Oregon lawmakers got their first taste of what folks think about the latest attempt to pass a transportation funding package when they hosted a public hearing at the capitol Monday afternoon. Known as Legislative Concept (LC) 2, the package would raise about $6 billion over the next 10 years through a myriad of taxes. That amount represents a striking compromise and pales in comparison to where lawmakers began their journey in early June when the package was valued at nearly $15 billion.
Left on the cutting room floor was funding for popular programs like Safe Routes to School, Oregon Community Paths, the Great Streets program, and funding for jurisdictional transfers or state-owned orphan highways to local road agencies. That’s partly why a coalition of environmental justice, active transportation and land use advocacy groups who are typically very supportive of more transportation spending came out as neutral on the proposal. They don’t like the amount of fee increases for electric car owners and how it doesn’t include dedicated funding for popular safe street, walking and bicycling programs. Indi Namkoong, an advocate with Northeast Portland-based nonprofit Verde, said LC 2 would, “provide temporary life support” for Oregon’s transportation system and acknowledged it would fund much-needed transit services and keep Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) jobs in tact. “However, we can’t get around the fact that LC 2 leaves many of our communities’ most pressing needs unaddressed,” Namkoong continued. “Now more than ever, affordable options like transit, walking and biking are a lifeline for us, ensuring we aren’t forced to take on yet another massive new cost in the form of car ownership, which outstrips the payroll tax for most Oregonians many times over.”
Testimony at the hearing was a mixed bag of criticism, support, and opposition.
The sharpest opposition was mostly from people who don’t want to pay more taxes. Some of they also oppose the bill because they feel like ODOT should live within their means, they don’t think biking and public transit are an core function of the state, and that ODOT should not get rewarded for years of mega-project cost overruns and lack of fiscal responsibility.
“Oregon doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending and misallocation problem,” said interior designer and social media influencer Angela Todd of PDX Real. Todd, whose platform reaches thousands of Oregonians a day and is part of a growing conservative, anti-tax, anti-government media ecosystem, accused lawmakers of taking part in a “special interest loop” where state funding is funneled to projects that benefit public unions, “and other groups pouring money into campaigns for bigger government while government turns around and enriches them at the expense of Oregonians.” “That cycle is draining taxpayers,” Todd added. “It’s ruining our state.”
Todd’s concerns are echoed by nearly all Republican lawmakers, who worked together on a very coordinated “No new taxes” campaign in the week leading up to the hearing. Three Republicans who sit on the Joint Interim Committee on Transportation Funding (where Monday’s hearing was hosted) — Representative Shelly Boshart Davis, Senator Daniel Bonham, and Rep. Christine Drazan — used time prior to public testimony to push different approaches to fixing ODOT’s funding problems that they say wouldn’t require new taxes. Boshart Davis asked ODOT staff about transferring funds from capital projects to operations and maintenance (which can be done, but would require a change to state law), Bonham said project labor agreements with unions aren’t worth it and that expenditures like the Climate Protection Program, “creates a slush fund for environmental nonprofits”, and Drazan asked ODOT staff about cutting vacant positions.
While none of those concerns were new to Democrats, who are prepared to pass the package on a party-line vote if necessary, one Republican has emerged as a strong vote in favor of the proposal. Rep. Cyrus Javadi, who represents Oregon’s north coast region, published a subtle yet stinging takedown of his own party’s tactic on his Substack yesterday. Titled, “The roads don’t care about your talking point,” Javadi’s post rebutted Republican talking points and told his constituents that raising taxes is, “the only adult option on the table.”
“Being conservative isn’t about pretending math doesn’t exist,” Javadi wrote, as he invoked conservative icon Ronald Reagan. “It’s about responsibility. It’s about stewardship. It’s about making sure we hand the next generation… a safe road to drive on. Ronald Reagan raised the federal gas tax in 1982. Why? Because he believed in a use tax. You drive, you pay. That’s not socialism. That’s fairness. That’s accountability.”
