Oregon lawmakers passed a new version of a transportation funding package out of committee after a four-plus hour long marathon work session and public hearing on Sunday. And even though House Bill 3991 passed with changes that aimed to curry favor with Republicans, none of them voted in support of the bill.
Even though Democrats have a supermajority with control of the House, Senate and the Governor’s office; Republicans used their last piece of leverage — their ability to give Democrats the quorum needed to convene the special session — as a bargaining tool to force a change that further weakened transit funding and stripped the state’s power to levy minute increases to the gas tax without a vote of the legislature under certain circumstances.
As a result of these last minute negotiations to ensure Republicans showed up on a holiday weekend, Democrats agreed to make the payroll tax that funds transit — which the bill increases from 0.1% to 0.2% — temporary. Initially proposed as a permanent increase, it would now sunset in 2028.
In addition to a short-term increase in transit funding, the bill would: implement accountability measures for the Oregon Department of Transportation, give the state economist the authority to lower the gas tax and/or weight-mile tax to make sure it stay in balance for light and heavy vehicle owners, require e-car owners to enroll in a pay-per-mile program in 2028, increase the gas tax by six cents, increase vehicle title and registration fees, repeal the tolling program (but not the state’s authority to levy tolls in the future), increase funding to roadside rest areas, and simplify how truckers calculate weight-mile fees.
The bill passed 7-5 on a party line vote after lawmakers heard dozens of Oregonians testify for and against it.
One person they didn’t hear from was Governor Tina Kotek. She wasn’t in the building. That fact gave Republicans and their supporters online a chance to lambaste the governor as being disrespectful, uninterested and out-of-touch. Asked by Republican Senator Daniel Bonham where Governor Kotek was, her Transportation and Infrastructure Advisor Kellly Brooks said, “I am not going to disclose the governor’s exact whereabouts right now, but she has been intently engaged in working with me on today’s materials, and I’m fairly confident watching this right now.”
TriMet General Manager Sam Desue was watching. In his online testimony he said he supported the bill, but told members of the Joint Special Session Committee On Transportation Funding, “Anything less than a permanent increase [to transit funding] will result in deep cuts to transit service by the end of this decade.” Desue was aware of the amendment to sunset the payroll tax increase and remarked that, “A sunset of the 0.1% increase in 2028 will not leave enough time to generate replacement revenue from other sources, while inflation will continue to put pressure on the cost of providing service.”
Republicans spent quite a bit of time Sunday poking holes in transit and the state’s efforts to fund it. Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis implied that the state is merely subsidizing transit agencies who choose to offer free fares and who want to do nothing but purchase electric buses with it. Senator Daniel Bonham implied the funding wasn’t need because ridership on transit was higher before 2017 before ODOT had a dedicated stream of funding for it. Committee Vice-Chair Christine Drazan implied that rural people could just switch to taxis and rideshare providers, instead of public transit.
Later in the hearing, Rep. Drazan maintained that Republicans weren’t trying to cut transit funding. “Transit is an essential part of our transportation system,” Drazan said. “The fact that I want to have a conversation about how we pay for it shouldn’t be confused with the fact that I believe we need it.” Either Drazan is more of a transit supporter than it appears, or she’s trying to sound more moderate on transportation ahead of a run for governor in 2026. Either way, she and her party have seriously weakened transit in Oregon.
The other change made yesterday was to how the state handles the constitutional requirement for car and truck drivers to pay an equal amount for road use. A provision in the original bill would have given the Department of Administrative Services (DAS) the ability to make small adjustments in the gas tax (what car drivers pay) and weight-mile tax (what truckers pay) if the state’s analysis showed the ratio was too imbalanced. The original bill would have let DAS raise or lower the taxes to achieve equity. In a compromise with Republicans, a successful amendment passed that only gives DAS the ability to lower the taxes.
With these changes — along with the fact that the bill will now raise only around $4.5 billion instead of the $15 billion Democrats and the governor initially sought — the bill was finally successful.
Republicans on the committee said they couldn’t stomach voting for any new increase in taxes. And Democrats who voted in support of it offered only tepid enthusiasm. Senator Khanh Pham described her vote as a “courtesy yes.” “It just kicks the can down the road for both road maintenance safety and also for public transit,” Pham continued. “So I am voting for this reluctantly because I can’t, in good conscience, jeopardize the critical work that is needed on our state roads right now, and I can’t deprive our state or transit agencies of even two years of funding right now.”
