Albina Vision Trust, No More Freeways Clash During City Council Hearing

The 2027 groundbreaking on the I-5 Rose Quarter improvement project will mean finally reconnecting the parts of the historically Black Albina neighborhood bisected by the freeway 60 years ago. On Monday, members of city council held a tense session to hear from both Albina Vision Trust and No More Freeways, a climate advocacy group that has sued to pause the project. 

“I thought it was important to have these two different community perspectives at the table,” Councilor Angelita Morillo said during the council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing. “I think we hear a lot from industry and other big areas, but this is really a deep community discussion that needs to happen.”

During the discussion, however, Committee Chair Olivia Clark and co-committee member Loretta Smith expressed regret officials from the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and the Portland Department of Transportation (PDOT) were not present to answer questions about No More Freeways’ assertion that ODOT has been misleading about the size of the freeway expansion. 

“I don’t think there should be any mistake that what ODOT is proposing is to essentially double the width, and in some cases triple the width, of I-5 through the Rose Quarter,” Joe Cortright said, showing a diagram he said the group had obtained through a public records request with ODOT. The diagram was a rendering of a cross-section of Broadway-Weidler after the expansion. 

“They’ll tell you that they’re only adding one additional auxiliary lane in each direction,” Cortright said. “Why, then, are they doubling the width of the freeway from about 82 feet to more than 160 feet?...They’ve really engineered enough room for five 12-foot-wide lanes and full shoulders in each direction. Once they build this project, there’s nothing that stops them from running a paint truck and re-striping the freeway for five lanes in each direction.”  

Clark and Smith both asserted that the rendering was outdated. 

“That is really unfair and disingenuous of you to bring it here as if it was released yesterday,” Smith said. 

Both Cortright and Smith maintained their information was accurate, and Clark said ODOT and PBOT would be invited to the committee’s May 12 session, schedule allowing. 

Representatives from Albina Vision Trust defended the project. 

“One of the challenges for the Albina Vision Trust at this point is this idea that we’re somehow being duped into supporting this project,” Winta Yohannes, executive director of Albina Vision Trust (AVT), said. “So I want to be really clear that our support for the project is rooted in our very clear and deep understanding of trade-offs of project components, and how we’ve gotten here to this point.”

Funding Connectivity

In March of last year, the new U.S. Department of Transportation’s Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods Grant Program awarded $450 million to fund AVT’s plan for the construction of buildable freeway covers that will reconnect lower Albina over I-5. Alongside this announcement came the news that AVT had also entered into a work agreement deal with the Oregon Department of Transportation, making official AVT’s collaboration with ODOT to explore highway cover governance and future ownership of surplus lands associated with the project.

“Fundamentally, this is a state project that was intended to meet the needs of freight that has been foundationally transformed into something else, something better,” Yohannes said.

“This project represents the braiding of climate, community and statewide economic development goals, to deliver an outcome and a project that would not have existed if not for the organizing of organizations like ours, and the willingness of the city of Portland to stand up for what is right at every critical juncture. At this point, we ask that you continue to stand with us – again, not as a rubber stamp for a project, but as vigilant partners committed to forward momentum.”

“Former (U.S.) Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg came and toured our project area alongside Congressman Blumenauer, and sat down with our team,” JT Flowers, director of government affairs and communications for AVT, said. “After that tour, he said something that we found incredibly charming at the time, but we didn’t think it meant much in a substantive way. He said in his tenure as secretary of transportation he’s been to 603 cities and towns across this country, and he has been to all 50 states. Nowhere in the country has he seen a project that is not only as audacious as this one, but as feasible as well…Just six months later, the well over $488.5 million in federal funding from the USDOT’s Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods grant program came to the door…There’s an understanding even at the federal level that the significance of this project is in the ways in which it ties into everything else being built around it.”

Fighting Emissions

No More Freeways was established in 2017 in opposition to the Rose Quarter expansion. 

“Our basic philosophy is that in an age of evident climate change, when greenhouse gases from transportation are increasing even as they decrease in every other sector, every dollar spent on freeway widening is a dollar wasted and adding more harm that could go to proactive investments like transit, walking, biking, that could reduce greenhouse gases,” Smith said. “That’s what motivates us.” 

