Fact and Fiction in Oregon’s Department of Transportation
Since 2017, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) has been advancing the Interstate 5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project, known otherwise as the Rose Quarter Freeway Expansion. As the project approaches its eighth year of deliberation, it’s amassed endless criticism not only for what it’s promising, but for how deceptively it’s packaging those promises.
Distorted Renderings and Unbudgeted Ideas
For Portland resident and City Observatory writer Joe Cortright, so much of ODOT’s strategy for selling the I-5 project to the public has involved distorting the reality of what ODOT is actually planning and paying for. “In their latest marketing material: It’s not about cars or lanes at all, it’s about covers and community centers and housing built by Black artisans,” he wrote in 2021. “Never mind that these ‘features’ … aren’t actually part of the ODOT project at all.”
It’s not uncommon for highway expansion projects to overplay the public spaces, “park-like opportunities,” or pedestrian connections embedded in their plans. For many, these amenities are “lipstick on a pig,” but they are nevertheless accounted for in project documents. ODOT, by contrast, has been publicizing entirely fictitious streetscapes, complete with buildings, plazas, and community centers it has no intention of constructing.
“In the lower right hand side of the frame, a young Black man stands in front of a building labeled a ‘Career Development Center,’ carrying a plaque stating: ‘This building constructed by Black artisans in 2022,’” Cortright described. “It’s a nice thought, but such a building is not part of what ODOT will build or pay for. Nor, in fact, are any of these buildings.” For Cortright, this practice epitomizes “woke-washing,” or masking a project’s true intentions with a veneer of progressive promises.
A page from a 2021 ODOT brochure, one of thousands that landed on the doorsteps of Portland residents. (Image courtesy of City Observatory.)
In advertising all that it isn’t, many brochures failed to detail the project’s actual scope, which includes tripling the footprint of the I-5 from its current 82 feet to 250 feet in some segments, despite “just adding one auxiliary lane” in each direction. Even if ODOT isn’t planning to formally add travel lanes, with the added width, Cortright fears that the agency could restripe the I-5 to 10 lanes “in an afternoon.”
Furthermore, the impact on Portland’s geography is arguably downplayed in renderings. ODOT illustrations are marked, “no scale” or “not to scale,” which in itself isn’t abnormal, but the extent of the distortion appears dishonest. A 126-foot-wide or 250-foot-wide road appears to be barely larger than the existing 82-foot-wide one. The additional absence of accurate numbers accompanying the illustrations has led Cortright to conclude that the agency is intentionally concealing its plans. In fact, he was only able to confirm ODOT’s proposed width through a Freedom of Information Request. The information was not easily publicly available and prior communications with ODOT were fruitless.
Misleading ODOT illustrations. (Source: City Observatory.)
The top ODOT drawing was presented in the project’s 2019 Environmental Assessment, whereas the bottom drawing (which is three times wider than the current roadway) was only accessed via a public records request by Cortright. (Source: City Observatory.)
Who Will Pay?
When the project landed on the desks of the Oregon Legislature in 2017, its estimated cost hovered around $450 million. In 2020, that figure nearly doubled, hitting $795 million. By September 2021, ODOT announced the project costs would require $1.45 billion in funding and, as of December 2023, the Rose Quarter project is estimated at $1.95 billion, a figure many expect to increase by spring 2024.
These numbers prompt two questions: how have costs ballooned so much, and who will pay?
When it comes to the first, ODOT’s consultant, San Francisco-based Arup, offered several suggestions, one of them being to lose the extra weight. By tripling the current highway’s width, ODOT would need to excavate much more ground, install lengthier and larger support beams and girders for the overpasses, and the final cover for the highway—which ODOT has cited as the principal driver of costs—would have to be much larger. A narrower highway, one equal to or closer in width to the current I-5, wouldn’t cost nearly as much, according to the consultants.
As for how the agency will come up with $1.95 billion to foot the latest bill, ODOT speculates several sources may step in. Those include:
Tolling.
Federal grants.
Newly allocated State Improvement Project (STIP) funding.
At least in its own documents, ODOT does not outline a strategy or timeline for procuring that funding, nor a guarantee that, when combined, those sources will produce over a billion needed, nor even what will happen if that money is not secured. The Oregon Legislature did, however, approve up to $60 million in consulting to bring the project to a “30% design phase.”
These uncertainties signal to Cortright that the Rose Quarter project is devolving into a “zombie project, utterly unfunded, but technically not dead, because ODOT (and its enablers) pump millions into keeping it on life support.”
Keeping the project “undead” comes at a cost to existing infrastructure. In fact, already in November 2023, ODOT announced reduced services, warning Oregon residents that unless it receives more grant or taxpayer money, it cannot afford to maintain or even plow its roads. “ODOT is planning to reduce snow plowing on some roads, and not repaint fog lines on the sides of many rural highways,” Cortright wrote in response to ODOT’s announcement. “Cutting these modest expenditures won’t save much money, but what they will do is directly endanger road users.”
As the agency threatens the public with unsafe road conditions in an effort to convince that same public to demand more funding for ODOT, it has a roster of boondoggles that it is both currently funding and trying to fund. Even the local news accused the agency of lying:
In October, the Oregon Department of Transportation began getting the word out that it will not have enough funding to plow or sand roadways over the coming winter to the extent that it has in previous years, blaming a combination of inflation and declining fuel tax revenue. But there is a distinction between the agency’s messaging and the facts… It’s not accurate to say that fuel tax revenues have gone down — they are still going up.
In fact, both City Observatory and KGW-TV illustrated how fuel tax revenue has increased and ODOT has more money in the current fiscal year than it has for years prior. The agency did not respond.
As the project grows more and more unpopular by the week, many like Cortright can only hope that it ultimately dies, rather than remain undead. The cancellation of the half-a-billion-dollar I-205 widening elsewhere in Portland offers hope, but, as Strong Towns President Charles Marohn puts it, “the only way to combat these boondoggles is to not let them begin, in the first place.”
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.