Portland Asks: Should Corporations Pay for Transit?

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Portland Asks: Should Corporations Pay for Transit?


Oct 8, 2020

By Kea Wilson

Read More: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/10/...y-for-transit/

The greater Portland area is poised to pass a ballot measure that could radically increase pedestrian infrastructure and transit access for communities of color, but opposition from the region’s biggest corporations, and even some urbanists, is threatening the transformational initiative.

- Because Oregon bars cities and counties from charging their own sales tax, Portland and its neighbors have had difficulty finding politically tenable ways to pay for light rail expansion, sidewalks, bike lanes, or even to simply modernize asphalt roads. Voters have approved local funding for the metro’s light rail network, MAX, just once in the past 30 years and communities of color and low-income people have largely fallen through the cracks. — “People think Portland is so progressive, but most of the sustainable infrastructure we have is located in a very small area of the Portland downtown where the majority of people do not live,” said Vivian Satterfield, a community organizer and director of strategic partnerships at the nonprofit Verde. “It’s really a seven-mile segment that most people don’t interact with all that often and I work in a neighborhood where 40 percent of the roads are unpaved.”

- Get Moving 2020, which would levy a payroll tax on employers with more than 25 workers to raise an estimated $5.2 billion for a slate of targeted transportation improvements (see graphic above). The plan is the fruit of two years of public engagement, which Josh Cohen of the Center for Transportation Excellence calls “an unprecedented level of inclusion and accessibility” especially for a region with a well-documented history of racist exclusion. — “Even before [our Black Lives Matter uprisings put us in the news,] this measure was fundamentally about correcting our patterns of underinvestment in communities of color,” said Satterfield. “Especially on the edges of town, where, like in a lot of cities, our lowest-wage earners tend to live due to fundamentally linked patterns of gentrification.” — Only 9 percent of all Portland-area businesses would be charged the payroll tax, but many of those companies, including deep-pocketed corporations like Nike, Intel, and The Standard, a national insurance company, are funding an opposition campaign, Stop the Metro Wage Tax.

- Critics of Get Moving 2020 say that the measure may have originally intended to center the sustainable transportation needs of non-white communities, but the pork barrel simply picked up too many auto projects as it rolled through communities whose support was needed to pass the initiative. — “Metro paved the measure’s way to the ballot by giving every part of the region an earmark for a pet project,” wrote G.B. Arrington, former director of long-range planning at TriMet, the region’s transit authority. “New suburban highway capacity in Clackamas County, bridge replacement in Multnomah County, quicker access to Port of Portland airport parking garages. … Pursuing political business as usual is a sure-fire recipe for making Portland more like sprawling auto-oriented Houston than the Portland we have long worked and aspired to be.” — Of course, like many U.S. cities, those “sprawling” areas are where many of Portland’s non-white residents have been forced to live as Portland has gentrified.

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