Oregon Joins The Campaign

Congressman  Peter DeFazio

We are glad to welcome Organizing People, Activating Leaders (OPAL) and the newly formed Portland Transit Riders Union to our national campaign.  A third organization, Oregon Action, is currently deliberating joining. We also held extensive discussions with many new allies in the state.

Oregon is extremely important because Congressman Peter DeFazio is the chair of one of the two main committees drafting the federal surface transportation act.  Congressman DeFazio is chair of the Subcommittee on Transportation and Highway and represents the Eugene area.  DeFazio is now in the newly formed Progressive Caucus, yet he is being challenged heavily by the Latino community on his poor stand in immigration issues.  Although he has been friendly to the environmental voice, he has also been supportive of highway expansion.

These new organizational relationships were built out of a recruiting trip we took to Oregon in early April. Tam Bang Luu and I are grateful to Mara Gross from Coalition for a Livable Future and Joseph Santos-Lyons from Portland and Nancy Forrest from Springfield Solidarity Network in Eugene for their help in bringing together organizations and activists to learn about our campaign.

Why Join TRPT: Oregon Faces Highway Expansion, Portland Transit Operations Crisis

Tammy makes the case for TRPT.

Although it is one of the most pedestrian and bicycle friendly cities in the country, Portland shares the same structural transit problems as the rest of the nation. Transit operations are in crisis. TriMet, the local transportation agency, has recently decided to discontinue 4 bus lines, and make major service cuts to 35 other lines.  TriMet gets 55% of its revenue from an employer payroll tax. Their current budget deficit is $23.6 million. Of course, like all strapped transit agencies across the country, they claim they have taken numerous steps to reduce costs and improve efficiency.  Some of these measures include an 8 percent across-the-board expense cut, a hiring and salary freezes, furloughs and projected staff layoffs.

At the same time as transit operations are in crisis, highways are slated for massive expansion, a toxic priority in Oregon for the federal and state governments. Several activists brought together by Joseph Santos-Lyons, organizer with the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, told us about the expansion of the I-5 freeway into six more lanes in both directions in the northeast region to open the flow of capital from Mexico and Canada. And according to the Coalition for a Livable Future, the Columbia River Crossing project--the $3.6 billion proposed freeway expansion project for the five mile stretch of Interstate 5 between North Portland and Vancouver, Washington--is the biggest, most expensive transportation investment in the region’s history.

The Portland Transit Riders Union has formed out of a group (No Cuts TriMet) that came together to oppose the TriMet cuts, which are only the latest attack in a string of fare hikes (sometimes two in year) over the past few years. During our visit, we had a two hour conversation with the members of the group. They were very interested in learning about how we came to be the Bus Riders Union and about our struggle for civil rights and environmental justice in Los Angeles. We spoke to them about how critical it is to involve communities of color and low income communities who are usually the ones most impacted by cuts in transportation and all other services.

OPAL and Oregon Action were the two community of color organizations we met with in Portland. We spoke with Kevin Odell from OPAL, an Asian/Pacific Islander organizer who has organized in Portland for a long time, and Yalonda Sinde, one of his executive board directors and a long time environmental justice organizer in Seattle, about the new “green” movement and the difficulty in organizing communities of color in such a white city. From the beginning, Kevin and Yalonda were pretty jazzed about the campaign and the opportunity to work at the federal level to advocate to their district representative Congressman Earl Blumenauer and felt confident they had some type of connection to Congressman Peter DeFazio through their alliances.

Francisca speaks on the air.

During our visit we also met with many other new allies: Jobs with Justice Portland, 1000 Friends of Oregon, Oregon Environmental Council, Environment Oregon, Focus the Nation, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCCUN), Woodburn, Springfield Solidarity Network/Jobs with Justice, Eugene, and graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

From them we also learned of two other key issues.

Transit and Civil Rights: Heightened Police State in a Time of Crisis

The folks from No Cuts TriMet were critical of how the TriMet has hired 70 new TriMet Police at a time when the agency claims it is in a fiscal crisis.  Ron Williams from Oregon Action, a state wide organization with a Black membership base, spoke to us about the issues of racial profiling in the city.  The organization is currently campaigning to hold the police chief accountable for a newly released proposal on how to remedy the racial profiling problem in the police department.  Ron’s greatest area of interest in the TRTP is our demand for the abilities of private parties to sue under title IV for disparate impact—a major civil rights victory that was rolled back in 2001, permitting only attorney generals to bring such cases under intentional discrimination, which is virtually impossible to do.

The Rural Voice

We also learned a lot about the urban transportation conditions during our visit to Woodburn, a mostly farmworking community.  Ramon Ramirez, the co-founder of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), spoke to us a lot about the necessities of the rural areas for mass transit.  While in the urban areas we struggle for an expansion of mass transit and to save what currently exists, the rural areas such as Woodburn suffer with the non-existence of a transit system.  PCUN, which represents farmworkers with no automobiles, spoke about the exploitation that these communities confront to gain access to mass transit. Private vans offer rides for $3 dollars each way to take a car full of farmworkers about 20 miles away to work in the fields. These workers essentially pay $6 a day and close to $200 a month for rides to their jobs—that is higher than any monthly bus pass in the country. 

Click here to see our photo album of the trip to Oregon!