| On Tuesday I sat in at the Tillamook hearing for the legislature’s Statewide Transportation Safety and Sustainability Outreach Tour. The goal of the 12-city tour is to help build public understanding of the challenges Oregon faces in maintaining a safe, accessible, and reliable transportation system.
Those challenges include a $1.8 billion gap in revenue between what the Oregon Department of Transportation Department figures it needs and what it gets in a year for operations and maintenance. That’s a gap in the revenue for customer service, for road preservation, safe routes to schools, public transit, bike and pedestrian networks, and more. That gap doesn’t include big construction projects like replacing coastal bridges. It’s about keeping what we have.
From my seat at the front table, I heard sincere and heartfelt comments from people about where they thought transportation money should be spent. But there were precious few suggestions on how to make up the shortage or where new money should come from.
A funding package, which will require ultra-majorities for legislative passage, could include a gas tax increase; automatic indexing of that tax to inflation; tolling; increased annual registration fees; and/or a mileage-based charge. A sales tax dedicated to transportation also is being floated.
For some context, Oregon’s 38-cent gas tax is the lowest on the West Coast. Washington is at 49 cents and California 51.
Columnist Dick Hughes talked about the hearing in his report this week: “The state transportation hearing Tuesday in Tillamook illustrated the difference between Oregon’s ‘have’ and ‘have-not’ communities…. This episode underscores why rural Oregonians believe the Portland metro area receives preferential treatment”.
You can read his ten takeaways here. You can listen to the complete hearing here.
For residents of HD 10 living further south or east, there are similar hearings planned for Coos Bay, Eugene, and Albany. |
In my remarks, I observed that legislators need to face both short term and long-term challenges. Our most immediate need is housing. People who want to work in our communities also want to live here. But the largest issue facing our future are global climatic changes centered in our oceans. Hatfield will be on the front lines of these challenges including warming waters, acidification – the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide, lower oxygen levels, and rising tides. This new housing will help support the researchers we need and I added that we were all pleased to see the complex located above the tsunami inundation line.