The bill is being voted on in the House Chamber right now. It’s expected to pass barring any last-minute snafu.
UPDATE: The bill has passed the House.
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Dems have no one to blame but themselves for needing to compromise.
Got to wonder if Tina Kotek had bothered to show up if that would have helped her get more of want she wanted (Oregonian’s $). Pretty embarrassing she wasn’t there. Allegedly she was in Astoria this holiday weekend (doing some shopping) while everyone else was working in Salem.
That’s a really bad look. The Ds are their own worst enemy right now.
What a sad joke. The payroll tax increase was already way less than every transit agency in the state needed, and 2028 is looking to be a bad year for bus riders at this rate.
Incidentally, there is some reason to reconsider bus electrification policy in the light of future cuts like this. Every extra dollar spent on electric buses (or H fuel cell buses) is a dollar not spent on moving riders. Battery electric bus operations and capital costs remain higher than diesel, and while I’m concerned about the environmental effects of diesel bus pollution, I’m more concerned with the environmental effects of more cars on the road due to lack of reliable transit service
The joke is even funnier when you consider how much time they spent doing the transportation town halls where people said basically the same three things; 1) fix existing roads 2) better transit service and 3) more bike/walk infrastructure. This bill gives us none of that.
The anti-tax psychosis in Oregon is nuts, and there’s literally no way to fix it. As Rep. Pham said, this is just kicking the can down the road; the next generation of road users get to deal with broken, unsafe roads, the next generation of politicians to promise lower taxes and “accountability” while roads and bridges crumble. Rinse and repeat. If your house needs a new roof, you pay for a new roof or your house floods when it rains. Right now we’re just standing around pointing fingers while the rain clouds gather.
There’s very good reasons for that. Tax money that goes to programs that are utter failures or are fraud ridden (latest being the pre-school for all scam) and depending on where specifically you live in Oregon you are taxed (total taxes/fees) at some of the highest rates in the country.
If this bill came to a vote of citizens I’d vote NO, as I don’t care what the new taxes are for, I’m sick of them.
How is pre-school for all a scam?
And if people want to drive cars everywhere, you need to pay for it. Rural and suburban areas should be paying significanly higher taxes to ensure the massive amount of infrastructure needed is properly maintained. Meanwhile, dense urban areas are subsidizing everywhere else.
https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2025/07/31/leslee-barnes-resigns-as-preschool-for-all-director/
“The resignation comes shortly after a WW story revealed that a preschool Barnes owns collected hundreds of thousands of dollars to serve just a handful of children.“
Here’s an obvious example.
As far as the urban areas subsidizing the rest of the state’s infrastructure, I would enjoy seeing some numbers on that. It sounds intriguing.
That’s not really evidence of a scam, more evidence of poor hiring practices by the county (which is hardly isolated to the PFA program). Issues of conflicts of interests and corruption in public agencies isn’t evidence of the program itself being a scam or wasteful, especially not one that is still in the rollout phase
If you had to pay many thousand$ for PFA – and you were the ONLY one paying it – and you saw that PFA is charging almost $900K to educate eight kids, you would be livid.
I’m not saying all taxes are wasteful, but surely PFA is Exhibit A of wasteful programs.
Sure, if you cherry pick one aspect of an obviously poorly run and corrupt contract, it looks bad. But it’s actually pretty easy to stop that kind of thing from happening, and publicly exposing that it is part of a good social culture of preventing public graft and waste. I hope in the future, the county is more careful with who they hire and that no board members get contracts – that’s obviously bad practice. I think there are actual issues at Mult Co that need addressing, but those problems won’t be solved by draconian anti funding measures.
PFA is not exhibit A of wasteful programs just because it’s being run by the county. If we want good social programs (which Portlanders overwhelmingly do – just look at the way we vote on tax and bond measures), we need to pay for them. I know you find the idea of a high earner tax to pay for programs distasteful, but I don’t. I think high marginal tax rates are a net positive for society, and that high earners (who by definition benefit from our current economic system) ought to pay back into the same system at a higher rate. You’re welcome to feel differently, but I prefer to live in places where everyone has a fair chance in life. Universal free education is part of that.
