AUGUST 2008: FEATURE, TRANSPORTATION
ILLUSTRATION BY TYSON SMITH
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The $4.2 billion question
Answers are few and the clock is ticking as the project to
replace the I-5 bridge over the Columbia starts looking for
billions of dollars in funding.
By Abraham Hyatt
Fifty-two days. That’s the amount of time between when
the Columbia River Crossing task force made its final
recommendation in June for a replacement I-5 bridge across the
Columbia River, and when the funding reality for the $4.2
billion project hits. Aug. 15 is the first deadline that Oregon
and Washington have to make to apply for federal grants;
it’s a deadline the CRC is expected to easily make.
But the date has another significance. For the past three
years, the 39-member task force limited itself to generalities
as it researched potential projects. This month, however, the
CRC is going to have to begin looking for hard answers to a
question that has the possibility of killing the project: How
is this thing going to get paid for?
“There’s a number of potential hurdles that the
project still has to go through, [and one is] getting an
absolutely fixed funding plan,” says Dave Thompson,
spokesman for the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT).
“You’ve got a couple counties, two cities, two
governors, two states that all have to have consensus and level
of comfort that this is the right thing to do.
“If a major player says, ‘No, I hate it, stop
it,’ that’s a huge death blow.”
There’s a long road ahead. Exactly how much of the
funding will come from the federal government? Oregon and
Washington will bear a significant portion of the cost, but who
should pay more? Tolls seem to be inevitable, but how much
should they be? As fuel prices hit record highs, would the
Oregon Legislature really gamble on floating a gas tax in front
of the state’s fiercely tax-adverse voters?
This summer, Gov. Ted Kulongoski and Gov. Chris Gregoire will
create a project sponsors’ council — made up of
regional, city and transit agencies — that will look at
funding options and engineering proposals before passing
recommendations on to the agencies that will make the final
decisions: Oregon and Washington’s state departments of
transportation.
Possible Funding Sources for the Columbia
River Crossing Project
• EXISTING STATE REVENUES: includes only the
$20 million currently committed to the project by
WSDOT.
• STATE-ADMINISTERED FUNDS: various state
sources, including fuel and motor carrier
taxes, vehicle registration and licensing fees,
lottery funds and sales tax (WA); and federal
sources.
• FEDERAL DISCRETIONARY HIGHWAY FUNDS: highway,
transportation, maintenance, research and
environmental funds.
• FEDERAL DISCRETIONARY TRANSIT FUNDS: includes
rail, bus, and other transit-eligible grant
programs.
• TOLL BOND PROCEEDS: revenue backed by
tolling; includes the possibility of 40-year
non-recourse debt or 30-year state-backed bonds.
• C-TRAN AND TRIMET REVENUES: includes federal
funds administered by the agencies. Other sources are
dependent on each agency.
TOLL CREDITS: expenditures used as a credit toward
federal highway funds.
SOURCE: Columbia River Crossing Task Force
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But support for the project is far from unanimous at this
point. As local and regional agencies and governments voted on
a preferred project concept this summer, nearly every entity
voiced multiple environmental, congestion and sprawl-related
concerns. The City of Portland and the Metro Council, for
instance, conditionally supported the project but demanded
further study into possible impact to the region. In a 15-page
letter to federal highway and transit officials in July, the
Environmental Protection Agency wrote that while it generally
supported the project, there were many unresolved land-use and
water- and air-quality issues.
Thompson says ODOT is acutely aware that it needs to do
more than simply alleviate critics’ fears. The agency
isn’t planning any formal public relations outreach.
“I don’t know if that’s applicable and I
don’t know if [we] would have the money for it,” he
says. Instead, the agency will rely as it has in the past on
public forums and interaction with agencies.
Many CRC task force members — along with community and
business leaders — agree that the time has come for
leaders to step forward and act as builders of compromises and
partnerships as the project progresses.
