PORTLAND, Ore. — Oregon is set to receive about $17 million in federal funding for more than a dozen projects in Portland and Hood River, many of them focused on local transportation issues, as part of a package of budget bills that the U.S. House passed earlier this week. The deal still has to pass in the Senate, but U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Portland, said on Friday that he had about "90% confidence" that it would make it through, and he began touting the local funding.
The biggest grant is $4 million for the Hood River Bridge replacement, but the rest are smaller-scale projects like safety upgrades at intersections along Southeast 112th Avenue in Portland and a segment of the Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail.
"We focus on areas where the local community has identified priorities that can make a difference, and it doesn't have to be a trillion-and-a-half dollars," he said, adding that he prioritized projects where the funding could lead to visible improvements in a matter of months rather than years or decades.
The intersections where 112th Avenue crosses Southeast Holgate Boulevard and Division Street have been notorious high-crash areas for decades, Blumenauer said, even back when he was representing the area in the Oregon Legislature before getting elected to Congress.
The grants include $850,000 for the Columbia River Highway trail between Perham Creek and Mitchell Creek. The overall project aims to one day provide a continuous biking path all the way from the Portland metro area to Hood River. The new grant is a relatively small amount, Blumenauer said, but the important thing is to keep chipping away at the project.
"It's maybe 20% of what we had hoped to have," he said. "It's part of a larger package, though, that we've been putting millions of dollars in for the last 20 years. When you go out there now, you can see the results of the incremental investments, and we're going to keep working at it till we get it done."
Some of the projects will have impacts that extend beyond the immediate work, he added, such as a roughly $960,000 grant for a wastewater treatment plant upgrade in Gresham. The project will enable the plant to filter out ammonia, which is a byproduct of semiconductor manufacturing, so the goal is to bolster semiconductor operations near the city, which fill a critical niche by producing simple microchips for things like cars and microwaves.
"I've been fighting not for advanced chip manufacturing — I mean, that's cool, that's good, and big companies like Intel are getting billions of dollars — but what was messing us up (during the pandemic), we were having supply chains that were all blocked," Blumenauer said. "And they were blocked not because we didn't have multi-billion dollar new chip manufacturing; we couldn't get what are called legacy chips. Chips that cost, you know, 27 cents."
Blumenauer also highlighted a $1 million grant that ties into the 82nd Avenue project in Southeast Portland. The busy 7-mile corridor has a poor safety record due to its longtime status as an "orphan highway" — a city street still controlled by the Oregon Department of Transportation. Portland and ODOT reached a deal to transfer control of 82nd Avenue to the city two years ago, setting the stage for $185 in planned safety upgrades in the coming years.
The federal grant isn't part of the upgrade package; instead, it will go toward the purchase of land along the corridor to preserve it for future affordable housing development. It's important to set the land aside now, Bumenauer said, because the safety upgrades will make the whole corridor more attractive for development.
"All of a sudden, this land becomes more valuable, and we don't want to lose the land for affordable housing," he said. "So $1 million to buy up some of this, to protect it, is something that's not going to get headlines. But I think it's really, really important to be able to protect it."
Retirement plans
Blumenauer announced last fall that he plans to retire after finishing his current term at the end of this year, stepping away from Congress after 28 years representing Portland and Hood River. He's developed a reputation as a champion for transportation during that time, especially public and active transportation in Portland.
When asked if he views that role as a torch that he hopes to see passed to his successor, he said he's proud of what he's accomplished and already has good relationships with everyone running for his seat this year, so he sees potential to keep working with them on local projects.
"We've built a constituency — all of these things just didn't spring from my head," he said. "These are the results of the conversations we've had with the community, with local government, with TriMet, and I hope that we have developed a constituency for people to follow through on that."
He said he also plans to keep pushing for local transportation projects himself, such as trail work and a streetcar extension to Montgomery Park. He said he wants to keep being a partner in Portland's Vision Zero program, which aims to eliminate traffic deaths in the city.
Portland launched its version of the program in 2016, but recent years have seen traffic fatality numbers trending in the wrong direction, both in Portland and nationwide, which Blumenauer attributed in part to bad driving habits that people picked up during the pandemic. He said new traffic signals and other safety upgrades at intersections can help, but the issue is "an example of something that's not going to change overnight."
"It's the same way, how long it's taken to put together that trail in the Columbia River Gorge. We just keep chipping away, working at it, making progress, and all of a sudden, we turn around and we've got it," he said. "And that's, I think, what's going to happen when we change the dynamic of traffic safety."