The $900,000 wasn’t PFA.
I was about to say this. It was the state program. However the two are enmeshed in that they are similar programs covering different areas, and the person who owned the business receiving the $900k to educate 8 kids was hired as the Director of PFA. So, she did defraud the state and was still hired and the program has not gotten up to speed very well. Read the WW.
As Blumdrew already said, thats not evidence its a scam. Corruption existing doesnt mean its a scam.
As for urban areas subsidizing suburban/rural areas, heres a great video to get you started.
https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=e-bejzairDHZ4x1o
What it really comes down to is taxes per acre. The denser an area is, the more taxes per acre an area contributes while needing less infrastructure for those taxes to support. Suburban and rural areas dont have enough people and buisnesses to tax to maintain all the infrastructure needed. You need more roads. You need more sewage piping. You need more electrical infrastucture, and all that needs to be maintained. Sprawl has been bankrupting cities and towns because they dont raise enough in tax revenue from their small populations to maintain everything.
So yes, if yoy want to live in the suburbs or in a rural area, you should be paying significantly more to maintain the infrastructure needes for the smaller population.
So the Director of a program sitting on (as of April) 485 million dollars who feels emboldened and confident in her ability to steal hundreds of thousands from that slush fund is simply a bad apple, nothing to see here, move along?
“While the county forecasted ending the latest fiscal year with $260 million left unspent for Preschool for All, it instead ended with $485.4 million, about $225.4 million more than expected.”
https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2025/04/08/preschool-for-all-had-485-million-left-in-its-coffers-after-fiscal-year-2024/
We’re simply going to have to agree to disagree on that if you feel that way. WW has been doing a pretty good job over the years covering what the tax is doing and it is not impressive. I don’t know if WW is considered right wing media these days as they do a pretty good job of uncovering scandals in the political world so I don’t know if you follow their reporting.
What is all that tax money doing? It’s clearly not helping kids if its just sitting there. Where is the interest going? Who’s borrowing out of the fund? Why is it consistently taking in more “than is able to be used”?
For the video I thought it was pretty good. I agree that density is key and that cities should be building up and not out.
It didn’t really pertain directly to Portland of course, or to the way in which the city interacts with the eastern part of the state or compare to the enclaves to the west. Or offer any hard numbers. It would be interesting to base taxation on density levels, but that is never going to happen.
Most of the overfunding relative to projections is downstream of overly conservative post Covid economic forecasting, combined with the inherently unstable nature of high earner income taxes. Since projections for the rollout of the program happen in 2020/21, and the post Covid recovery was smoother than anticipated (macro economic wise anyways), its meant that the program has gotten way more money than it’s had staffing to spend. This should dissipate in time, but it can be hard for public agencies to deal with this stuff, and ironically adding more administrative guardrails and oversight usually makes it even more difficult.
And compounding the issue is the fact that very wealthy people have income more tied to large transactions and less tied to regular income. 2020 was a particular volatile year for this, but this is also likely why it took in way more than expected in the most recent fiscal year. It’s just hard to forecast this stuff.
I’m not sure there’s an easy solution (outside overhauling our entire tax structure), but I think it’s not a case of wanton waste or bad planning. It’s tied to the nature of economic forecasting (crapshoot) and high earner income (volatile), with a healthy dose of general public sector inefficiencies related to budgeting and spending practices.
This seems to be a conflation of individuals and businesses. The taxes discussed in the video aren’t detailed, but seem to be limited to property taxes, which are paid almost exclusively by businesses in downtowns. The way it is presented makes it sound like the 20-something in a four story walk up without AC that will crumble in the earthquake is subsidizing someone who doesn’t live in their city or county and that couldn’t be further from the truth, at least not here where the Portland metro suburbs have, on average, higher incomes, higher home values, and certainly drive more to pay more gas tax than their urban counterparts.
As Portland is experiencing through massive devaluation of downtown office buildings and retail centers, once the people from the suburbs quit coming in for work to generate revenues for businesses to pay rent, for property owners to pay taxes, the music starts to slow down real quick. It even becomes clear that using the same analysis in the video, one could easily suggest that the city was being subsidized by the work of suburban office workers and when the value of Portland office buildings are quickly approaching that of the assessed values, that argument is close to coming to fruition in real time.