It’s not a moment too soon. This month, funding becomes
the defining element for the CRC and for how
Oregonians see the project.
While the bridges that carry Interstate 5 over the Columbia
are aging, they’re still structurally sound, according to
a 2007 Oregon Department of Transportation study. But the daily
raising of the lifts, combined with short highway exits and
entrances along that stretch of I-5, creates high accident
rates and an average of six hours of congestion a day.
That’s expected to increase to 15 hours a day in the next
20 years.
A fix is obviously needed. The question is: Do you make more
room for drivers or do you make fewer drivers by increasing
mass transit?
Proponents of a bigger bridge — including business
groups and the governors of both states — say the project
is needed to fix a traffic-clogged bottleneck that impacts
trade and transport from Canada to Mexico. I-5 cannot be seen
as just a regional highway, the argument goes; it’s also
part of a national and international economic network.
A new bridge also is seen as an essential component of the
future economic health of the region. Evidence of that can be
found in a December 2005 study on congestion funded by Metro
Council, the Port of Portland and the Portland Business
Alliance. The report looked at the entire Portland region, not
just the Columbia River bridge, but the findings are still
illuminative: Failing to invest in transportation
infrastructure improvement could cost Portland as much as $844
million in jobs, wages, and economic growth by 2025. I-5 is one
of the major components of that infrastructure.
Opponents of a bigger bridge — but who still support new
mass transit options for the bridge — ask how a project
designed to increase traffic by tens of thousands of
vehicles is consistent with a new Oregon law that requires the
state to reduce its greenhouse gases 10% by 2020. Reducing
congestion and vehicle idling time, the argument goes, will not
balance out the amount of emissions released by a 40% increase
in rush-hour traffic, which is what would be allowed by a
larger span.
These opponents also question the CRC task force’s
findings that a bigger bridge and an easier drive for commuters
will not increase urban sprawl in North Portland or Southern
Washington. The task force’s findings were challenged
earlier this year by an Oregonian story that cited a 2001
report by regional planners who found that sprawl was indeed
possible. There are also questions as to whether the data used
by the task force to project traffic flow in coming years has
been rendered obsolete by current fuel prices.
Then there’s the question of light rail, and Portland
versus Vancouver attitudes toward mass transit. An independent
poll in June — conducted and paid for by Portland’s
Riley Research Associates — shows Clark County residents
giving light rail a 62% approval rating. That’s a
significant change from only a few years ago when many
residents and businesses saw light rail as something being
forced on them by Portland.
If the Riley polling numbers stand, the issue of connecting
Clark and Multnomah counties via rail will probably be the
first major CRC controversy that has found some kind of
resolution.
If controversy over planning has been intense, deciding who
pays for the project likely will be more contentious. The
estimated $4.2 billion price tag is far beyond what either
Washington or Oregon can fund. Nor is that likely to be the
ultimate cost. Until final construction bids on the CRC project
have been accepted by the transportation departments, any
estimate is just that — an approximation based on current
engineering data. Additionally, the $4.2 billion is in 2008
dollars; inflation will likely alter the final figure.
Whatever the amount, the states plan to look to several
sources — federal transportation dollars being the most
obvious. The state departments of transportation are up against
a deadline for some of that money: They need to apply by Aug.
15 for what might be as much as $750 million in public transit
grants from the Federal Transit Administration. Congress will
reauthorize — and the CRC needs to apply for —
federal highway funds in 2009; if the CRC misses that deadline
it will have to wait until 2015 to try again. In all, the CRC
project has identified 21 possible sources — some big,
many small — of federal funding.
But getting federal financing is not as easy as it may sound.
First, there needs to be strong support by Oregonians and
Washingtonians for a project before Congress will seriously
consider offering money, say project supporters like Corky
Collier, executive director for the Columbia Corridor
Association. A region needs to prove it both needs and wants it
or somewhere else will get the money, he says.
