6 Oregon Trucking Association, Inc. Oregon Truck Dispatch FROM THE PRESIDENT Jana Jarvis OTA President/CEO MOST OREGON LEGISLATIVE sessions have a theme, with priority policy issues announced in advance. For 2023 and 2024, it was housing and homelessness. In 2025, leadership has stated that it will be transportation. What that means for the legislative session has yet to be determined, but what we do know is that the Legislature’s Joint Transportation Committee is spending the summer and fall traveling the state and sharing their message that there simply isn’t enough money to complete the projects outlined in HB 2017 from the 2017 legislative session—or even enough dollars to do general upkeep and maintenance of our transportation infrastructure. That message, set against the background that there is an imbalance in what cars and trucks are currently paying, creates a large challenge to finding an agreeable solution in 2025. You are likely asking why there is any issue with general maintenance and upkeep of our transportation system. The gas tax is the highest it has ever been, along with the rates in our weightmile system. So why is ODOT so broke? Oregon is one of the only states that doesn’t rely on general fund revenue to support our transportation infrastructure. For decades, roads and bridges have been paid for with Highway Trust Fund revenue along with federal funding that often comes with limitations on how those dollars can be used. Projects used to be paid as they were built, but for the past couple of decades, ODOT has been bonding capital construction costs and their indebtedness has grown exponentially. Often, when transportation packages pass, they also come with spending limitations specifying what projects will be built or where those dollars may be spent, so general maintenance of our current infrastructure becomes an afterthought. On top of that, we find ourselves constrained with contradictory policies. The push for fuel efficiencies to support our environmental goals means that while our tax rates per gallon have risen, the amount of gallons of fuel we purchase today is significantly less than what we purchased a few decades ago. Most Oregonians think they spend a great deal more on our roads than they actually do—the average cost to use Oregon roads is now about $200 per year. That, coupled with significant cost increases in both labor and materials, means that we are actually spending far less on roads per person than we did in the 1980s. Of course that is NOT the case for heavy vehicles. The trucking industry has been paying a per-mile rate since the 1940’s with our very complicated weight-mile tax. Efforts to extend that philosophy of taxation have been percolating at ODOT for the past 20 years with their voluntary Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) for passenger vehicles. But few Oregonians are interested in having their mileage tracked and the system itself is expensive to administer. In the conversations we had around transportation spending during the 2017 legislative session, we recognized that the push for increasing fuel efficiencies, along with the desire to move to a zero-emission future, would greatly diminish ODOT’s buying power. Some of the large projects identified in HB 2017 weren’t funded, such as the I-205 project upgrading the Abernethy Bridge and adding a third lane from it to Stafford Road. Some projects had identified funding, but the cost estimates for those projects were inaccurate. The Rose Quarter Project was supposed to come in around $500M—but the project as it has been redesigned is now costing close to $2B. And the dedicated funding for that project was redirected in order to start construction on the Abernethy Bridge which was a project that was ready to go. The Rose Quarter project was still mired in controversy from local governments whose approval was necessary to begin construction. As we negotiated on HB 2017, we recognized that additional funding would be required to complete all of the projects identified. Tolling had been identified as an additional source of transportation funding as far back as 2006 but had not been defined in its application. Was it simply to support the cost of construction and then be removed when those costs had been met? Was it designed Transportation Planning There has never been a better time for you to get involved with your trucking association and help us find more workable solutions to your ability to buy and use your trucks efficiently.
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