Last week at the regular Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation meeting, two members of our Regional Flexible Funds Task Force made a presentation on their work. Steve Ganiere from Alliance Packaging in Beaverton and Stephen Gomez from the Bicycle Transportation Alliance explained to the gathering of regional elected leaders and agency directors how they had spent the past few months coming to a shared understanding of the complex challenge of balancing freight mobility and access for bicycles and pedestrians.
I want to take this opportunity to thank the members of that task force for their commitment, creativity and common sense. Most of the members attended all five of the two- to three-hour task force meetings. They represent trucking and rail firms, manufacturing, hospitals, education, bike and pedestrian activists, underserved communities and more. They started from very different perspectives, spent many hours trying to explain and understand each others' issues, and found they had more in common than not.
This was a bit of an experiment. In the past, we would have convened the Regional Freight Task Force and the Active Transportation Partnership separately.
As chair of JPACT, I proposed that bringing them to the table together, and adding new faces that had not been in either group before, might provide more insight and give us a better outcome. Together, this new group helped us set priorities for how to spend the scarce federal dollars our region allocates to non-road projects—the so-called "regional flexible funds." They also established criteria for judging which projects make the most sense for funding. This was hard work. I encourage you to follow the link to read their report.