That stance is music to the ears for Democrats and Governor Tina Kotek. So was the powerful testimony of several ODOT employees who showed up to the hearing in a personal capacity to plead for funding that would save their jobs. ODOT drone pilot and content producer Julie Murray told committee members she has flourished in her role covering emergencies and documenting road conditions. “The agency developed me, molded me into a perfect fit, and the layoff will throw all that away… We are investments worth keeping,” Murray said.
Democratic party leaders and Governor Kotek are likely feeling a bit better about getting this proposal through after Monday’s hearing. They have the backing of mayors from major cities, county commissioners from all over the state, the Oregon Trucking Association, driving advocacy group AAA, and many important stakeholders.
That said, ODOT critics from the left and right have made major gains in the past three months in pounding home grievances about ODOT’s terrible record of fiscal irresponsibility and general lack of accountability. That, combined with a well-organized statewide coalition of safe streets, transit, and active transportation supporters who are eager to boost funding for their needs, should make for many more transportation conversations when the full legislature returns in 2026.
But before that, there is still work to be done in Salem. The special session is slated to begin this Friday and committee members have promised they’ll take more public testimony at future hearings.
Thanks for reading.
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I hope that one day soon, smart, hard-working, rural republican voters and representatives will realize that the best way to own the smug Portland libs is to take away their cars and make it harder for them to drive. The Willamette will have new tributaries made solely of liberal tears. It will be the greatest FAFO, told-you-so, triumph of real Oregonians over the sad, weird Portland elitists. The culture war will finally be won.
Maybe they could really p0wn us by fixing our schools and solving the drug crisis.
Fixing rural schools and the rural drug crisis would be good enough.
Throw us in that briar patch! Portland without cars?? – it would be HEAVEN.
I remember this: it was called COVID-19. Riding during lock down was almost the only way for me to get any decent exercise with limited risk. As much as I enjoyed the low traffic levels during the height of the pandemic, I’m not sure the cost was worth it. I do, however, agree that fewer cars through out the greater city would be wonderful. It’s too bad we have to continually face crisis to see reason.
Comments like these are too cliche to be real. Do MAGAts actually think this way?
It was a widely publicized sentiment for republicans that Portland is wasting money on urban transportation projects that provide alternatives to driving. These same voices have pushed for widening highways in their districts for marginal increases in speed. I think it is fair to say that they would not like their personal driving habits to be limited. Just connecting the dots that taking something away from city dwellers, like driving, could be seen as a win for resentful people who think Portland is a hell hole. And, yes, people in ruralish Oregon do think Portland is a horrible place filled with crazy people thanks in part to grifters like Angela Todd and some republican legislators.
It’s just a shame that they’re so easily had. If Portland was really so awful, wouldn’t people be leaving it en masse? On the contrary, the city’s growing at about the same rate it has been over the last decade. It’s kind of like that old joke that no one goes to a place because it’s too crowded.
In conversations about this issue, I always try to point out that we are not, in fact, free to choose our means of transportation in many communities. You must drive because everything is built so far away and there is no other choice to travel quickly except by buying a car and paying large amounts of money to keep it on the road. Of course, the cost of gas that people love to complain about is only a small part of the expense. Crucially, none of this is, in the strictest sense, necessary; it’s a choice that’s taken away from anyone who doesn’t live close to a bus or MAX station.
Conservatives like to mock that people to the left of them will “eat the bugs, and stay in the pod”, while quite literally being forced by how we’ve built stuff to require a sort of “pod” to travel around; it’s called a car. Is the lack of thinking this situation through on their side that acute?
Yeah, if the republican agitators/ legislators were serious about bipartisanship, they would see a large amount of common ground here. First, that over budget mega projects are not a good use of limited resources. Second, that the state should have a goal of making transportation cheaper to use and to maintain, and limiting personal vehicle use in metropolitan areas is one of the easiest places to accomplish this. Unfortunately, the OrLeg transportation committee and ODOT are filled with people who have serious conflicts of interest that are not in line with the interests of most people or their constituents.