No More Freeways sued ODOT in May of last year, alleging the project as currently designed violates the climate goals outlined in Portland's Comprehensive Plan and Metro's Regional Transportation Plan. Co-plaintiffs include Neighbors for Clean Air, the Eliot Neighborhood Association, Bikeloud and Families for Safe Streets. 

Last August, No More Freeways joined Neighbors for Clean Air, the Eliot Neighborhood Association, Neighbors for Clean Air, Families for Safe Streets, Bikeloud and the Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates in an additional lawsuit to pause the project. The groups brought the complaint against the U.S. Department of Transportation and the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, alleging the environmental review of the project understated projected emissions.

“There is a lawsuit that says we should have an (environmental impact statement) that examines a full range of alternatives, including pricing, including transit alternatives, and there’s no reason that covers cannot be in that mix,” Smith said. “We have never had a full alternatives analysis at that level, and that’s what we demand in our federal lawsuit.”  

The group has cited concerns over induced demand, meaning that expanded roadways fail to mitigate congestion because they inevitably draw additional traffic. 

“It makes the project vastly more expensive, but from the standpoint of Albina Vision, every additional foot that you widen the freeway makes that (cap) structure much more massive and much more expensive if you’re going to achieve the redevelopment objective that we’ve all agreed makes sense,” Cortright said. 

But Yohannes pointed out that AVT has in the past been ODOT’s “fiercest critic.” In 2020, both AVT and the city of Portland walked away from discussions with ODOT over concerns the latter was not taking historical concerns or the needs of the community into account. At the time, ODOT was planning for highway covers that would support significantly less construction and infrastructure than AVT and Portland had asked for. 

At the time, AVT also called for a full environmental impact statement from ODOT, specifically citing concerns about air quality and the project’s proximity to Harriet Tubman Middle School. 

“I think it’s important for us to address that obviously the part of this project that we are most invested in is the highway cover,” Yohannes said. “And yet, there is no highway cover without a complete project, which is why we were really clear about saying we support the delivery of the complete project.

I don’t see a path for the state to say we will build a highway cover here without meeting the needs of freight and other rural industries. Our federal partners have said the delivery of this project is the best way for the covers to be delivered, which is why they granted their largest award to this project. So unless someone has a secret plan for just delivering the covers, I want to be really realistic and honest on the record in saying that is not a real position.”

“If you’re essentially buying agreement for the lids by further damaging the climate, that’s our objection,” Smith said later during the session. “The principles of just transition say we should move racial justice and climate justice together, not put them in opposition as ODOT is doing now.”

Trump Threats?

The challenge comes at a time of deep uncertainty over federal funding, due to the Trump administration’s wide-reaching cuts to programs, specifically programs that intersect with diversity and equity.  

“With the Trump administration, knowing that he and his administration do not care about Black communities and they have been stripping federal funding for a lot of BIPOC communities and anything that’s coming our way that is actually helpful to us, what guarantee do you have that that funding is secured for the cap?” Morillo asked Yohannes and Flowers. “My earnest, truest, sincerest fear is that they’re going to give us the money to expand the highways, the highways will get expanded, and then they will yank the funding for the caps. And then we will have a bigger problem than we had before.”

Yohannes said AVT couldn’t offer certainty, but that she was reassured by state and local leadership. 

“What we can guarantee, and what we’ve seen over the last few years and have a lot of confidence in, is actually the leadership at PBOT,” she said. “PBOT has remained vigilant in tracking every single stage of the project to make sure that as the project moves through the process, what is moving forward is what has been agreed to.”

“If we have heard anything at the federal level, it has been that while they have been very happy to issue stop work orders to projects that didn't have funds that were already obligated, they’ve been more hesitant to touch obligated funding,” Flowers said. 

Yohannes added, “Because this project braids together so many different interests, even if there’s a part of the project any particular administration doesn’t like, there are other components that they do. This is again where maintaining a commitment to the full project is important. This project is important for labor, it’s important for freight, it’s important for industry. Just as it is for community, for advocates of multimodal transportation.”

The next Portland City Council Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing is scheduled for Monday. May 12 at 9:30 a.m. For more information, visit this website.