Oregon’s total tax rates are only “among the highest in the country” with the loosest definition of that phrase. As a state, it’s something like 15th or 20th highest, with the Portland area being a bit higher than that if you judge large cities.
And the assortment of new taxes is a direct response to systemically underfunding local governments. Not all of this is just 1980s/90s tax revolt stuff, some of it is also related to corporate tax structures being generally bad in the US (in the way they encourage competition between states for low rates and the like), but Oregon is a state where the 80s/90s tax revolt has had long lasting negative consequences for local governments having stable budgets.
People consistently say they want good public programs – transit, transportation, and schools included. You don’t do this by crippling and politicizing the way those programs are funded.
I agree with your basic premise, but people don’t want to pay for anything, in general. That’s another important premise.
Wasteful and otherwise badly run gov’t programs just give people even more excuse to oppose further taxation, and unfortunately the examples of these programs in Oregon are rife.
I support taxation for things we all need, but gov’t officials – esp at MultCo – need to do a much better job of stewarding tax dollars.
I don’t think I agree that people don’t want to pay for anything, especially in Portland, but that’s a bit besides the point.
And yes, we need better government officials especially at Multnomah County. Lucky for us, we can vote some of them out shortly! Though if the replacements are any better is anyone’s guess
We had that chance recently as well, and made an obviously bad choice. It’s hard for me to feel confident that the voters will exercize better judgement next time, but we can at least hope.
I mean… look around. We don’t exactly have a great track record electing leaders. They’re not uniformly bad, but in general Portland and Mult. County and Oregon have sunk into a pretty deep murk of dysfunction, and a lot of the problems stem from poor leadership at times bordering on incompetence.
Injecting more money into the system seems unlikely to fix the core problems.
“Oregon is a state where the 80s/90s tax revolt has had long lasting negative consequences”
The tripling of trophy house sizes and residential housing prices that resulted from property tax limitations being the prime examples.
In the long run, electric buses are far cheaper than diesel buses. The “fuel” costs very little and there is significantly less maintinence and less that can break. For some reason, Americans think getting something cheaper now that will cost significantly more in the long run is a good idea. Its not and never will be.
This isn’t necessarily true. A lot can and does go wrong with electric buses, and there are significant operational constraints that come with the current depot based charging systems. And higher capital costs with potentially lower maintenance costs but probably higher operational costs (per rider) isn’t necessarily a good thing TriMet which tends to be grant reliant for capital spending but generally better off for maintenance and operations.
If BE buses end up being less expensive to maintain, enough to offset any operational difficulties that will come about as a result of using a less operationally flexible vehicle, that’s great, but it’s disingenuous to frame this as something you know to be true. But I think it’s dubious at best of TriMet goes gangbusters on a plan that has a serious number of unknowns and quite a bit of risk at a time when the area is risking huge cuts to service.
I want our bus fleet to be electrified, but I’m not confident that a BEB only plan (with a sprinkle of fuel cell) is wise without better funding structures. And given that the state can’t even guarantee half of what TriMet needs, and then can’t even guarantee that less than what they need to last past 2028, how are we going to actually achieve anything?
Good points here. CNG buses are used safely, effectively, and cheaply in many transit fleets, but Trimet won’t touch them cuz of the optics: they’d rather appear “green” than run a transit system well.
Also the charging times for electric buses, which run almost 24/7/365, are a real obstacle for transit fleets. You really need TWO fleets: one to run and one to charge.
Why would this be true of buses and not cars? EVs are mechanically simpler, have fewer fluids and other fragile systems, and have fewer consumables like oil filters.
I’d need a citation for that statement before accepting it as true.
I don’t really care what technology TriMet adopts, but it is essential for human and global health that they stop burning diesel and other fossil fuels. I don’t see how that can be negotiable.
EVs are mechanically simple, and probably less expensive to maintain in the long term, but at least from what I’ve read the differences are not that large. Here’s a 2012 King County Metro study comparing lifecycle costs of trolleybuses and hybrid diesel, with maintenance cost being essentially the same (http://metro.kingcounty.gov/up/projects/pdf/Metro_TB_20110527_Final_LowRes.pdf). Obviously not a one to one comparison, but trolleybuses are not meaningfully more mechanically complex than battery buses. And I’ll take King County Metro studies on this seriously, since they’ve been running a solid trolleybus network for decades.