I like your points and agree that there seems to be a real chance at bipartisanship if the legislature would actually care about legislating for its constituents and not engage in continuous slap fighting over perceived social and/or national issues.
It’s unfortunate that for whatever reasons the democrats are pushing the megaprojects for all they are worth and that the repubs are just as bizarrely ardently against car free infrastructure and public transportation.
Do you honestly believe “most people” (or even just the constituents of the folks on the transportation committee) really want to limit personal vehicle use in metropolitan areas? I think supporting that agenda would put legislators in the short line for unemployment following the next election.
If I’m wrong, there is a huge opportunity for someone to run on that platform. It’s a completely untapped political resource.
Not today, Satan. Not today.
The following comment is meant to be read without a note of sarcasm:
This is actually a great troll. It expresses total disdain, yet does so in a way that even I thought was funny. While I would prefer to discuss ideas, if you’re going to go this route, this is how you do it. I’ve been critical of the quality of other trolls in the past, but this one hits the note perfectly.
“In conversations about this issue, I always try to point out that we are not, in fact, free to choose our means of transportation in many communities.”
You are always free to choose, if those options actually exist. Having a choice doesn’t mean you have good options. Obviously, it would be better for all available options to be viable. Further eroding the viability of those choices is not the answer.
This just misses the point, though, that building for cars usually means that nothing else can compete…which seems like it should be obvious just from how it’s described. If you build your towns/cities around driving–wide roads, lots of free parking, almost everything too far to walk, no dedicated bicycling infrastructure, nothing that could reasonably called transit-oriented development–then if becomes unreasonable to expect people to choose to do anything else. And, if you can’t afford a car, don’t want to drive, or can’t drive, you are directly mobility-impaired by this setup.
By contrast, driving in dense, transit-oriented places is inconvenient and offers no objective advantage to walking in taking transit in those places, which is why fewer people drive in those places; nonetheless, some still do because. Even places with excellent transit–Tokyo, NYC, Seoul, London, Paris, etc.–have a lot of cars driving through them, because it’s still an option, just not one that’s been privileged above all else by the built environment.
That’s what makes the two developmental paradigms unequal: not driving in car-dependent places is effectively actively and intentionally penalized; there’s usually just no benefit to driving in non car-dependent places.
One of these things offers true choice because nothing is really prioritized over the other; the other one rewards one mode–driving–over all else.
You argue (and I agree) that in the US we have prioritized transportation by car over other modes of transportation. You then say that limits choice, and that in order to not limit choice we need to prioritize non-driving transportation.
Prioritizing transit or bicycling or whatever over driving is a rational position, but it does not make choice any “freer”, it simply makes one set of options more attractive at the cost of another, which is exactly what we’re doing now, just with different options.
There is no way to build a transportation system that is somehow “neutral” and allows “true choice”. Every system prioritizes something at the cost of another. This is not inherently bad, but it is not accurate to say that, for example, a Tokyo style transportation system offers “true choice” while an American one does not. Each offers a different range of options, but both are inherently “opinionated”.
“You argue (and I agree) that in the US we have prioritized transportation by car over other modes of transportation.”
Yes, I agree. Go on…
“You then say that limits choice, and that in order to not limit choice we need to prioritize non-driving transportation.”
It does limit choice. You know, you *can* value different form of transportation equally. That would give you an actual choice.
is it easy to change people’s mindset? No, of course not. Is it impossible? No.
There are compromises that autocentrism requires that handicap the other three modes. However, the other three are completely compatible–and more accurately synergistic–with each other in a way that less penalizes driving than it simply doesn’t actively privilege it. Good transit enhances walking/cycling; good walking/cycling infrastructure is likewise good transit infrastructure.
