Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly said Wednesday that she plans to send a 10-cent gas tax back to voters in May 2020.
The transportation commissioner made the announcement Wednesday during the City Council’s first annual briefing on the 2016 voter-approved gas tax.
Portland plans to put the funding measure on the May ballot, ahead of the log-jammed November docket which is expected to include a Metro-led regional transportation package that could number in the billions of dollars.
“We are certainly going to take the gas tax back to the voters,” Eudaly said. “It’s a dime for a dollar’s worth of problems.”
The announcement comes as the city is just hitting the halfway mark on its four-year gas tax, but transportation officials say the funding scheme has already and consistently overperformed the city’s initial revenue projections and Portlanders will see the results on the ground soon.
“This construction season is going to be a doozy,” Eudaly said.
Voters approved the existing four-year gas tax with 52 percent of the vote in May 2016. The 10-cent gas tax was projected to bring in $64 million through a marketing push designated “Fixing our Streets.” Portland City Council opted to refer the gas tax to voters after then-Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner Steve Novick sparked a years-long debate about the need for more money for street safety and maintenance projects.
With two full calendar years of gas tax revenue in hand, transportation officials said this week residents will see a dramatic increase in construction this year and in 2020. Portland has collected $39 million in gas tax money so far, $7 million more than initially estimated. According to transportation officials, it’s spent nearly $11 million of that revenue, but spending will pick up this year.
Transportation officials say they are trying to “leverage” the gas tax revenue with another $63.7 million in spending from other sources. The largest chunk of the additional funding, $21 million, comes from transportation fees charged to developers for new construction.
Some of those projects include urban renewal funds or federal grants. Hannah Schafer, a transportation spokeswoman, said the city has tried to take a step back and look at ways to improve the specific projects outlined in the 2016 ballot measure. Sometimes that means adding sidewalks or protected or buffered bike lanes in addition to paving, for example. Throughout the city, crews are conducting basic repairs on pavement in hopes of preventing further degradation.
“These focused interventions keep the rest of the street from failing,” PBOT staffer Mychal Tetteh told the council Wednesday.
Twenty-one projects of various size and scope will break ground in 2019 – ranging from sidewalks and paving and bike lanes on Southwest Capitol Highway to paving North Denver Avenue to protected bike lanes and paving work on Halsey and Weidler in the Gateway neighborhood.
A citizen oversight committee is advising the city on how to best spend the money.
The majority of the gas tax revenue, 56 percent, goes to street maintenance projects while the remainder is spent on pedestrian or bicycle safety.
A separate heavy vehicle tax approved by the City Council in 2016 is projected to bring in $8 million during the four-year period. City officials previously said the tax would bring in $10 million, but those estimates were revised downward last year after the politicians opted not to raise the tax rate because initial projects of the number of eligible trucking businesses expected to pay the tax were dramatically under initial projections.
The city has an interactive map with all the projects expected to break ground in 2019 and 2020 at fixingourstreets.com/annualreport [click the “what’s next” tab]
-- Andrew Theen
503-294-4026
@andrewtheen
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