Contrast that against the “wishful thinking”
argument. “We’ve constructed this mythology that
there’s this huge pot of funds on the federal level if we
only get our act together,” says economist Joe Cortright
— vice president of Portland-based consulting firm
Impresa, and a vocal opponent of the project. “The era of
big earmarks is over.”
Tolls — modern electronic systems have eliminated the
need for collection booths — will almost certainly be a
part of the project. In fact, Welches’ Rick Metsger, the
Democratic chairman of the senate Business, Transportation and
Workforce Development Committee, thinks tolls could fund the
bulk of the project — putting the funding burden on
drivers instead of state residents. That certainly will be
controversial. The actual toll can’t be determined until
other types of funding have been obtained, but early estimates
put the peak-hour, one-way toll at $2.50.
That’s a wildly unpopular idea. A poll paid for by the
CRC project in 2006 found that only 36% of residents in the Tri
County and Clark County region approved of a toll that size.
The Riley Research poll from earlier this year — which
surveyed residents in Washington, Clark, Multnomah and
Clackamas counties — came up with similar numbers: Only
38% of people approved of a fee. Clark County residents, who
make up the majority of commuters crossing the I-5 bridge, were
the most vehemently against it: 59% told Riley Research they
strongly opposed any kind of toll.
After federal funds and tolling, another avenue of funding
will be the pockets of Oregon and Washington residents.
The list of potential funding options that the CRC reviewed in
its final report reads like any state project’s most
wanted list: gas taxes; DMV fees and taxes; lottery funds;
private-sector funds. Convincing voters to raise or change any
kind of tax likely will be a formidable task. Oregonians
actually agreed to gas tax increases throughout the 1980s, but
since then, other proposed increases — whether for gas or
otherwise — have not passed.
It’s arguable that in order to tap into those funding
sources, state officials, legislators and transportation
planners will have to develop a significant level of trust with
Oregonians to convince them why it’s important that the
state take on any financial burden, big or small.
Many members of the task force and the region’s business
community think that the CRC task force process, with its
emphasis on collaboration and addressing multiple viewpoints,
laid the foundation for just that kind of relationship.
That’s a sentiment echoed by Bob Russell, president of
the Oregon Trucking Association; Rich Brown, market development
manager for Bank of America in Portland; and Marion Haynes,
Portland Business Alliance’s government relations
director and associate general council; and others.
“To this point we’ve just been looking at
alternatives. It’s been about building consensus,”
Haynes says.
But there’s a marked lack of trust between other players
and the two main agencies — Oregon and Washington’s
transportation departments, which will be asking for project
funding. CRC Task force members such as Metro Council president
David Bragdon and Jill Fuglister, co-director of the Coalition
for a Livable Future, deeply question the ability of state
highway planners to objectively decide on the size or
appropriateness of a project.
“One reason that you’ve seen a diluted
leadership, in the traditional sense, is because the
[transportation departments] are running the projects —
they’re the ones setting the structure on how we move
forward,” says Steve Stuart, a CRC task force member and
a Clark County commissioner. “They have been the leaders
but they can’t keep that role. It’s the fox
guarding the henhouse.”
The search for funding will reshape the leadership needs for
the CRC project. But the project’s many-headed nature
— by some counts there have been at least 90 entities
involved up to this point — means it’s difficult to
predict just what kind of leadership will be able to address
the controversies and negotiate solutions.
There are many opinions as to where leadership should come
from. Royce Pollard, mayor of Vancouver, thinks it should have
its roots in Portland’s business communities. Multnomah
County commissioner Jeff Cogen echoes the thoughts of many on
the task force when he says that a small group of people from
multiple agencies could emerge as leaders.
Whatever the source of leadership, the schism is clear:
taxpayers hungry to see construction start vs. taxpayers who
are wary of the entire process. Only one of those groups will
win when Oregonians are asked to open their wallets and help
fund the most expensive transportation project in Pacific
Northwest history.
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