Sure, we can say that transit/cycling/walking development paradigms inhibit driving, but it is at least more choice to offer 3 modes then one, especially if those modes are in every sense collectively more accessible to more people. And again, there are lots of people driving even in the world’s big transit cities, far more people as a percentage than are taking transit in LA (or Portland).
If true modal choice is completely impossible, the choice is at least more truly free under a transit/ped/bike paradigm.
No, I don’t think it does miss the point. If you build a city for cars above all else, that’s what you’ll get. It will be friendly to drivers, and hostile towards everyone else. Transit systems designed by people with the same “cars above all else” mentality will probably never be able to compete. A lot of people will also scream, and cry very loudly, If you try to change it. I still believe that a transit system built by people with the right vision *could* be made viable in such a city. Those people wouldn’t be very popular, and it wouldn’t happen overnight… but it could be done.
Yes, I know very well that not driving in car dependent place is actively, and intentionally penalized. I grew up in car dependent places, and I have never been able to drive. Everything was much too far apart to walk. There was very little safe, or connected bike infrastructure. Bus stops were few and far between. For a long time, I didn’t know light rail existed because there was none where I grew up. Most people considered transit to be low class. You either drive, or you get a ride. You live your life around other people’s schedules.
Imagine the net property value impact of your culture war “win”. You can’t guess what sort of people would show up. Portland would be a strange attractor like Disneyland and Whistler side by side.
What could two million people do with the liberated cost of maintaining all their private motor vehicles? What would be possible on the land surface freed of the need to move, and store, all those cars? What would it be like to live in a place where the air smelled like a forest and the streets were as quiet as the night the Cubs Won?
Whew, as I heard about the layoffs at ODOT I immediately thought of the impact to the lives of the folks who repave them in the summer time heat, the mechanics repairing plows so the roads are safe in the winter, the front end loader and dump truck operators making sure there is enough gravel over Santiam pass, the folks who make signs after they are all covered in graffiti, so I don’t get lost and end up downtown, the people who arrive after a crash and help Oregon drivers avoid creating another one. I thought about what would happen if they lost their jobs and what would happen to our roads as a result.
Granted, I was still not entirely understanding how the billions the agency already gets need to be supplemented by billions more, but hey, what’s a few billi here and a few billi there among friends. I was still willing to cough up a few more bucks at each fill up, a few hundred more each time a register my car and a thousand or so when I have the “privilege” of buying a new car to save these jobs. My motivation was mostly because I don’t want to be seen as some anti-tax, anti-government nut job. That would be terrible, these bureaucrats are the adults in the room and they’re flanked by panels of experts. I am just some idiot with a budget for my family that if I mismanage for long enough I don’t have a house anymore, I just work at some stupid company that if expenses surpass revenues we go out of stupid business, who am I to know how a complex government agency works.
So, color me surprised to read this article and the vitriol slung at those anti-tax interior decorators to find out that if I just keep doing what I am doing, not only can I save those jobs I was worried about, but most importantly of all, I can save the drone pilots and content creators. There is just nothing quite like government funded, image stabilized, six rotor, 4k video turned into content to distract one from the perils of fiscal mismanagement.
COTW
tl;dr: The ODOT bill is a crap proposal and everyone hates it.
FYI government budgets are not like a family or business budget. That’s not how it works at all.
Because states can raise taxes you think they can have expenses in excess of revenues in perpetuity?
Oregonians are funny because we pay a lot of taxes in some ways and little tax in other ways and it breaks peoples brains. I grew up in a solid red midwestern state. When I bought my first brand new car, I paid 8% sales tax on it. Can you imagine Oregonians brains breaking at paying 8% of the sale price of new car in tax? Then I paid licensing and registration. Oh yeah, then I paid the *yearly* property tax on the value of the car. The state I grew up in also likes to change license plates every five years so you need to buy new plates all the time. Don’t worry, I paid a gas tax everytime I filled up too! In contrast Oregon charges basically nothing for the privilege of driving.
