what if. How likely does that seem to you?
As likely as them getting their $13B, not at all, but one can hope for accountability in agencies using public funds.
I guess that would make too much sense.
They should cancel the remaining expansion projects from 2017 and then procede. This would allow for much smaller tax increases that would be more palatable
This is the best answer to this problem. The Leg should convene for a special session and do 2 things:
1) Cancel the highway projects from HB 2017
2) Slightly increase road use taxes to cover the budget shortfall that remains after the highway project funding is returned to the highway fund and can be used for maintenance, etc.
It is complete buffoonery to leave highway expansion projects on the table when basic maintenance won’t be done. What a robbery.
I blame the political structure for what is happening, not the Ds or Rs directly. They both caused and are victims of their own idiocy.
You are underestimating the willingness to just walk away, and break everything. After all, who was it who just walked away from their jobs when they didn’t get their way?
I remember it being that the Dem leadership didn’t even bother to call a final vote on HB 2025 and ended the session two days early. I think that’s a pretty clear example of Dems walking away from their jobs when they didn’t get their way.
How do you think the session ended?
How do you remember things isn’t my fault, Jake9, but I don’t spend all my time watching sessions. I value my mental health too much. Whatever floats your boat, though…
I was referring to that time. R’s refused to come in to work because they didn’t get something they wanted, and had to be tracked down.
“Over the last five years, ODOT presented more than a dozen times to the Oregon Legislature on the agency’s growing structural revenue issue from as far back as June 8, 2020 through the agency’s budget presentation to the legislature on March 3, 2025.
The news media has covered this budget issue and its consequences extensively in the past year.“
If only the Speaker of the House had taken the warnings seriously when ODOT became desperate then perhaps this mess wouldn’t be happening. What a nightmare! Almost a thousand positions gone and a huge workload placed around the neck of everyone left. It’s horrible realizing that with the unfilled positions gone there will never be any break in the workload.
Meanwhile the current legislature adjourned two days early and don’t seem to have a care in the world about what’s happening. If they did they would have been negotiating with their holdouts and the token Rs in the open without trying to rig any results before the last few days.
We spend money for a baseball stadium over roads. We are taxed enough. Cancel the stadium and use the money for roads.
The money for the stadium (if MLB decides to start a team here) is issued in the form of bonds (aka loans) that will be paid out by taxes on players’ income. If we were to “use the money for roads” in that same way, we’d end up with just a bunch of debt that would have to be paid out anyway. I get where your reactionary stance is coming from, but that’s not quite how it works.
The baseball stadium will happen only when an MLB plan decides to move here. And even then it will be funded on the backs of players and staff – a good plan, IMHO.
There is no point in calling a special session unless every Democrat is already on board with the package, whatever it is. If that means changing the bill to get Meek to firmly commit, it also means checking with all the other Democrats to ensure that they are all still on board with whatever the changes are.
Maybe they could set up some kind of on-line working group with all house and senate Democrats to work from home to hammer out a compromise everyone will support. If there’s no other legislative business in the way, they can spend three or four months on it, if necessary, and come back for a special session in the fall.
18 votes is enough to raise taxes and accelerate procedure, but it isn’t a quorum – that takes 20 in the Senate, which the Ds don’t have even with Meek. If Rs don’t show up, it isn’t a session.
Hardball here would be to call everybody in for 10 days and then if Rs refuse to show, the ones who weren’t already ineligible for their next term (~1/2 of their senate caucus) become ineligible. Not entirely clear to me that that’s enough of a penalty.
Why play hardball with the Rs when this whole debacle is a dem problem?
From when Kotek was Speaker to now, the majority has ignored the problem and ignored any other input except for their own cronies and donors.
Not true. The Dems really really really tried to get a few Rs to support the plan – and they even got one (Mannix) in committee, which was a major accomplishment. Their two big mistakes were taking too long to try to woo Rs, which held up introduction of the formal bill to June 9th, and not making sure all Dems were on board with the plan (maybe that’s one mistake, actually).
Remind me which party has a supermajority in Salem?
That would be the Dems, so see Mistake #2.
