The Week Observed: August 29, 2025

What City Observatory Did This Week

Special Session: The old bait and switch. ODOT is pulling the same tired playbook: crying poverty while promising to fix potholes and plow roads, then quietly diverting every available dollar to billion-dollar freeway megaprojects.

The agency wants to raise gas taxes 6 cents per gallon, but LC 2 contains zero language requiring the new revenue go toward maintenance. Sound familiar? In 2017, ODOT swore new funding would prioritize "fixing the system above expansion"—then promptly launched unfunded projects like the Abernethy Bridge (tripled in cost to $815 million) and Rose Quarter freeway widening (now missing $1.5 billion).

Even as officials plead for emergency funding in Salem, ODOT contractors broke ground on the unfunded Rose Quarter project this week. The fix is simple: legally mandate ODOT spend new revenue on maintenance first, not megaproject cost overruns and consultant contracts.

Environmentalists get rolled once again: An overlooked provision of LC 2, the transportation bill headed to Oregon's special session is repeal of a 2017 requirement that the state highway department implement congestion pricing on major freeways in the Portland Metropolitan Area. The requirement was a major concession that environmentalists wrested in return for going along with a package of highway spending measures.
ODOT is moving the highway expansions forward, at a cost of billions,, but pricing is dead–environmentalists and the climate got rolled again. Ironically, this is happening just as Manhattan is showing how pricing is a rapid and effective solution to congestion–and helps pay for transit. More than just money, the demise of pricing monkey-wrenches state transportation and environmental policy. Without pricing, Portland traffic congestion will grow worse, and this blows a hole in state and regional climate plans. And just like Charllie Brown, Lucy and the football, this wasn't the first time this happened; environmentalists were rolled by ODOT which evaded a similar requirement that was part of the 2009 transportation package requiring a demonstration of congestion pricing in Portland. The only difference: We've squandered a decade and a half when we needed to be making progress in reducing greenhouse gases.

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