ODOT, like every other State transporation agency is watching the infrastructure crumble because driving is the most expensive and least efficient form of transportation and the “billions” we pay to ODOT aren’t even close to enough to maintain all the roads we’ve demanded ODOT build.
I would replace half of what I pay in income tax for an 8% sales tax in a heartbeat.
So far it all looks reasonable and doable. But Oregon isn’t normally associated with reasonableness, for the very good reason that $6 billion isn’t very much for an area as large and egotistical as Oregon, even if it’s what the state can realistically afford. I have no doubt that when the legislators and governor start to figure out what they are going to spend their modest $6 billion on, the figure will immediately leap 4-fold before they settle back onto $15 billion (again) with various preposterous tax and fee increases to pay for the extras, and once again it won’t pass.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
No mention of tolling? Rep Javadi talks about a “use tax” and the dems are proposing a pretty invasive tracking system to tax electric vehicle drivers, but no one is pushing back on Kotek’s abrupt reversal on tolling? This sounds like ODOT has successfully blackmailed the Dems to fund them with zero accountability and letting most of the bike/ped/urban design programs wither and die
nope! And no mention of the big new “there’s tolling in the bill”-like narrative Republicans are pushing this time: that the bill allows “unelected bureaucrats” to raise the gas tax and weight mile tax without a vote. That’s actually true, but Rs are leaving out a lot of details about that provision. And given how much they pushed it on all the platforms leading up to the hearing it was interesting that no one really talked about it.
But I realize that the vast majority of Rs and their supporters online are just ginning up anger for political reasons (to help boost Drazan or someone else against Kotek for governor and saddle the Dem with “They raised taxes over the wishes of 94% of Oregonians who opposed it!”) and are not really doing the organizing work it takes to make their policy goals a reality.
That being said, the Rs have moved the needle in their favor a bit over all this for sure. They’ve done a good job spreading their message about ODOT’s spending problem — and I agree with a lot of what they’re saying in terms of how ODOT constantly chooses megaprojects as the priority over everything else and the negative impact that has on some of their structural challenges. My hope is that in 2026 those same Rs can actually work with some Ds on real ODOT reform… something progressives have been clamoring for for many many years.
Rs want reform only when it benefits their narrow interests, not the public interest. Dems simply can’t work with them. The better option was to get a supermajority and hold it together, but that didn’t work.
And this is above the existing additional ~$300 fee EV drivers have to pay every two years. Owning an EV already kind of sucks for a myriad of reasons but these additional barriers to ownership will likely encourage many Oregonians to continue burning gasoline for transportation.
Curious – why does owning an EV suck for you?
My 20 yo 4 cylinder Honda is about to bucket and was looking at used EVs. I have friends that say the trade-offs are decent. I’m not a daily car commuter, but do need one for monthly longer trips out of the metro and state.
PDX Real is run by ***Portion of comment deleted. I don’t want to host serious allegations like this since I have not verified what actually happened myself and have not seen a public verification of it from a quality news source. – Jonathan***
Do you have any evidence Angela Todd is a ***Portion of comment deleted. – JM***
PS
Pretty low of you Jonathan to allow a slanderous post such as this.
Hi Angus,
I just went and moderated both comments. I let it through initially because I recall what happened with Angela’s husband Jeff Church and the fact that she didn’t deny it and the charges appeared to be legit. That being said, I do not wish to spend the time and energy hosting that type of back and forth on that topic in this comment thread, so that’s why I moderated them. I have also not independently verified the allegations and haven’t seen it verified through a trusted source.
I thought about testifying, but what’s the point of doing so? This bill is a disappointing stopgap and does almost nothing to shift our transportation system away from the status quo. If the bill doesn’t pass, then I’ll feel sorry for the ODOT employees who are losing their jobs but that’s about all.