PORTLAND — Oregon transportation leaders had hoped to lay out a clear path by mid-July to break ground on the nearly $800 million Rose Quarter freeway project in late 2023. But a mega meeting Tuesday evening chiefly among Black Portlanders tasked with advising planners of the project showed consensus is anything but certain.
During a three-hour meeting that brought together multiple project committees — one comprising construction and contracting leaders, another that includes people with specific ties to the Albina community decimated by the freeway construction decades ago and a third that includes government or elected officials – distrust, impatience and unanswered questions dominated the discourse.
The meeting came as ZGF Architects, the firm that signed a $2.7 million contract with the state to perform an “independent assessment” of the viability of constructing robust caps across Interstate 5 through the Rose Quarter to accommodate large buildings or otherwise reconnect the Albina community, is expected to wrap its work next month. The committees are then supposed to offer recommendations on the best option for the freeway covers, with the Oregon Transportation Commission making a final recommendation in July.
But during Tuesday’s meeting, ZGF didn’t brief the committees. Instead, two consultants from different firms presented a detailed analysis of freeway cover options. And they indicated that the two most popular options in community surveys so far —concepts that would provide the most transformative opportunities to reconnect the neighborhood and build housing and other structures atop the freeway covers — present design and engineering challenges and would delay the project. Megan Channell, the transportation department’s project manager, who is white, later indicated both options would likely push construction itself off another three or more years.
That briefing appeared to irritate multiple committee members and it came on the heels of a lengthy presentation on the various economic benefits of the project and implications associated with delaying it.
Bryson Davis, an attorney and member of the state’s executive steering committee for the project, said that before he joined the committee, “pretty much anybody” he knew told him not to trust ODOT. “It’s going to be hard for me to say with a straight face that they weren’t right,” he said.
J.W. Matt Hennessee, pastor of Vancouver Avenue First Baptist Church, said he’s supported the project for years but he was “disturbed” by the presentation Tuesday. “You all in my opinion did an elaborate job of telling us why we shouldn’t do what the community said,” he said of the consultants who outlined the purported feasibility problems with the most popular options.
Hennessee said the state had a credibility issue. That appeared to be a significant departure from his comments just weeks ago when he testified to a different committee that he wants to see “nothing that will cause any further delays.”
Estelle Love Lavespere, a member of the Historic Albina Advisory Board, one of the three committees that met Tuesday and the most recent group formed to advise the state transportation decision-makers, said the state appeared to present options to build the least substantial freeway covers as the most favorable.
Since the purpose of the covers is to reknit a neighborhood torn asunder for racist reasons, “to be honest, that’s kind of like the least restorative justice,” she said. She said restoring Black homeownership would be restorative justice, too, but the state didn’t give detailed presentations on how it would bring residents back to the neighborhood.
The meeting, as with those in the past 11 months, didn’t include representatives from the city of Portland or Albina Vision Trust. The latter is a Black-led nonprofit that for years has been advocating for reconnecting the neighborhood and bringing economic vitality back to the area, which formed the heart of Oregon’s historic Black community, including homes, businesses and churches. Albina Vision Trust was one of the leading advocates pushing the state to build more robust interstate covers as far back as 2017.
Albina Vision Trust leaders stopped participating on project advisory panels last June, saying Oregon Department of Transportation leaders weren’t willing to make meaningful changes to their preconceived plans in response to the nonprofit’s feedback. Portland leaders Mayor Ted Wheeler and then-Commissioner Chloe Eudaly quickly followed suit.
Winta Yohannes, Albina Vision Trust’s managing director, watched the meeting online and said in a statement, “The skepticism and mistrust by many members of the advisory committees was telling. ODOT will need to overcome the raw doubt that they intend to build a project that reflects community values and achieves positive outcomes for the whole community. Many made it clear last night that this project should deliver both economic benefits and long-term community health and safety – we agree.”
Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who now oversees the city’s transportation bureau, issued a statement indicating the project is “absolutely not ready to be fast tracked.”
“We have an obligation to undo the racist harm of past transportation policy and rushing to finish such an impactful project will not allow us to right these past wrongs,” she said in an email. “There are far too many outstanding issues including air pollution, community input and investment, climate mitigation, and the final nature of the caps to rush this.”
After multiple speakers highlighted the trust gap, ODOT leaders including Channell and the head of the Office of Urban Mobility, Brendan Finn, acknowledged the uphill road. Channell and Finn are white, as are the two consultants who presented Tuesday.
“You are right,” Channell said in response to Hennessee, “we have a trust deficit,” adding that she didn’t intend to present reasons not to do the cover options deemed most desirable by the community. She said she wanted to bring a “technical lens” to the table.
Finn said he was trying to rebuild trust. “I do not think this is an either-or situation,” he said of the jobs versus robust cover debate. “There’s got to be a middle ground.”
“There’s still victory to be grabbed here for the community. I don’t think what you’re hearing tonight is these options are off the table,” he said of the two options most favored by Black Portlanders, which included more than 40 residents with historic ties to Albina.
Five options presented for ways to cap the interstate were presented to committees and a group of more than 150 community organizations, churches and individuals via community workshops. The state also posted an online poll and interactive survey.