I am most interested in getting people onto public transit in a cost effective way, as I personally think that’s an effective climate mitigation strategy. A bus electrification strategy that makes the system less reliable for riders means more people driving largely SOVs that are still mostly gas powered. Bus electrification is needed, but if bus operations become more expensive as a result, we need to fund the difference. Oregon has not shown itself to be willing to do that, so I remain deeply skeptical of the effort which has good intentions but rarely is focused on what should be the first priority: transit riders
TriMet isn’t planning on completing it’s electrification until 2040; by then, I expect much of the auto fleet to be electrified. If TriMet sticks by diesel buses (if they are even still available then), they will be a bigger emitter than an electric bus and a small number of EVs (representing the marginal number of drivers who were displaced from TriMet).
Ultimately, though, I think it’s a false choice between retaining riders and reducing emissions. But given that choice, I’d side with the global environment over TriMet’s budget.
How much of the auto fleet do you expect to be electrified by 2040? That’s 15 years away and ICE vs EV is still 10:1 for new car sales. I don’t think it’s a given that the car fleet will electrify itself over the next 15 years, especially with current federal policy. And related to that, I think the general dogmatic focus on EV cars – the multi thousand dollar subsidies that essentially amount to massively regressive tax policy – and the total lack of coherent funding policy for transit fleet electrification (via more than just BE buses) is more what I have issue with.
And I think TriMet (and other local transit agencies) bottom lines matter a great deal when it comes to climate action. Transit agencies going belly up will not help anyone other than car salesman and payday loan operators
Plus, I don’t think we should just write off the non-emission social costs of driving (different topic though).
Even with today’s vehicle mix, electrifying buses would be such an environmental win that some increase in private vehicle trips would be worth it. And you’re just speculating that ridership would drop — as David H pointed out, vehicles and other capital equipment are often purchased with grants, so the costs may not be particularly high and service cuts are hardly inevitable.
As for EVs, Trump’s anti-EV zeal won’t last forever, and in China, EVs make up more than half of new vehicle sales, with well over 100 companies manufacturing cars. At some point, the US is going to fall so far behind the rest of the world in its ability to build cars that the dam will break, and there will be a lot of excellent, cheap electric cars to choose from. Either Chinese companies will set up shop here, or we’ll allow imports.
A lot can happen in 15 years, and with things happening so quickly, a lot will. I don’t know what the future will look like, except that it will be different than today.
I actually don’t care much about EVs in themselves, but I do care dearly about climate change, and EVs are the surest way to make a dent in transportation-related CO2 emissions, at least according to every study I’ve seen. We also need to pursue better transit service and fewer people driving, but those are all things we can work on simultaneously.
I don’t know where to find the data to substantiate this, but a colleague who works with TriMet tells me that the agency now has about double the administrative staff per passenger that they had in 2018. If that’s true, I’d regard that as a far bigger threat to the viability of TriMet than electric buses.
I disagree in the strongest possible terms that an increase in EV car use would be a worthwhile trade off for bus electrification. The wanton sprawl and waste of all US cities is tied closely to our collective love for the automobile, and these land use forms have dire environmental and climate consequences. There’s a chance (depending on local electricity mix) that your scenario would reduce overall emissions, but the second order effects are so much worse that I can’t see how it would be a long term benefit, especially considering that most transit agencies are already in a cutting service death spiral.
All of these things can work simultaneously, but even if the like $10k in credits was enough to convert the entire light vehicle fleet to electric (it’s not), that’s like $2.75 trillion being spent on EV car policy. Has the FTA even spent that much money in its entire existence? The issue is that our transportation policy is so out of wack, and so deeply favors car use, that transit riders who pollute far far less than car users get the short stick despite the fact that boosting transit ridership is overwhelmingly cheaper than subsidizing everyone’s new EV.
TriMet does have issues that predate and will postdate the current crisis, and I do think we could take this time to reorganize the agency to be more efficient (and bus oriented), but EV bus policy in Oregon is still essentially in the undfunded mandate world where we have plans demanding fleet electrification by 2040, but little in the way of dedicated funding to make it happen in practice. When we have to spend 50% more per new bus, that money has to come from TriMets existing budget. It gives less money for other projects, and that is bound to degrade service in one way or another.
