A Metro committee vote this morning allows the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) to step over a key procedural hurdle before they break ground on their $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter project. The controversial project has been mired in lawsuits and budgetary uncertainty for years, so ODOT needed an emergency allocation from the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) of $250 million start construction.
But that funding pales in comparison to the overall price tag of the project, and ODOT says they’re still over $1 billion short. Add the federal funding pause and ODOT’s gap rises to $1.4 billion.
The latest funding came via an amendment to the regional project list managed by Metro known as the Metropolitan Transportation Improvement Program, or MTIP. The amendment was presented and discussed briefly before passing (with just one vote in opposition) at Metro’s Transportation Policy Advisory Committee (TPAC) meeting today.
When the OTC voted in December to dedicate $250 million to the project, ODOT was so eager to share the news they had an email drafted and sent before the OTC meeting ended. ODOT says they have a total of $850 million out of the $1.9 billion estimated price tag. But even that partial total isn’t nearly as solid as it seems.
Over half of what ODOT says is dedicated to the project is a $450 million grant awarded by the Biden Administration through the Reconnecting Communities program. The grant was ostensibly given to build the “Albina Vision” — the plan pushed by the nonprofit Albina Vision Trust to rebuild the black community displaced by construction of the freeway in the 1960s.
But a cloud looms over that grant because of President Donald Trump’s disdain for Biden-era investments, especially ones made in the name of racial justice. The federal funding freeze means no one knows for sure whether or not that $450 million can be counted on. On February 24th, I-5 Rose Quarter Project Director Megan Channel told Oregon lawmakers at a meeting of the Joint Committee on Transportation that the funds, “are currently subject to the current pause on federal grant funding pursuant to federal executive order.” A website published by ODOT on February 7th to track the funding pause says that just $37.5 million of the $450 million Reconnecting Communities grant has been obligated to ODOT thus far. That leaves about half of what ODOT claims as funding for this project still solidly under Trump’s control.
When Oregon Senator Khanh Pham asked Channel how ODOT would pay for the $1.4 billion needed to complete the project, Channel acknowledged that the grant funding pause by Trump is a “unique situation” and that if it doesn’t come through, “All options would be on the table to help full that gap.”
Despite all this uncertainty, ODOT plans to break ground this summer. In the first phase of construction ODOT says they’ll build a section of the highway cover, begin the expansion of I-5 between I-405 and the Morrison Bridge, and do necessary upgrades to the Fremont Bridge.
Where the rest of the funding for the project will come from — or if it will ever come at all — remains to be seen. But for ODOT, all that matters is getting a shovel in the ground.
ODOT understands high-profile megaprojects like this rely on inertia. The hardest part is getting them going (the former head of ODOT’s Urban Mobility Office remarked in that email that a project to widen I-5 at the Rose Quarter “has been in development for a generation.”) But once started, the hardest part is stopping them.
“This is the classic Robert Moses move of getting shovels in the ground and then keeping the community on the hook to pay for whatever it costs in the end,” said No More Freeways co-founder Chris Smith in testimony at the Metro meeting this morning. “I hope you will see through that and reject these amendment.”
The amendment passed. The sole vote in opposition came from Indi Namkoong, a transportation justice advocate with nonprofit Verde. Namkoong said she couldn’t support the funding because of, “The level of uncertain information on how much of this is going to deliver on our key goals around safety and equity.” Namkoong feels $250 million in ODOT funding deserves more public review and scrutiny. “There’s a lot that we don’t know,” she said.
The Street Trust Executive Director Sarah Iannarone is also on the TPAC committee. She abstained from today’s vote.