The options that proved most popular with those who weighed in would remove freeway ramps from Interstate 5 at the northern edge of the project area near Northeast Broadway on its east side and North Flint Avenue on the westside and replace them with new connections to the freeway farther south, near the Moda Center. That would make it possible to build a continuous cover over the interstate from roughly Northeast Hancock Street to Northeast Weidler Street, a span of three blocks north to south, and create up to 1.1 million square feet of building space over or near the freeway. There are slight deviations in those two options – one envisions a Black cultural center atop the freeway while the other calls for slightly more housing.
The base plan proposed by the state would cover the same general area, but with sizable gaps and no capacity for structures atop the freeway covers.
Consultants said the larger continuous cover would result in challenging intersections on both sides of the freeway and would require a wider freeway cover – nearly 100 feet larger from east to west than the non-continuous caps. The state still hasn’t revealed or doesn’t know cost estimates on any of the options presented by ZGF. For the first time Tuesday, the state said those options would likely add three or more years to the project timeline.
A lawsuit filed by multiple nonprofits earlier this year seeks to delay the project’s start by several years, arguing the project demands a more extensive Environmental Impact Statement.
The Legislature in 2017 funded a sizable portion of the Rose Quarter freeway project through the $5.3 billion transportation package, citing its statewide importance as a key freight and traffic bottleneck. Oregon can begin tapping funds allocated for the project in 2022. A bill introduced by House Speaker Tina Kotek currently moving through the Legislature, however, would allow the state to use the Rose Quarter money and short-term borrowing to jumpstart other mega projects on metro freeways.
Referencing the potential delays and other challenges that engineers said would result from opting for the larger continuous caps over I-5, Steve Drahota, a project manager with the consultant HDR who presented the freeway cover analysis, said, “This larger area for redevelopment, which is a fantastic thing, does come with consequences.” He said both options that shift the freeway ramps to the south of the project area would create “unconventional intersections” and challenges on the west side of the freeway near the Moda Center, a vital northbound route for cyclists. But he said the situation would not be a “whole lot dissimilar than today,” where drivers trying to get on southbound I-5 have to wait for cyclists when they have a dedicated light.
By the end of the night, some participants had highlighted the unyielding gun violence Portland is experiencing, particularly the effects disproportionately experienced by Black residents, the deep reservoir of distrust in institutions like the Oregon Department of Transportation and the frustration in seeing a project that could funnel as much as $175 million to minority owned contractors get delayed.
James Posey, a longtime leader in construction circles who sits on the community opportunity advisory committee, acknowledged he and others were “emotionally attached” to the project and its potential for Black workers.
“You can’t use a highway to cure all these ills,” he said of the societal pressures and institutionalized racism facing Black people. “The planners who have gentrified our community had a plan,” he said. “I’m angry about that. We don’t have a plan. We should have a plan.”
Posey said that the stars are aligned and the state needed to build the project now, adding the caveat that he has “never been in love with ODOT.”
“You all don’t get this,” he said to those on the Zoom call. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. If we don’t get this now, we might never get this,” he said of the project and its potential for Raimore Construction, the Black-owned firm that is working with the construction management company. Jeff Moreland, owner of Raimore Construction, was also on the call and highlighted that the Black community is in trouble and kids need opportunities to earn good salaries. The Rose Quarter project would be under construction for five years, other construction advocates pointed out.
At one point in the evening, the state presented a slide that indicated workers were already being recruited.
Other community opportunity advisory committee members like Stephen Green, a financial expert, said ODOT should be hiring Moreland and his firm to lead construction projects in other parts of Oregon.
“I bet he can do great ass work in Medford, Redmond, all these other places,” Green said of Moreland, citing the transportation agency’s massive budget.
He also used Posey’s stars being aligned metaphor and expanded it to the White House. He asked whether ODOT is reaching out to the Biden administration, given that the project is not only aimed at fixing a traffic bottleneck but also addressing racist actions that brought the freeway through the community in the first place.
“That’s a conversation we haven’t had yet,” said Channell, the project director, calling it “an important partnership that needs to be at the table.”
Portland has ties to the Biden administration, particularly in the Department of Transportation. Maurice Henderson, Wheeler’s former chief of staff who previously worked for the city transportation department and also had stints at TriMet and on the state transportation commission, is a senior aide to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Posey pushed back on Green’s assertion about doing jobs elsewhere in the state. “Black folk can’t even get their car washed in some of these places in southern Oregon,” he said. “Raimore needs to do a project in their own backyard,” he said.
Raimore is the general contractor building TriMet’s high capacity bus line on Division Street, a project that is under construction and scheduled to be finished in 2022.
Steven Holt, the facilitator who is overseeing the Rose Quarter committees, said he understands the Black community’s distrust. Holt, who is Black, said the state transportation department’s goal was to create outcomes that are different than in the past and that’s why they hired his consultant firm to moderate and lead the various committees’ work.
He added that committee members don’t need to like any of the specific options, opening the door for a hybrid option comprising multiple plans presented to the committee. He said the state is doing what it set out to do: create a path of “transparent decision-making.”
“We obviously need to come together again,” he said of another joint committee meeting.
Two of the groups will do just that next week when the Historic Albina board and the executive steering committee meet May 24.
