When Oregon lawmakers convened in January to kick off the 2025 legislative session, among their top legislative priorities was a transportation funding fix for the state’s aging bridges, highways and roads. But the Democratic supermajority failed to get a transportation package over the legislative finish line when the session adjourned on Friday night.
Democrats waited until the last month to unveil HB 2025, which would have generated nearly $12 billion over the next decade through a mix of taxes and fees, including hikes in the state’s gas tax and vehicle and registration fees. Republicans balked at the proposal, including several who had been working with Democrats on transportation funding.
Defections emerged among Democratic lawmakers as well, most notably from state Sen. Mark Meek, D-Gladstone, a member of the Joint Committee on Transportation Reinvestment. Senate President Rob Wagner, D-Lake Oswego, removed Meek from the committee on June 20 to boost the bill’s chance of passage.
But on Friday, Democrats conceded they didn’t have the votes to pass it, and they had to abandon a last-ditch effort to raise the state’s gas tax by 3 cents to avert looming layoffs at the Oregon Department of Transportation.
Sen. Meek joins us to share his thoughts on the legislature’s efforts to tackle Oregon’s transportation challenges.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. As we talked about yesterday, Democrats were unable to pass their signature legislation of the 2025 session: a transportation package. My next guest is one of the big reasons that bill did not pass. Democratic state Senator Mark Meek represents a very purple district in Clackamas County. He argued against both the process behind and the substance of House Bill 2025, and he joins me now. It’s good to have you on Think Out Loud.
Sen. Mark Meek: Thank you, Dave. It’s nice to be here.
Miller: You were on the Transportation Committee until you were taken off of it, which we’ll talk about. The committee was charged with getting the first pass on this bill. There was a framework that leadership put out some number of months ago. But they didn’t release an actual bill until June 9, about 20 days before the end of the session. What went through your mind when you first read that bill?
Sen. Meek: Thank you, Dave. When I first read the bill, well, first it was a draft not the bill. It was an amendment to House Bill 2025 and I believe it was about 120 pages long. Anybody who knows me [knows] I’m a student of these bills. I actually go through each section, highlight it. So I had a printed version when we were in the middle of that committee, going through and listening to the presentation. And there were some things that I really appreciated were in there but confused by some of the mechanisms that were also in there, to the point of also wanting to know the numbers that they represented. And if you’ve followed, we had Dirk there and Bryce ...
Miller: Two of our [OPB] reporters.
Sen. Meek: Yes. We never did get those numbers until later on, so …
Miller: You mean the revenue or the fiscal impact?
Sen. Meek: The revenue.
Miller: And that came four or five days later, something like that?
Sen. Meek: Correct. And I’m on the Revenue Committee. We’re all about numbers. So I was very concerned that, at this late stage, we weren’t even looking at numbers, knowing what the numbers were, the impacts. So I was very disappointed.
Miller: You did vote though, at the beginning, to have the bill introduced. You were clear from the beginning that you said a lot of work had to be done. So what changes were you hoping to see?
Sen. Meek: When I came to the session, I actually volunteered to be on the committee. As a Revenue chair I was happy to be there, engaged. Really, at the beginning of the session, we knew that we needed to do what we could to help our thousand ODOT workers remain on the job and able to complete their mission of operations and maintenance. Those are the things I was looking for in there. Then after the bill was introduced, a lot of that was not there, at least it wasn’t apparent how we were going to achieve that. And it was very, I would say, frustrating and a lot to digest in just a couple of days’ time.
Miller: I’m not sure if I totally understand your critique here. Is it that the basics of the operation wasn’t in the bill or there were other things in the bill in addition to that, that you were against? That’s a little bit different. So what didn’t you like that was in the bill?
Sen. Meek: If you look at the bill, because I like to see what the numbers were and where they were gonna go, they had the actual repayment of debt and the programming. You can see the $125 million was gonna go to these kinds of priorities according to a little bit of a structure. And then, through some other privilege taxes, they reversed it or inverted it. $125 million would have been going to grate streets and safe routes and these different mechanisms. What I was frustrated by was that, within each of those pools, where were those dollars gonna be going? How are they gonna help us meet the mission? And we never did really get down to those brass tacks.
Miller: You mean you were upset that there wasn’t more specificity about how this new revenue was actually going to be spent?
Sen. Meek: Yes sir, yes.
Miller: You did eventually express your intent to vote against the bill, citing both the procedural problems or your sense that there was so much to digest here that it should have come out earlier and also the tax increases. And then the Senate president removed you from the Transportation Committee. Were you surprised by that removal? It’s not unprecedented, but were you surprised that it happened to you?
Sen. Meek: Yes, I was brought to the table to engage and I would say, have a good policy conversation. And at that point, I disclosed that I had issues and wanted to, I would say, tap the brakes on rushing this. I said “no” on a Tuesday, where we had a hearing on that new amendment that we were told we were gonna vote on the next day, and not even having a chance to digest it. So I was frustrated at that point, disclosed that and let the officers know. Then when it came to committee time where the presiding officer asked if I would give a “courtesy yes,” I said, “No, I cannot give a ‘courtesy yes.’”
I’ve been on the Ways and Means Committees where I’ve voted no on ODOT’s budget because it had tolling in it. And the presiding officer or the co-chair could come in, tap me out, vote in my place, and then tap me back in. But in this case, on the Policy Committee, they couldn’t just tap me out. They actually had removed me. And at that point, it was a badge of honor versus a disgrace.
