House Rep Mark Gamba speaks out on why Democrats didn’t pass a transportation bill – BikePortland

I don’t know about you, but I’m still fascinated by the complete political breakdown that happened at the State Capitol five days ago. With so much at stake, and so much work done to fix the state’s structural revenue challenges, the fact that they came away with nothing is boggles my mind. I feel like the better we understand what happened, the easier it is to cope with and the less likely we are to fail so dearly again next time.

On that note, this morning I interviewed House Representative Mark Gamba to get a detailed perspective from someone who had a front-row seat to the drama surrounding House Bill 2025. Rep. Gamba is a member of the Joint Committee on Transportation Reinvestment and former two-term mayor of Milwaukie. He has a well-earned reputation as an expert in transportation policy and was the lead author of the Safe, Modern, Affordable, Reliable Transportation (SMART) Framework — a progressive policy package that garnered significant support from top Democrats and eventually became an amendment to House Bill 2025.

I’ve edited the interview for clarity, but left most of it in tact so you can learn as much as possible and delve into Gamba’s thinking beyond typical sound bites and prepared statements.

Jonathan Maus/BikePortland

How are you feeling right now?

Representative Gamba

I’m still pretty disturbed and how badly that was all handled. I am very concerned for Oregon, we were already the lowest taxed state of all the western states in terms of transportation funding (according to this comparison prepared for the Joint Committee on Transportation by ODOT Finance and Budget Director Daniel Porter), and not just by a little bit. I mean, we’re a little bit less than Montana, but otherwise, all the other states are significantly more than we are — two to four times more.

BikePortland

Going into this session, what was your goal when it came to funding transportation?

Gamba

If you go back to 2017 [when the last transportation funding package was passed] they knew that t get ODOT caught up to where they had the money they needed to function with just basic operating expenses, they needed to raise the gas tax at that point by about 70 cents. And they raised it a dime, and simultaneously said, ‘Oh by the way, go do a bunch of these really expensive projects.’ They said you can toll. That was their big give on how we were supposed to pay for all that. But that whole tolling thing was mishandled, so now we’re in a situation where we have a couple of the big projects under construction and they’re paying for those out of the State Highway Fund, which means they’re putting less into preservation and maintenance than they should be by a long shot.

I was told that during the 1960s we were replacing around 50 or 60 bridges every year. Now we’re replacing two or three every year, and there are more older bridges now than there were in the 60s. A lot of our bridges are very old, and we should be replacing them — if you just do the math there’s over 7,000 bridges in the state and ODOT is responsible for a little less than 3,000 of those. If you divide that by 100 [bridge lifespan], you find out that we need to be doing about 30 of them a year just to keep up. And like I said, we’re doing two or three right now.

So that is the state of things we walked into this session. And cities and counties are in a similar boat.

We knew we needed a real package this year. We needed to move back up to where the point where we were spending a significant amount of money on maintenance and preservation and all the other things we should be doing. We should be starting to move our transportation system in a direction that is lower carbon. So there’s a variety of ways you do that. You increase transit, you increase bike/ped, you need charging infrastructure more readily available, you start to help people switch to EVs with rebates, both for cars and bikes, all those kinds of things to reduce greenhouse gases because 35% of greenhouse gases in this state are transportation-related.

And that’s not even touching safety. We have hundreds of people dying in just the metro region every year in predominantly bike/ped versus car accidents. And there are solutions to that… So it’s stuff like that that we need to be going through systematically and fixing. There needed to be significant investments in those things.

BikePortland

So what happened?

Gamba

We voted on a really solid bill, got it out of committee, and then had a significant amount of pushback from within Democratic part of the legislature, and had to negotiate that down. We still had a decent bill coming out of that — no greenhouse gas reductions — but certainly some good safety investments and moving the needle on, catching back up, but not nearly what it should have been.

So we negotiate with the handful of Dems, get something that they can live with. And we end up negotiating with the car dealers so that they don’t refer it to the ballot, and we finally land on something that, while it’s not awesome, starts to move the needle on some of those things. Then we didn’t have the votes in the Senate to get it out.

BikePortland

Do you think mistakes were made? If so, what were they?

Gamba

Yes I think there were mistakes made. I think there was too much effort in the early part of the session in trying to get some Republicans on board, and more or less ignoring that the Democrats were going to have feelings or thoughts about the package. We’re not a monolith, and we certainly aren’t in lockstep.