I can’t think of a single downside to playing hardball with the Republicans. Why wouldn’t the Dems at least gesture about solving a crisis and making the remaining Republicans who don’t show up ineligible for reelection?
The Dems are the ones who have caused this crisis.
They are the ones pushing and funding the bridge plus miles of interchanges and roads, for the rose quarter expansion and the ones who have ignored an ODOT funding problem for years.
Why are the Ds pushing these insane freeway plans?
My question is why play hardball with the Rs who aren’t in power when the hardball tactics need to be used on the Ds who control ODOT.
If one can’t understand problem the one can’t work to fix it.
That’s because you are not a well-off establishment-dem who does not need a livable wage in order to play legislator-gentry and whose campaign paychecks are funded by oligarchs and mega-corps who expressly do not want democrats to play hardball
Can we assume that you’ve listened to every session, and you know that for a fact?
Instead of a snarky throw away line, perhaps you could give an example of how I’m wrong and we can have a further discussion?
When ODOT shares a long FAQ about its budgetary problems and doesn’t even mention the billions earmarked for highway expansions, ODOT’s huge failures in forecasting the costs of megaprojects (this isn’t just inflation), or its history of paying more to deliver projects than other states, it’s hard to take anything they say at face value.
For example, they say this:
“ODOT saw this coming years ago and made significant, voluntary cuts over the past five
years: reducing staff, increasing efficiency, shrinking operations, and deferring
maintenance…”
But they don’t mention they’ve spent millions of dollars to lobby to add to their expenses massive highway expansions we can’t afford (including the most expensive project in state history), that they pushed for – and go – $1 billion in general fund bonding to back the IBR, that it includes seven highway interchanges – some rebuilt relatively recently, in highway terms, and so on.
If they want credibility, they need to be honest about their failures. They are not.
Much of what they say in the FAQ is accurate. But too much is weasel words, lack of detail, assertions not based in fact, and ignoring many of the elephants in the room.
I agree with a lot of what you and others are saying, but…
There are in fact a lot of rules on how transportation funding can or cannot be spent, some of it local, some state, and some federal, usually designed to prevent theft, fraud, corruption, misusing funds, prioritizing certain rich, white, or urban districts over poor, black, or rural districts, and so on. Oregon may be a bit more rules-bound than some other states, but every state complains about the lack of maintenance funding versus new construction funding.
I agree that the IBR was a dumb project, that the bigger it got, the more likely Oregon was doomed to failure and default. ODOTs debts have gotten so large already that it has to either cut its budget severely or else raise taxes. Since the latter failed, it now has to do the former.
We can blame the bureaucrats at ODOT, and we all will, but in reality the blame needs to be shared with the Governor, state legislature, and the people who kept electing them, and that Oregon has an outsized ego but relatively little money to support such a massive highway system for 4 million people covering such a vast area.
It’s those feckless do-nothing democrats (that I voted for) and it’s those nasty climate-destroying corporations (that I buy so much “stuff”, SUVs, gasoline, and methane from).
Why doesn’t she just do what the president does and issue an executive order? The republicans won’t have a problem with that kind of governing since they are fine when tR^mp does it.
But then again, democrat leadership are complete pushovers these days so I wouldn’t expect them to find the courage to be bold anytime soon
Kotek is kind of part of the problem as she ignored ODOTS funding emergency and didn’t stop the ongoing carcentric insanity that is the Rose Quarter or what the IBR has come to be while Speaker.
I understand many believe the Rs are the bad guys locally and I won’t argue with that.
My argument is against the delusional belief that the Dems are the transportation good guys when clearly they are not.
With the Dem lead legislature, Res Ipsa Loquitur.
I’d suggest a re-reading the Declaration of Independence before advocating for a
King Kotek. What we have now in Washington DC is bad enough!
***Note from moderator. I am linking to text of the Declaration instead of copy/pasting the entire thing out of respect for peoples need to scroll. – Jonathan***
I repeatedly voted for democrats and am repeatedly angry that they have been pushovers for the fat-cats and mega-corps.
Hmmm…how could we possibly break this cycle?