Oregon Department of Transportation Director Kris Strickler has flipped on his turn signal and will take the next offramp. The leader of the agency since 2019, Strickler announced Wednesday he’ll exit for good on January 2nd, 2026.
Texts about Strickler’s decision flew between phones of transportation advocates and insiders last night, many of whom see him as just the latest high-profile leader to jump from a sinking ship. As I reported last month, agency leaders have been fleeing faster than drivers can fill up a new freeway lane. Strickler leaves ODOT as it tries to heal from scars of a brutal legislative session, years of funding uncertainties, project delays, cost overruns, and an embarrassing accountability audit released back in May.
When Strickler assumed the director role in 2019, things looked rosy by comparison. ODOT had money in the bank and a clear roadmap on how to spend it thanks to the the $5.3 billion transportation package passed in 2017. The same week Strickler was named ODOT’s new leader, the agency launched an ambitious effort to reduce congestion by expanding freeways in the Portland region. Initially called the Office of Urban Mobility & Mega Projects and later changed to the Urban Mobility Office (UMO), the new Portland-based office was created to ensure ODOT could deliver what they knew would be three very controversial projects: a new tolling system and two freeway expansions on I-5; one at the Rose Quarter and one between Portland and Vancouver.
In the six years since, the UMO has been defunded and shuttered, tolling was torpedoed by Governor Tina Kotek, the Rose Quarter is in such dire straits that Strickler’s bosses at the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) removed a “stop funding the project” vote from the agenda of their meeting today, and the Interstate Bridge Replacement Program (IBR) is on life support after its leader jumped ship last month and an OTC member recently logged the first ever “no” vote against it.
Even so, you’ve got to have some sympathy for Strickler. Just months after he was hired, Covid threw our state into turmoil and then ODOT faced disastrous impacts from major wildfires. After leading the agency through those disasters, more of them hit: Kotek’s capitulation on tolling destroyed the revenue stream Strickler was counting on to build megaprojects and the Trump Administration caused “confusion and delay” at the agency including a rescission of $382 million Strickler was counting on to build the I-5 Rose Quarter project.
Strickler’s life preserver was Oregon lawmakers, who promised to pass major funding for ODOT in the 2025 legislation session. In the run-up to that session, Strickler worked overtime to convince lawmakers (and the public) that ODOT deserved — and could be trusted with — a massive funding package. But even that failed. The bill Kotek ultimately signed just last week barely keeps the lights on at the agency. Despite massive increases in projects costs and inflation (and a false narrative from Republicans that it’s massive) the total funding is over one billion dollars less than what was passed in 2017.
And it must sting that the paltry revenue lawmakers were able to raise for Strickler’s agency is still somewhat in limbo as hundreds of signature gatherers fan out across the state as I type this, eager to refer the increased taxes and fees to the ballot and use the issue to boost Republican chances ahead of next year’s gubernatorial election.
Before he came to ODOT, Strickler spent nine years working on the Columbia River Crossing project, the precursor to the IBR that shares not only many of its design elements, but also its unfortunate distinction as a project that spent hundreds of millions on consultants and planning without one shovel pressed into the dirt. That’s 15 years focused on one project that still might never be built.
Maybe Strickler just got tired of not winning.
Maybe Strickler’s exit and the horrible condition of ODOT he leaves behind will finally shake things up. Maybe the OTC and Oregon lawmakers will wake up and take our state’s approach to transportation in a very different direction — one that stops chasing freeway expansion megaprojects as a solution to climate change (which is what Strickler believed them to be) and one that ends the bottomless pit of taxpayer dollars going to consulting firms who benefit from making projects as expensive, expansive, and extensive as possible.
Oregon needs to build more, not bill more.
Now Governor Kotek has an opportunity to heal her wounded transportation legacy by picking an ODOT director that is humble enough to change the status quo and courageous enough to create a new one.