Miller: You mentioned tolling. A week ago, you wrote this on social media: “Clackamas County, tolling is back. It’s buried in the transportation bill, but we found it under HB 2025. Tolling will come to I-205 and eventually the rest of Portland metro.” And then along with that post, you posted a picture of yourself holding up a highlighted bill. But that bill was from 2017. It’s not the current bill?
Sen. Meek: No, if you look at the bill, there’s two phases on that page. On the left side was Statute ORS 383.150. And on the right side of the page was the page actually out of House Bill 2025 that referred to the tolling that said to implement Statute 383.150.
Miller: But the bill from the legislative session that just passed didn’t say anything new about tolling. It referenced existing statute that was in the other picture that had all that major highlighting. In other words, it kept the status quo, a status quo in which tolling is not happening …
Sen. Meek: It is paused. The governor paused it.
Miller: But what I’m saying is that there’s nothing in the bill you opposed that changed anything about tolling. It simply referenced existing statute?
Sen. Meek: Yes, and a statute that I have diabolically opposed since its inception in 2017 and that is very harmful to my community. And I made a promise to them I would not support a reference to and continuation of tolling in my community. And that’s what that statute did.
Miller: Let me make sure I understand this. So what you claimed to have found was tolling is coming back. But it seems like what you literally showed is that tolling has not been killed in a new way from 2017 in this new bill. That’s the disagreement. That’s why the governor said “no,” this is not explicitly true?
Sen. Meek: Well, I would debate that, because if you look at the statute ...
Miller: Which statute?
Sen. Meek: The bill that references the implementation of … this House Bill 2025. It says that we want to start sending the revenue from the streams listed above in that same paragraph to the implementation of the tolling, which means not to start tolling but to start paying for and preparing for tolling in those districts according to ORS 383.150, which specifically outlines I-205 and the Abernethy Bridge.
Miller: I fear listeners might be getting a little bit …
Sen. Meek: And I apologize.
Miller: No, no. I brought this up and it’s important because you’ve gotten a lot of pushback for what people see as misinformation here.
Sen. Meek: That’s not true.
Miller: Is it fair to say that what you wanted to see in this new bill was a statutory erasure of tolling from 2017, as opposed to a gubernatorial pause?
Sen. Meek: Yes, because there’s the repeal in [HB] 3055 in 2021. ORS 383.155 was repealed.
Miller: Let me move on to some other pieces here, because the governor and the agency itself, ODOT, said some dire things in the near term about layoffs – that’s what the governor is talking about now. And then pushing out just a little bit further, dire things about their ability to provide basic services without an increase in funding, an increase that this bill would have provided. Do you believe them?
Sen. Meek: Yes, I do. Actually, [as] part of my role this year, the co-chair of the Transportation Economic Development subcommittee for Ways and Means, we were responsible for ODOT’s budget. Myself, co-chair Gomberg, the co-chairs, and then also Representative Boshart Davis and Senator Starr worked on a group, a work group, looking at ODOT’s budget in the worst case scenario of a cuts budget. It was true there were gonna have to be layoffs.
We went through some iterations to help transfer some vacancies over to the operations and maintenance section. But yes, there will be some layoffs. But they don’t necessarily have to be right now in 2025. The governor even mentioned, in her article, next year sometime. But it is dire that we take this up and address this, and I think part of the governor’s solution at the end of Friday would have helped at least mitigate some of that.
Miller: At the very end, her stopgap solution, or a very pared down version of funding, was an increase simply in the gas tax. That obviously didn’t go anywhere at the end and the session ended. She’s also said that maybe there should be a special session. What would you support in a special session?
Sen. Meek: I would support a package that helps pay for maintenance, bridge repairs and transit, making sure that we can keep these ODOT workers basically employed so that Oregonians can see where their dollars are going at the time.
Miller: How big a revenue increase are you talking about? The initial bill was going to be something like $15 billion over 10 years. That went down to about $11 billion and change over a decade. How much revenue are you talking about?
Sen. Meek: I don’t have any specific numbers, Dave. That was part of, I think, the failure of this package. We never got down to the brass tacks of what we needed to provide for Oregonians, their need right now. If you look at polling that came out that Willamette Week shared a couple of weeks ago, this is low on our family’s totem pole right now. Pardon my slang for that, but this was low on their priority list.
Housing, homelessness, paying for their basic needs is top of mind for Oregonians. So to strap them with a huge increase in their cost to go to work, I think, was irresponsible. I couldn’t participate in that. I’m not willing to unless we come to the brass tacks of the fundamentals, and helping Oregonians and these ODOT workers stay whole.
Miller: What exactly would it take for you to agree to this? Because the way often special sessions work is that there’s a lot of stuff behind the scenes before a governor feels confident that it’s worth bringing lawmakers back. Because governors want to have a successful, say, one-day session. What do you need to hear before you would say, “Yes, I’ll vote for your package”?
Sen. Meek: I would love to see a responsible plan brought forward, and that we can show and prove that it will meet the needs of ODOT right now and Oregonians’ needs. And I have shared some of these details with the governor. I want to thank the governor for including me in some conversations when nobody else was, this last week. I appreciate her leadership on this, and she knows where I stand and she knows I’ll be there for her.
Miller: In opposing this bill, you went against some of your party leadership and also some powerful Democratic allies. First of all, do you plan to run for reelection next year?
Sen. Meek: Yes, I do. My community wants me to.
Miller: Do you expect to see a union-backed primary challenger?
Sen. Meek: Uh, I could care less, don’t even care.
Miller: Mark Meek, thanks very much.
Sen. Meek: Thank you, sir.
Miller: Mark Meek is a Democratic state Senator from Clackamas County, District 20.
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