Somehow it’s that time of the year again.
Every December, we provide our year-in-review of all the shenanigans you helped us organize, and then we ask you to consider adding No More Freeways to your list of year-end giving to help us keep the lights on around here.
Once again, we’ve been awfully busy – and we’ve been astonishingly effective despite running as an all-volunteer, grassroots organization. Click through to read about all of our accomplishments this year and considering throwin’ us a couple bucks to help us gear up for a busy 2024.
Hundreds of Comments and one self-run public hearing for the Rose Quarter
We kicked off the new year the way we best know how – by hosting a public hearing.
Apparently ODOT was too afraid of our overwhelming community turn out and decided against hosting an in-person testimony event during the public comment period for the Rose Quarter’s Supplemental Environmental Assessment. (this is despite the fact the agency has already spent $110 million just on planning and community engagement. o figure).
So instead, we hosted our own. We rented out the cafeteria at Harriet Tubman Middle School and brought dozens of community members together to speak on camera and submit the video as part of the public record. The video (watch above!) was the crown jewel of the thousands of documents and public comments we submitted for the official record, which closed in early January. No More Freeways submitted testimony for the Rose Quarter Supplemental Environmental Assessment with our pals at Neighbors for Clean Air, and our joint letter is available here; you can read testimony from numerous other community organizations here in our advocacy library. Special thanks to Sunrise PDX
Interstate Bridge Replacement / Just Crossing Alliance Takes on salem
Throughout the 2023 legislative session, No More Freeways worked closely with our allies over at the Just Crossing Alliance to talk to legislators and demand a right-sized proposal for the Interstate Bridge Replacement. Throughout March to June, we submitted hundreds of comments and organized dozens of individuals to testify in person in Salem demanding a “Right Size, Right Now” for the proposal, and No More Freeways helped packed the building in April for the Just Crossing Alliance lobby day. NMF co-founder Chris Smith wrote an op-ed in BikePortland explaining why advocates are so concerned about the project, and throughout the final months of the session we were so grateful to see our partners including Oregon Environmental Council, Verde, Sunrise PDX, Oregon Walks who continued to show up and demand a thoughtful investment in this bridge.
While the IBR bill died in committee after months of numerous contentious amendments, we were ultimately disheartened by the final outcome – the legislature eventually allocated a full $1 billion of general funds over the next four biennium to the project. (we were hoping to restrict the support to $250 for just this biennium, and to direct the revenue to come from the Highway Trust Fund instead of robbing the General Fund of resources Oregon could be using for schools or affordable housing). We can take some solace that, thanks to our efforts, some truly perverse language queuing up future funding for the Rose Quarter Freeway Expansion and restricting organized labor’s ability to demand a Project Labor Agreement didn’t make it into the final bill.
NMF Joe Cortright, with typical subtlety, submitted an op-ed to the Oregonian titled “Oregon’s funding plan for I-5 bridge is a generational crime.”
In future years, when the climate crisis is getting worse, when ODOT’s budget is in worse shape, when we don’t have enough money in the general fund to pay for schools and other public services, when there isn’t money to deal with orphan highways and deadly roads that kill cyclists and pedestrians, when we’re cutting public transit service, when pavement is deteriorating, you’ll be able to look back and see one decision that made all of these problems worse: the Legislature’s 11th-hour backroom deal to squander a billion dollars-plus in general funds on the Interstate Bridge Replacement.
– Joe Cortright, Oregonian op-ed this July
What’s next for the IBR? No More Freeways has continued to closely monitor the project, submitting public records requests and sending letters to the federal watchdogs pointing out that the IBR’s own Benefit Cost study is deeply flawed.
The sixty-day public comment period for the IBR’s Environmental Impact Statement is expected in the first or second quarter of 2024. We’ll be rallying comments and testimony in support, and we’re going to need your help. Stay tuned.
The I-205 Expansion “Indefinitely Postponed”, Rose QuarteR’s Not lookin’ too Good either
The week after the legislative session ended, ODOT’s Urban Mobility Office made public what we’ve all known for a while – with Governor Tina Kotek’s action to institute a multi-year pause on tolling, ODOT simply doesn’t have the funding to move forward with the numerous regional megaprojects and their spiraling costs. The report (which also noted that the Rose Quarter’s price tag is now up to $1.9 Billion, more than four times the $450 million price-tag in 2017) notes that the Rose Quarter project must ultimately be stalled until more funding is made available and that the I-205 expansion is “postponed indefinitely.” This acknowledgement echos what we outlined in two letters sent to the Federal Highway Administration earlier this spring.
Needless to say, we’re pretty damn excited about this. No More Freeways helped turn out nearly three hundred comments on ODOT’s proposed I-205 expansion west of the Abernethy Bridge this spring, a project which US PIRG identified as one of the nation’s worst Highway Boondoggles in their annual report. No More Freeways also submitted our own technical testimony, catching numerous troubling flaws with the project including most notably that the Benefit Cost Analysis suggested this project cost more than it was delivering to the community.
To be clear, these projects are like zombies – we are under new illusion that ODOT wouldn’t begin pursuing this project again with new funding or potentially new political leadership. And we are already seeing ODOT begin to start discussing the need for a new freeway expansion over the Willamette River south of Wilsonville. But every delay is a victory, and as price tags for these megaprojects continue to dramatically escalate these delays ultimately make these freeway projects infeasible.
We were also delighted that this news brought about our favorite sassy tweet from 2023 from NMF pal Iain Mackenzie:
Sunrise throws No More Freeways a SUMMER Birthday BASH
This summer marks seven years since Chris Smith first gathered all of us at the Lucky Lab Brewpub to discuss fighting the Rose Quarter Freeway, leading to the creation of No More Freeways. To celebrate our collective accomplishments, Sunrise PDX hosted a birthday party for No More Freeways at the end of August, and painted a gorgeous banner detailing the history of our movement. Special thanks to State Representatives Mark Gamba and Khanh Pham who attended and spoke at the rally!
