Hello folks! We’ve been awfully busy for the last two months (we helped some Harriet Tubman middle school students to testify at Oregon Metro’s Task Force Hearing, crashed an American Society of Civil Engineers’ meeting to gawk at the Freeway Industrial Complex, and joined some Sunrise Movement PDX youth as they staged a sit-in at Mayor Wheeler’s office in City Hall). We’ve got all sorts of shenanigans up our sleeves in the months ahead; every bit of evidence suggests ODOT intends to continue lurching forward with spending untold hundreds of millions on this fossil-fuel infrastructure that will give more kids asthma and won’t even solve congestion.
In the meantime, though, if you thought ODOT was dysfunctional, incompetent and felicitous with the truth, have you heard what has been going on in Salem?
The Republicans have finally returned from their vacation in Idaho, content to pass the bare minimum legislation possible that democratic supermajorities have moved through countless committees and votes, and have been passed by the Oregon House of Representatives. The following pieces of legislation are sitting in the Senate ready for a vote. Unfortunately, the legislative session ends on Sunday, and inevitably they will have to pick and choose which pieces of legislation to prioritize.
The good news is: you can email your legislators *today* and demand that we move forward with any and all of the following bills. Whether you’ve emailed and called your legislator a dozen times or don’t even know who your legislator is, please drop them a line at your earliest convenience, for any and all of the following legislative initiatives for housing, climate, and transportation justice:
VOTE YES ON HB 2015: Drivers licenses for all. No More Freeways stands in solidarity with Causa Oregon and PCUN for transportation justice for all Oregonians, regardless of citizenship status, because we’re not racist assholes. Contact your legislator here.
VOTE NO ON HB 3023: Uber/Lyft are terrible companies that exacerbate our traffic congestion, air pollution, and take away transit riders. Local cities shouldn’t be preempted by state law from regulating them. You can email your legislators via this link by OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon.
VOTE ON HB 2020 It was 115 degrees in France today. The headlines out of the arctic are astonishing. The oceans are rising. NMF acknowledges the numerous good-faith critiques from environmental justice communities about cap and trade, but the bill has a lot of great details worth reading about in full, including language that would help discourage new revenue from being spent on new freeways.
Each of these bills have passed through numerous committees, and are just sitting, waiting for the Senate Republicans to return to vote. Call/email legislators to demand we can’t wait another two years. Don’t know who your legislator is? Look ’em up.
Even if your legislator is a rock star and supports all of these, they deserve a note of appreciation for their diligence and public service during a miserably grim, dark time for Oregon democracy.
And while you’re at it, you can tell them: no more freeways.
