Leaders from around ODOT's Region 1 are looking at how to bridge the urban-rural divide in transportation prioritization.
It's been more than three months since a group looking at transportation funding in the Portland region convened, but members seem no closer to an agreement on how to distribute money in the Oregon Department of Transportation's Region 1.
That much was clear at last Thursday's meeting of the Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation, when Clackamas County Commissioner Paul Savas called for the formation of one group to prioritize state transportation funding for all of ODOT's Region 1, which extends from Molalla to Forest Grove and Canby to Hood River.
Metro representatives have pushed for a two-committee option, which would have one committee prioritizing transportation projects in the urban portions of the Portland region, and another prioritizing projects for the rural areas.
But that option, Savas said at last week's JPACT meeting, would make it hard to address improvements to highway connections between outlying areas in Clackamas County and the urban Portland region.
"We have a substantial number of highways that are part of the commute shed," Savas said. "Even in Estacada, almost every question is about transportation. They have 158 acres of employment land buildable out there, and very little transportation access. In Molalla, it's transportation, transportation. In Canby, it's transportation, transportation."
A task force, meeting as part of the Oregon Solutions program, convened in May to start discussing the prioritization problem, and look for a solution.
In the rest of Oregon, task forces called Area Committees on Transportation, or ACTs, set funding priorities and then present those priorities to the Oregon Commission on Transportation, which has final say on how some state transportation money is spent.
There is no ACT in ODOT's Region 1, leading to ad hoc committees assigning funding for the State Transportation Improvement Program, or STIP. (JPACT, despite its similar acronym, is primarily geared at looking at federal funding, and focuses transportation money inside the federally-defined urban area, which has a different boundary from ODOT's Region 1.)
In the last round of STIP funding, $38.3 million out of the available $81.6 million went to road improvement projects in ODOT's Portland region. Another $17.7 million went to multi-modal projects that included key road and pedestrian improvement elements, such as a rebuilding of Northeast 238th Avenue north of Glisan Street. About $21.1 million went to bike and pedestrian projects, and $4.4 million went to transit projects.
About $7.2 million went to projects in rural Clackamas County, the largest of which was a $1.9 million sidewalk project in Sandy.
The impetus for creating an ACT is based, largely, on a perception that there isn't enough being done to decrease highway congestion, particularly in Clackamas County.
"Clackamas (County) has tremendous needs for road and highway connectivity that transit cannot practically provide or supplant," Savas wrote in a letter to the state task force studying the issue.
But Metro Councilor Craig Dirksen pointed out that forming one committee to prioritize transportation projects in all of ODOT's Region 1 would probably still leave representatives from rural Clackamas County feeling left out.
"If the representation on that commission were to be at all proportional to population, the smaller communities in rural areas would be, to use my term, steamrolled by the urban area," Dirksen said. "They would have a challenge to feel that they're being adequately represented."
Rural Clackamas County has about 122,000 residents, compared to 386,000 in all of Clackamas County and 1.5 million people who live within Metro's urban growth boundary.
A two-ACT option, Dirksen said, would give both the urban and rural areas direct access to the statewide transportation commission. The urban and rural committees could reach a group decision on overall priorities for their regions.
In a letter to the task force looking at the issue, Metro Councilor Carlotta Collette said the majority of people she's spoken with believe the two-ACT option will improve access to the state committee.
"A two-ACT system could create the base of support for two distinct sets of needs, that of the metropolitan area and that of the surrounding communities," she wrote.
That was supported by Michael Wagner, a resident of the Mulino hamlet southeast of Canby.
"Formation of only one ACT will give the urban area domination of the entire process," he wrote.
The Oregon Solutions task force is scheduled to meet Sept. 22 to try and get closer to an agreement.