So when that bill came out with 10 days left in the session and there had been eight hours between the time the bill dropped and the time we were supposed to vote it out of committee, people were rightfully angry. I do not blame them for being angry about that. My team was very steeped in it because we had been deeply engaged early on to try and create the dash 15 amendments [which Gamba authored with a bloc of progressive Dems including Portland Senator Khanh Pham], to sort of set the bar of what we should be doing right now. So my team was very deeply involved and we were able to go through that bill in those eight hours. But it was a struggle, and I had four people, so I can imagine that everybody else on that committee was really angry.

BikePortland

Who pushed that early collaboration with Republicans? Was it the committee leaders, or did Democratic party leadership come in and take control of the package away from the committee?

Gamba 

I don’t think it had much of anything to do with the committee chairs.

BikePortland

So pretty early on, party leadership was saying, ‘Let’s get Republicans in the room.’ And you feel like there was time spent on that and that it didn’t go anywhere?

Gamba

And not only that, the more frustrating thing is that there were a lot of bills that were given consideration this session — that were given hearings and work sessions and passed out of committees — that should have never seen the light of day in a state as blue as Oregon. There were a lot of bills that died on the altar of appeasing Republicans.

BikePortland

You shared a long list of all the things that Dems wanted to accomplish with the bill. And Republicans’ main point of criticism was that it simply asked too much of Oregon taxpayers. Do you have any regrets about coming out with such a large bill?

Gamba

My attitude is: That which is necessary can’t be impossible. Right? If we have things that we absolutely have to do. I mean, for me, climate change is in that category. It doesn’t really matter if it’s hard, or uncomfortable, or bums people out — the reality is we’ve got to do it. We can’t keep kicking the can down the road and then hoping for some kind of miracle. They did that in 2017 they kicked the can down the road, and here we are today — in a situation where our system is going to start falling apart. Are voters at that point going to say, ‘Oh, geez, sorry. We should have known better, and you guys should have taxed us; but that was our bad because we didn’t want to be taxed.’ No, they’re just going to say, ‘You guys can’t run a state. You don’t know how to govern.’ So it was a Hobson’s choice. There really was no choice in this.

BikePortland

What you described is sort of like a Democratic doom loop where Dem party leadership is tries to collaborate with Republicans, then Republicans want to starve the system of funding, rally around “no new taxes,” and then criticize the people who run it as being incompetent. What can the Dems do to get out of that loop?

Gamba

I have only my experience at sort of the city level to lean on. In Milwaukie [where he served eight years as mayor], when we needed to do something big, when we needed to do something that we need to raise people’s fees on the water bill or whatever, we put a lot a lot of time and effort into helping them understand why. And that was my frustration early on in this session. We spent months in committee condemning ODOT, saying, ‘ODOT is so terrible, they’re so inefficient,’ and then we knew we were going to be turning around and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, we need a bunch of money for this organization that we just you how terrible they are.’

BikePortland

A framework for HB 2025 came out in early April, but the bill itself wasn’t released until June 9th — just 18 days before the session ended. Why do you think there was such a delay?

Gamba 

I wasn’t in the room, so can only judge it from the outside. If you were to ask the official line it would probably be something like, ‘It takes a long time to calculate the Highway Cost Allocation Study numbers.’ First of all, bullshit. Secondly, so what? Even if that was the case, that shouldn’t keep you from from putting out a concept and telling us, ‘Okay, this is broadly what we’re thinking about, you know, raising taxes this much so that we can start to move the needle on all these things that we need to be fixing.’ You can totally do that, even if you don’t have the exact calculations for HCAS yet. And, and that’s what should have been happening, in my opinion.

BikePortland

There’s a very strong current of criticism from Republicans that ODOT is simply inefficient and irresponsible and that they should focus on trimming fat in order to balance their budget. Now there’s an online, Republican-aligned punditry ecosystem that’s saying ODOT should eliminate DEI and social equity programs to pay the bills. What do you think about that?

Gamba

Let’s say ODOT is super inefficient and they could be doing all these things that they’re supposed to be doing with the money they have right now. Well, if that’s the case, why is every other state in the west (other than Montana) spending two-to-four times what we are on transportation? (See chart below). We have more bridges. Think about all the rivers in this state, and bridges are crazy-expensive infrastructure. So if it’s purely inefficient, then why are all these other states having to spend so much? It does not hold water.

It’s really easy to sell that to people, because it just seems like so much money. And people like to assume that government sucks, and, you know, government doesn’t help itself. It often does suck! But it’s also not as inefficient as people think it is. Could ODOT do better? For sure, particularly on delivery of small projects, like bike/ped projects, those tend to cost twice as much as they should.