Inaugural National Freeway Fighter Conference IN CINCINNATI
After over three years of planning, No More Freeways helped organize the inaugural Freeway Fighters Summit in Cincinnati this October. Over fifty people from over twenty five different freeway fighting efforts across the country attended to share tips and tricks of all the community organizing, legal strategies, communications, fundraising and political strategy efforts it takes to stop the freeway industrial complex. The summit was a huge success, and journalist Megan Kimble penned an excellent article about the event published last month in Bloomberg’s CityLab.
Progress (but not nearly enough) on the Regional Transportation Plan
No More Freeways closely tracked the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) throughout this year, submitting testimony and soliciting dozens of additional letters to the Metro Council and JPACT demanding greater commitment to prioritizing projects and policies advancing public health and climate goals.
Thanks to the advocacy of our partners including Verde, 1000 Friends of Oregon and the Getting There Together Coalition, the RTP significantly improved from it’s initial draft, including instituting significant new mechanisms of transparency of funding requests from ODOT and greater accountability around the agency’s megaprojects. However, as articulated in our testimony, No More Freeways remains concerned that the RTP adopted ultimately isn’t stringent enough in more explicitly prioirtizing investments towards safety and climate. As Joe Cortright wrote in City Observatory, Metro’s models on carbon reductions are riddled with outdated and overly generous assumptions and data, and No More Freeways was joined by Extinction Rebellion last month testifying in opposition to the RTP to push the council for bolder reforms. Check BikePortland for a recap of last month’s hearing.
Spectacular showing at Autumn OTC, Legislature hearings
The last few months have been busy, too! Portland’s local Sunrise hub organized a series of powerful youth climate justice testifiers to the Oregon Transportation Commission, which held their first in-person hearing in Portland in over three years this November. Their testimony – delivered by many teenagers who were providing public testimony for the first time in their lives – urged the OTC members to use their authority to demand an abrupt shift in direction to do something about the 40% of Oregon’s carbon emissions that come from transportation, and instruct ODOT to conduct an EIS on the Rose Quarter. We are so grateful for the continued support and elbow grease from the youth climate justice advocates – we believe the best community movements are inter-generational, and it’s truly an honor to get to coordinate and organize with them all.
And on December 2nd, No More Freeways and Sunrise helped organize dozens of individuals who testified at the two hearings of the Joint Special Subcommittee on Transportation Planning. This represented the first time in over seven years in which legislators were present for public testimony on the Rose Quarter and boy, you all delivered. Thank you to the hundreds who submitted public comment and testified in person. No More Freeways’ written testimony is available here.
We CAUGHT odot Straight Up Lying to ALL OF US ABOUT THEIR TEN LANE FREEWAY through albina
For *years*, No More Freeways has attempted to get ODOT to answer an enormously simple question – how wide is the proposed Rose Quarter Freeway Expansion? We’ve asked this question to Rose Quarter project managers and their enormous communications team, to legislators, to OTC members, to the Governor. Despite these repeated asks, we never received an explicit quantitative answer. This is surprising, considering it’s an enormously simple question that should be easy to answer, and considering the multiple millions of dollars that ODOT spent on community outreach and public engagement for the Rose Quarter.
Well, thanks to a public records request, we finally know the answer, and it’s more outrageous than we thought.
ODOT’s current plans call for expanding the freeway to double, and in some places triple, as wide as the current freeway. In multiple planning documents, ODOT deliberately removed and obscured the numbers that allowed us to calculate that ODOT is planning a 250 foot wide freeway, large enough for the agency to run a ten lane freeway through Albina.
As horrific and outrageous as this is, it’s hardly surprising. As we outlined in a November letter sent to ODOT, the agency has repeatedly failed to meet basic public records or community engagement. We caught ODOT hosting “public meetings” that weren’t actively advertised to the public, continuing meetings after turning off the livestream, and rejecting our public records requests using absurd and not-actually-legal justifications.
What a year!
Between the public comment period for the Interstate Bridge Replacement, the expected legislative conversation around tolling policy, upcoming municipal elections in November, and the litigious response to any potential federal decision to advance the Rose Quarter Freeway Expansion (expected this spring), we’ve got a busy year ahead. Plus, now is the time to begin organizing for the 2025 legislative session, which is expected to host a conversation about a substantial investment in transportation. As Representative Khanh Pham wrote in an op-ed in BikePortland, “The upcoming long legislative session marks a crucial opportunity in our larger movement for transportation justice and reform…the end of the gas tax is the end of an era, and it’s time we prepare for the future.”
Two generous donors have offered to match every donation that we receive up to $15,000. Our all-volunteer effort has spent no more than $95,000 over the past seven years (62% raised from donations of $50 or less), and we are taking on an agency that has spent $110,000,000 just on planning for the $1,900,000,000 Rose Quarter – and thanks to you, we’re winning.
According to the RMI’s Induced Demand Calculator, stopping the Rose Quarter Expansion will prevent ODOT from adding an additional 14,400-21,902 tons of greenhouse gas emissions to our atmosphere. Chipping in a few bucks to help defeat this freeway once and for all is possibly the most cost-effective investment you can make for a cleaner, greener future. Whether you have $5000, $1500, $500, $150, $50, or even $15 to donate, we’ll mail you a hand written thank you card and a button for every donation you make to No More Freeways.
Thank you for joining us in investing in a future with No More Freeways.
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