Oregon Division of Transportation Director Kris Strickler has flipped on his flip sign and can take the following offramp. The chief of the company since 2019, Strickler introduced Wednesday he’ll exit for good on January 2nd, 2026.
Texts about Strickler’s determination flew between telephones of transportation advocates and insiders final evening, lots of whom see him as simply the most recent high-profile chief to leap from a sinking ship. As I reported final month, company leaders have been fleeing sooner than drivers can replenish a brand new freeway lane. Strickler leaves ODOT because it tries to heal from scars of a brutal legislative session, years of funding uncertainties, mission delays, value overruns, and an embarrassing accountability audit launched again in Could.
When Strickler assumed the director function in 2019, issues seemed rosy by comparability. ODOT had cash within the financial institution and a transparent roadmap on spend it due to the the $5.3 billion transportation bundle handed in 2017. The identical week Strickler was named ODOT’s new chief, the company launched an formidable effort to cut back congestion by increasing freeways within the Portland area. Initially known as the Workplace of City Mobility & Mega Initiatives and later modified to the City Mobility Workplace (UMO), the brand new Portland-based workplace was created to make sure ODOT might ship what they knew could be three very controversial initiatives: a brand new tolling system and two freeway expansions on I-5; one on the Rose Quarter and one between Portland and Vancouver.
Within the six years since, the UMO has been defunded and shuttered, tolling was torpedoed by Governor Tina Kotek, the Rose Quarter is in such dire straits that Strickler’s bosses on the Oregon Transportation Fee (OTC) eliminated a “cease funding the mission” vote from the agenda of their assembly at present, and the Interstate Bridge Substitute Program (IBR) is on life help after its chief jumped ship final month and an OTC member not too long ago logged the primary ever “no” vote in opposition to it.
Even so, you’ve obtained to have some sympathy for Strickler. Simply months after he was employed, Covid threw our state into turmoil after which ODOT confronted disastrous impacts from main wildfires. After main the company via these disasters, extra of them hit: Kotek’s capitulation on tolling destroyed the income stream Strickler was relying on to construct megaprojects and the Trump Administration prompted “confusion and delay” on the company together with a rescission of $382 million Strickler was relying on to construct the I-5 Rose Quarter mission.
Strickler’s life preserver was Oregon lawmakers, who promised to move main funding for ODOT within the 2025 laws session. Within the run-up to that session, Strickler labored time beyond regulation to persuade lawmakers (and the general public) that ODOT deserved — and could possibly be trusted with — an enormous funding bundle. However even that failed. The invoice Kotek finally signed simply final week barely retains the lights on on the company. Regardless of huge will increase in initiatives prices and inflation (and a false narrative from Republicans that it’s huge) the overall funding is over one billion {dollars} lower than what was handed in 2017.
And it should sting that the paltry income lawmakers have been capable of elevate for Strickler’s company continues to be considerably in limbo as lots of of signature gatherers fan out throughout the state as I sort this, wanting to refer the elevated taxes and charges to the poll and use the difficulty to spice up Republican probabilities forward of subsequent yr’s gubernatorial election.
Earlier than he got here to ODOT, Strickler spent 9 years engaged on the Columbia River Crossing mission, the precursor to the IBR that shares not solely lots of its design components, but additionally its unlucky distinction as a mission that spent lots of of hundreds of thousands on consultants and planning with out one shovel pressed into the filth. That’s 15 years centered on one mission that also would possibly by no means be constructed.
Possibly Strickler simply obtained uninterested in not profitable.
Possibly Strickler’s exit and the horrible situation of ODOT he leaves behind will lastly shake issues up. Possibly the OTC and Oregon lawmakers will get up and take our state’s method to transportation in a really totally different route — one which stops chasing freeway enlargement megaprojects as an answer to local weather change (which is what Strickler believed them to be) and one which ends the bottomless pit of taxpayer {dollars} going to consulting companies who profit from making initiatives as costly, expansive, and in depth as doable.
Oregon must construct extra, not invoice extra.
Now Governor Kotek has a chance to heal her wounded transportation legacy by choosing an ODOT director that’s humble sufficient to vary the established order and brave sufficient to create a brand new one.
