Transportation bill passes committee (again), now heads to floor vote – BikePortland

House Bill 2025 has passed out of committee for the final time and will get a vote on the House floor Friday. The $11.6 billion package of transportation funding underwent considerable changes since it passed out of the Joint Committee on Transportation Reinvestment last week. Authors of the bill lowered the overall revenue of the bill by about $3 billion by reducing the gas tax provision and eliminating a new vehicle “transfer tax.”

Those changes helped persuade one Republican on the JCTR to vote in favor of the bill. In remarks at the committee meeting this afternoon, Senator Kevin Mannix said, “Where are we going to go if we don’t move forward with this legislation? The easy thing is to say, ‘Well, we’ll just sit back. I mean, I’m a Republican, I’ll just let the Democrats carry the water.’ But wait a minute, I’ve had an opportunity to participate in this process… and I know it would be easy enough to sit here and say no, but I’ve decided that I need to say yes so that we can move forward.”

The bill was voted out of committee 8-4, with “no” votes coming from Senators Bruce Starr and Suzanne Weber, as well as House Representatives Jeff Helfrich and Shelly Boshart Davis.

Starr and Davis were the most vocal opposition and framed their concerns primarily around the tax increases in the bill and what they felt was a lack of bipartisanship throughout the negotiations.

While Starr and Davis said Oregonians couldn’t afford to pay for safe routes and reliable transit, JCTR Co-Chair Senator Khanh Pham said she supports the bill because a dysfunctional and disinvested transportation is unaffordable. “One in three, or one in four Oregonians can’t afford a car, or maybe their household depends on one car and can’t afford a second car,” Pham said in her closing remarks. “They depend on reliable bus service and they can’t afford to be late. That is more expensive. That is costly when you’re late for work and you lose your job. Those, those are the the expenses that I worry about when it comes to impacts on Oregon families.”

Just hours before the meeting, Senator Mark Meek, a former member of the JCTR and Democrat who opposes the bill, posted an update on his Instagram page saying HB 2025 would impose a new tolling program on I-205. Meek’s assertion is completely false and it led to committee co-chairs and Governor Tina Kotek having to make remarks to debunk the rumor at the outset of the meeting.

From here, the bill, known formally as HB 2025-A28, will move to the House Floor for a vote on Friday. Given the recent changes to the bill and the relatively calm comments from lawmakers in committee today, I have a strong hunch the bill will have the votes it needs to pass.