Doesn’t that wholly depend on the magnitude of the tradeoff? One extra car trip is surely a cost well worth paying to electrify buses, and a million is too much. Given the way capital grants work, it seems quite possible to me that the number will be 0.
Show me a reputable study with a plausible path to decarbonization without electrifying transportation, then we can talk about the rest.
We need transit ridership to go up, probably by a lot, not down. I’m not sure there’s any magnitude of trade off that I would classify as net positive.
It’s not that we shouldn’t electrify our transportation network, far from it, it’s just that we should have a transit-first approach to reducing automobile emissions for so many reasons. One of which is that’s it’s cheaper. The more people riding transit regularly, the less it will cost to electrify the light auto fleet.
Do we wait until society has turned to transit for its primary mode of transport before we start electrifying vehicles? Or do we work on both strategies (and others) at the same time?
You’ve got a friend in Washington DC!
This is not actually true. Buying buses is the same or equivalent of building track or facilities, it falls under capital costs and is funded much more generously by the feds (up to 83%) and state DOTs. Electric buses also get a lot of CMAQ funding for the perceived pollution reductions (actual results vary depending on your fuel sources, i.e. coal versus hydro) – in many jurisdictions it’s actually possible for the entire $800,000 electric bus cost to be subsidized from external sources. As with highways, your house, and probably your poor old bicycle, maintenance and labor costs are much less subsidized by the feds, they fall under the operating budget and local agencies are expected to pay at least 85% of the operating costs. Until buses are operated and maintained by robots, labor costs will continue to climb faster than inflation.
For our local transit system here in Greensboro NC with well over half of our buses being electric, our costs per e-bus to maintain them is well below our costs to maintain our diesel buses, and they last a lot longer (more miles per bus) before they need to be taken out of the fleet. That said, our e-buses cost at least 5 times as much as a diesel bus, though both types of buses are heavily subsidized when they are bought, as are our diesel ADA lift vans. For most US transit systems, it’s cheaper for the agency to dispose of old buses once they reach a certain mileage and age than it is to try to rehabilitate or rebuild them, though it’s wasteful for society. Most used buses then get auctioned off to churches, private schools, and tour companies; a $140,000 new diesel bus will usually get sold for $8,000 at an auction when its all used up – it would take at least $20,000 to recondition it “like new”, which sounds cheap, but most transit agencies end up spending less than that to buy a new one (with all the subsidies), so why bother?
I think I was a little imprecise in how I phrased that initially, but the higher capital costs of EV buses versus diesel buses do mean worse service for riders since agencies will have fewer buses than they otherwise would have.
In most transit agencies, the limits on service is no longer the number of buses they have or how often they are rotated or being serviced (which was usually the case pre-covid), but rather the severe shortage of drivers, of even finding and retaining qualified drivers – it’s not just the money they are being paid (or the lack of it), but competing with other transit agencies, trucking firms, intercity buses, and drivers wanting to live in the NW versus say the SE.
As for the vehicles themselves, the interior spaces of diesel buses are often slightly larger than electric, I don’t know why, especially for wheelchair users. Diesel buses also seem to be less well built, again I don’t know why – it may be there are probably high-quality $800,000 diesel buses for sale out there, but they don’t seem to be purchased into the state bus pool that most transit agencies purchase from (to save on paperwork) and most diesel buses are in the cheaper $140K to $200K range, whereas ebuses tend to be in the $800K to $million range – it’s a lot like comparing a Next or Magna bike from Walmart with a Surly Skid Loader, they are both steel and look similar, but with a vast price and power difference. Or maybe comparing a Rad Power bike to a Riese & Muller, I don’t know.
Sure, but that’s all a bit besides the point. The higher capital cost of battery buses plus the operational constraints they bring almost guarantee worse service for riders at the same constant funding levels. Transitioning to an EV bus fleet will require more buses, since charging downtown has to be accounted for, and the number of vehicles available for service is a constraint that agencies deal with. It’s not the only one, but it would be silly to imagine that a typical large agency like TriMet wouldn’t be forced to make some hard decisions about how to prioritize limited funding.