The fact is construction across the board since 2010 or so has been escalating in costs about 15% per year, so every six years you double the cost of projects.

It’s comfortable, magical thinking, to think that ODOT is just so inefficient that if they just were more efficient they could do all these things we ask of them without any more money. And yes I know that relative to the cost of living in Oregon, wages are crap. The bottom half of the population is barely hanging on by their fingernails. No question, that is absolutely true. Is the solution to that, to let our bridges start falling down? Or maybe should we look at other solutions, like either putting some downward pressure on people’s biggest costs, i.e. housing or put some upward pressure on wages, right?

I don’t think the solution is to let our infrastructure completely crumble.

BikePortland

Have you heard any substantive ideas or solutions from Republicans that would fund our system, build bridges, and be able to solve the problems that you’ve laid out?

Gamba

No. Full stop. The Republican proposal was basically to steal the STIF [Statewide Transportation Improvement Fund] from transit, stop spending any money on bike/ped anything, take the money from Safe Routes to School, take the money from everything, and go back to just the core services of keeping the roads and bridges repaired and plowed and all that stuff. So you know, obviously, when you have a third of your population that can’t or won’t drive, that’s problematic.

BikePortland

In an interview on Oregon Public Broadcasting Tuesday, Senator Mark Meek implied that a major reason he opposed the bill was because he didn’t see how it funded operations and maintenance. Can you set the record straight and explain how HB 2025 would have funding operations and maintenance?

Gamba

The bill would have increased revenue for the State Highway Fund, and operation, maintenance is, as you know, the largest single line item in the highway fund. So, yeah, I’m not sure what he wanted in there. Did he want it called out specifically that we’re going to spend this much on highway maintenance and preservation?

He’s also the same guy that claimed that there was still tolling in the bill, so his ability to read a bill is a little suspect.

BikePortland

How frustrating was that to have Senator Meek not just vote no, but to, in multiple instances, not really seem like he understood what the bill actually did?

Gamba

Very frustrating, but you a little bit get inured to that in the legislature, because so often we’re in these committee hearings with Republicans who do not — in any way, shape or form — understand the bill that they’re looking at and you just have to sit there and listen to them ring on about stuff that’s just not even remotely accurate and move on with your day.

BikePortland

Clearly there was a handful of Democrats in the House that voiced concerns with the bill too. What do you think were there objections?

Gamba

It was variety of things. They were absolutely swing seat folks and taking a big tax vote was going to be tough for them. No question. You know, that propaganda works. It works on Democrats as well as it works on Republicans. There were also Democrats who opposed it and who don’t live in swing seat districts and I never got an honest answer from them. I got their talking points, but those were clearly not why they really opposed it.

BikePortland

You mentioned how the propaganda was effective. I think Dems in general are overlooking the fact that there’s a really powerful online media ecosystem that supports Republicans. This mirrors what I think is happening at the national level where we just saw the national Democrats say they they want to find the left’s Joe Rogan. Is that something you’re aware of and think should be a bigger issue?

Gamba

I absolutely think about all the time. Part of the problem some Democrats have, is Democrats tend to try and be accurate with the things that they say. There is more of a tendency towards that with Democrats and there is with Republicans. Republicans will say whatever emotional message will get their story across, so it’s really easy to gin up emotions when you don’t have to have any concern whatsoever for the truth. And we are losing that battle.

It’s 10 times harder to gin up an emotional response and to have people viscerally understand something when you are also at the same time trying to be accurate. That’s what Democrats are going to have to put a whole lot of thought and effort and probably money into, is learning how to, and hiring people, that know how to message hard things in a way that people can wrap their heads around them and have an emotional impact. Because, you know, there’s that old saying about speeches: People don’t care what you say, they care how you made them feel. If you have no concerns for the validity of what you’re saying, it’s easy to make people feel certain ways.

BikePortland

What do you think the Democrats should have done differently?

Gamba

I think they should have been spending a lot of time and effort helping Oregonians understand the state of our transportation system and why it was so very important to start catching back up financially. That’s what needed to happen. Secondarily, I would say there needed to be a lot more time and effort into helping our own caucus understand those same things, and there was very little, if any, time and effort spent towards that.

BikePortland

What does the failure of the transportation package mean for the I-5 Rose Quarter project?

Gamba

Rose Quarter needed this bill to happen. I don’t know how they start actual construction on the Rose quarter now, without some bill that begins to create that level of funding just to pay for the bond.

