Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has put together a working group that will try and find a path out of our state’s transportation funding quagmire. The roster of the group hasn’t been made public, but Kotek’s Transportation Advisor Kelly Brooks told members of the Oregon Transportation Commission at their meeting last week that the first meeting will happen in April and they’ll publish a report with funding recommendations before the end of this year.
Since an attempt by lawmakers to pass a major transportation funding package failed spectacularly in 2025, it’s been common knowledge in Salem that they’d try again in 2027. What’s considered a band-aid funding bill was passed at the recent short session, but it’s only a temporary measure.
Speaking at the OTC meeting Thursday, Brooks said the working group’s goal will be to frame the 2027 conversation. The working group will include both Democrats and Republicans, as well as transportation experts, advocates, and everyday users of the system. Former Oregon Governor Kate Brown did something similar prior to the previous major transportation package that passed in 2017. The Governor’s Transportation Vision Panel produced a reported titled One Oregon that came out in May 2016. It was used to inform a series of public meetings about funding prior to the 2017 session.
Kotek’s transportation working group project is being led by Susan Peithman, a 10-year ODOT veteran who began in the agency’s Active Transportation group. Prior to ODOT, Peithman spent two years at the Transportation Research and Education Center at Portland State University and was the statewide policy advocate for The Street Trust for over three years. Peithman’s other role at ODOT is director of the Climate Office.
Brooks didn’t reveal many details on Thursday, but did hint that Kotek is seeking to be innovative. “We are in a new place now, given what’s happening on the ballot and elsewhere, where we have to take a new approach to solutions,” she said. “What are what problems do we want to solve? How are we going to solve them? And how are we going to do it together?”
When it comes to the assignment the working group will be given, Brooks said they must address Oregon’s “structural revenue issue.” “We have a set of needs; so the first thing they need to do is grapple with, ‘What do our adopted plans say we’re supposed to be doing, and what are we actually doing? And how does our revenue match up with that?'”
ODOT and lawmakers had an opportunity to change their approach in the short session when the state faced a $288 million budget hole and sought to reallocate or “rebalance” $117 million into highway operations and maintenance. Despite many adopted plans calling for greenhouse gas emissions and more funding for bicycling and walking statewide, lawmakers raided $25 million in grant funding sources that would have gone toward projects that make it safer for kids to bike and walk to school, give people the ability to bike and walk on carfree paths, and they chose to reduce money available for passenger rail maintenance.
This political choice to maintain funding for highway expansion megaprojects like the I-5 Rose Quarter or I-205 widening projects while reducing funding for Safe Routes to School, passenger rail, and the Community Paths program was made crystal clear at Thursday’s meeting by Oregon Transportation Commissioner Phil Chang.
“I heard a little bit about the the legislative horse-wrangling around this [funding] rebalance,” Chang revealed in a moment of candor. “I think that projects like I-5 Rose Quarter and Center Street Bridge [a $470 million project in Salem] had specific legislative champions who, you know, didn’t convince all of their colleagues, but convinced enough of their colleagues, that those projects stayed untouched by this rebalance.”
Chang seemed displeased by how the funding reallocations went down. “I want to make it really clear for people that services delayed are services denied,” he said. “We are not going to be able to do multimodal projects in this biennium [ODOT’s two-year budget cycle] that would make pedestrians, cyclists, and particularly kids trying to get to school safer.”
Whether this new working group comes out strong in favor of more robust spending on non-freeway, non-driving infrastructure, remains to be seen. Brooks said the scope of the effort will look at funding needs beyond ODOT and that the report will address, “local system needs and transit as well.”
Stay tuned for an official announcement of the working group and its members sometime this week.
