Oregon's congressional delegation came home for the end-of-summer break with a solid accomplishment to crow about: $2.7 billion in new transportation money to be spent over the next five years, our cut from the mammoth $286 billion federal highway bill.

There'll be more than $200 million to repair and replace aging bridges on the I-5 corridor and elsewhere around the state, including one over the Siuslaw River in Florence and another that carries rail traffic in Coos Bay. Route 97 around Redmond, Route 140 in Lake County and Barnhart Road in Umatilla County will be upgraded, while Josephine County will get new passing lanes on Highway 199, and the scenic road from Bandon to Charleston will be spiffed up. And the list of long-hoped-for projects goes on.

The Feds have also ponied up $16 million to support Portland State University's research on alternative transportation, as well as $4 million to help Clackamas-based Oregon Iron Works get a domestic streetcar industry up and running — just the sorts of pet projects for well-connected legislators that taxpayer advocates hate.

But Congressman Peter DeFazio of Springfield (D-4th District), who's the ranking minority member of the highways subcommittee in the House, makes no apologies. "It's fun for them to call it pork," he says, "but we need to think differently in a world where energy is expensive."

And to put some icing on the transportation cake, state lawmakers in Salem passed the Connect Oregon bill at the end of their contentious session. It invests $100 million from lottery bonds in crucial non-highway infrastructure, such as marine terminals and public transportation.

Fixing Oregon's old and clogged transportation system is one of nine key initiatives of the Oregon Business Plan. Gary Conkling of the lobbying firm Conkling Fiskum & McCormick, which represents the Port of Portland, says Connect Oregon is a small step in that direction. "We can't just build roads," he says. "We have to invest in air, rail, marine and transit."

But Conkling cautions that Connect Oregon is merely a down payment. "When you spread $100 million around the state," he says, "it isn't going to solve every problem." He adds that the folks who really know highways — the civil engineers at ODOT — think Oregon needs to spend more on basic maintenance such as guardrails and roadbed repairs to prevent costly infrastructure collapses later. "Those budgets are skinny," Conkling says, "but there was no appetite in the Legislature this session to increase them."

Still more irresponsible was the Legislature's failure to move ahead on the longer-term transportation needs of the state (and planet) by passing a biofuels bill establishing incentives for ethanol and biodiesel production. Associated Oregon Industries doomed the legislation by tacking on an irrelevant piece of pork for its members: extension of the Pollution Control Tax Credit, which largely benefits big companies when they purchase environmental devices that they're required by law to install anyway. The auto dealers' lobby chipped in by larding on a rider to keep Oregon from adopting California's tough new limits on vehicle greenhouse gas emissions.

Now California and Washington have a chance to jumpstart their biofuels industries, and it will be two years before Oregon lawmakers get to revisit the issue, leaving our farmers and refineries to play catch-up.

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Copyright 2005 Oregon Business magazine