I think we are essentially painting transit agencies into a hole to pursue a marginal emissions reduction that could be done more economically with simply providing more service on existing bus routes that are raised to the “minimum viable European bus” standard (which amounts essentially to an FX bus, maybe with less legit looking shelters). Stop consolidation is essentially free, and so are bus lanes. It’s just about political will to prioritize the bus network we already have over the movement of private autos.
Dang, Sam. Maybe you should have made the 45 minute trek down to Salem for this one? Online testimony doesn’t have the same impact.
Disagree with you on this point. Facts are facts, and rhetoric is rhetoric, whether delivered online or face to face. My evidence and argument don’t suddenly become stronger just b/c I’m at a mic in the same room. Yes, you can glad-hand people and look them in the eye before and after testimony but that’s a different thing altogether. I have learned much over the years from online testimony and will continue to do so.
Also Sam’s online testimony avoided the carbon emissions and pollution of a drive to Salem (and yes, it would have been a drive since bus and train service are so sparse).
If everyone who bought an F150 instead bought an F75 and agreed to pay 10% of their savings to a transportation tax, we would have enough to pay for world class state public transit.
Throw in the truck nutz and wheel spike budget, and we could have high speed rail. As long as ODOT doesn’t gobble it up for expanding I-5 to I-5 & 1/2.
“As long as ODOT doesn’t gobble it up for expanding I-5 to I-5 & 1/2.”
You’ve absolutely identified the reason people are against more taxation. Simply paying more does not equate getting better or even more for the money. It seems pretty clear that ODOT can function quite well if only they could access the funds available to them when they are needed and put them where they are needed. If the legislature cared, they could have easily rewritten any laws or regulations to allow this to happen. Instead, all they can push is more tax and more money for an organization that has proven they are not good stewards of what they already have.
https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2025/08/23/as-special-session-looms-on-transportation-funding-odot-quietly-offers-alternative-to-new-taxes/
More striking still, Boshart Davis says, was ODOT’s next sentence: “Only new funding or having the flexibility to use existing funding in new ways [emphasis added] can prevent layoffs and service reductions.”
If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t be bumping their butts all the time.
Great example of something that sounds true, but after about 2 seconds of thinking about it, frog wings would not affect how they land on their butts, primarily because frogs don’t land on their butts. Much like common truisms and misunderstandings about transportation regarding the costs, who pays for it, the role of transit, It might sound true when people are griping to each other, but often it’s not. It is easier for people to agree and accept rather than think, but not a great way to make budgets or laws.
As long as the MAX trains are full of crazy folks like they are today, people will choose to drive their car. If the trains aren’t cleaned up, most will not ride.
A comment on the numbers in this article. 3rd paragraph says the payroll tax is being increased from 0.1% to 0.2%. Then 4 paragraphs later it says “A sunset of the .01% increase in 2028 will not leave enough time….” I think the .01% should be 0.1%? Note that a tax increase from 0.1% to 0.2% is DOUBLE. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s DOUBLE – a 100% tax increase.
IF the linked article about road users being required to pay their fair share of ODOT costs is correct, then bicyclists had best get ready to PAY UP, because a lot of money is being spent on improvements for cyclists.
How much of ODOT’s budget goes to “improvements for cyclists”?
Do we plow roads because of cyclists? Do we have to repave roads because of cyclists? Do we build $8 billion bridges because of cyclists?
Two obvious points here:
Or as long as TriMet continues to wastefully spend money on the failed trains no one will buy into their cry that they don’t have enough money.
This morning I noticed new displays overhead. Full color, added a tiny bit of additional information, but in these time of austerity (or so TriMet claims) a totally unnecessary expenditure that didn’t fix anything that was broken.
The sooner Trimet fires the people on their staff that are working on expanding the Max network, the better we all will be in the pocket book and make for a better transportation system focused around flexible buses.
This is true, but also misleading in the context of Portland. The TriMet district payroll tax is 0.8237% for 2025 (source), so in the TriMet service area the total payroll tax will go from 0.9237% to 1.0237% – a 10.8% increase. Which is a substantial increase, but probably demonstrates why this won’t be enough to plug the current projected budget shortfall for TriMet.
I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had about the veracity of the payroll tax as a means of funding something like public transit, but it’s what we have now. I would personally prefer an overhaul of Oregon’s property tax system coupled with a shift in most of the tax burden to taxes on land. But that’s all beside the point.