BikePortland

What do you think are the chances of something getting passed in a special session? And something big enough to actually address Rose Quarter and other needs?

Gamba

I would be gobsmacked if we could, in a special session, pass a funding mechanism big enough to I to help the Rose Quarter, and to ensure that we have sufficient funds without further eating into our already depleted money for maintenance and preservation.

Could something be passed that maybe keeps us from firing a whole bunch of ODOT workers? Maybe. But what they were proposing [with HB 3402, a last ditch, failed effort to pass a three-cent gas tax] was completely cutting cities and counties out.

BikePortland

Do you think ODOT and the governor are bluffing on these layoff threats?

Gamba

No. They’re very sincere. There is somebody within the power structure that I have really good relationship with and that I trust implicitly, and in no uncertain terms, she’s convinced that layoffs were going to start immediately.

BikePortland

Do you think what happened at the state gives more political inertia for cities to pass new funding mechanisms to make up the gap?

Gamba

I certainly think they’ll try. They don’t have much of a choice. I mean, there as between a rock and a hard place as ODOT is. You’ve got really great leaders in a lot of cities that are not going to just go, ‘Oh well, guess it’s just going to fall apart,’ and then walk away. They’re going to be doing everything they can to keep it from falling apart.

Unfortunately, one of the many things we didn’t do this session that was give cities and city councils the right to pass a gas tax in their city without having a public vote.

BikePortland

I saw that. Can you help me understand how you respond to people that say, ‘Gosh, that’s horrific. How can the government just raise my taxes without asking me first?’

Gamba

Well, there’s a whole lot of places where that is the case. When was the last time the federal government asked you about a tax increase they were going to put on you?

Our revenue system in the state is so broken. Most states have a three-legged stool. They have property tax, income tax and sales tax. If you look at those charts that I was referencing that show the revenue that’s being spent on transportation in seven western states, about half of the money going towards transportation in many of those states is sales tax money. Oregon decided at some point that we just weren’t going to have sales tax as if it’s not going to have any effect on anything whatsoever.

And the only thing that allows groups like Oregon Business and Industry or the Portland Metro Chamber to claim that we’re the second highest taxed city in the country is because they’re ignoring sales tax. It’s like we’re going to ignore a third of the income of every other place and say that we’re the highest. It’s pure crap. They are not telling the truth. Not only do we not have a sales tax, but in the early 1990s we passed Measures 5 and 50 which artificially limited property tax. Property tax is where the bulk of the income for cities, counties, special districts, fire districts, parks districts, and schools used to come from. Since then, the State of Oregon, out of the general fund, has had to put more and more money into education. As of this year, more than 50% of school funding is coming out of the state budget. Before Measures 5 and 50 passed, only 10% of the state’s school funds were coming out of the general fund.

So when people go, ‘I’m paying all these taxes! Why can’t you just pay for it out of these taxes I’m already paying?’ it’s because you’re not paying much in the way of taxes relative to the cost of things.

BikePortland

Is there anything you’ve seen in the media or discussed in the public that you want to correct or set the record straight on?

Gamba

The condemnation of ODOT, how it is this incredibly inefficient entity, and that they could do what they’re supposed to be doing with what they have now — that is, by far and away, so inaccurate.

The local media is spending a lot of time saying how we’re one of the highest taxed states in the country, and ignoring a third of the taxes that other places pay. That is destructive. And it’s, you know, it’s the same stuff that’s happening at the federal level, right? They’re cutting all these services that working class folks need, in order to fund tax breaks for the rich, and then spinning that as, ‘We don’t need those things because you’re overpaying already.’

So that is a big piece, because if you tell people over and over and over that you’re already over-taxed, that your government is just inefficient, and nobody pushes back on that; well, then you start to believe that that’s all true. And it’s very convenient. Most people love that thought, because then, you know, in a righteous world, they wouldn’t have to pay more taxes.

BikePortland

In the absence of Democrats suddenly waking up and being awesome at comms and media messaging, do you think that the material consequence of all this policy failure will eventually be so acutely felt by Oregonians in the form of service cuts and road conditions that maybe they’ll come around to helping pay for it?

Gamba

Well, it’s a slow burn, right? Bridges aren’t going to just start falling in the river tomorrow. And by the time it’s really noticeable for people, it’ll be a totally different governor and a totally different legislature.

And it will be unfixable.

— Browse complete coverage of the transportation bill here.