House Minority Leader Jeff Helfrich Has Thoughts on Whether Tolling Can Bail Out ODOT

The transportation agency’s financial picture is dire. House Republicans will have a big say in any new funding package.

BREEZE: Kite boarder with Hood River-White Salmon Interstate Bridge, Hood River. (Brian Burk)
By Nigel Jaquiss

Since June, the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation has been traveling the state to build support for a transportation funding package in the 2025 session.

The featured speaker: ODOT director Kris Strickler, whose presentation describes a $1.7 billion funding gap for the agency.

Strickler warns that if that gap goes unfilled, it could result in widespread layoffs and a decline in basic services such as snow-plowing and pothole-filling—not to mention posing a threat to mega-projects such as the widening of I-5 at the Rose Quarter and replacing the I-5 bridge to Vancouver.

On Oct. 4, a lawmaker who is positioned to be a key player in whatever happens next year with ODOT funding, House Minority Leader Jeff Helfrich (R-Hood River), stopped by WW’s office for an endorsement interview. Helfrich is defending his position House District 52, which extends from the The Dalles dam to the Sandy River and includes Sandy and parts of Gresham, against Democratic Party nominee Nick Walden Poublon.

Helfrich’s district includes a mechanism for transportation funding that has proven to be a poison pill in the discussions about how to fund ODOT: tolls. Both the Bridge of the Gods at Cascade Locks and the Hood River-White Salmon Interstate Bridge charge motorists to cross.

Gov. Tina Kotek ordered ODOT to halt its work on tolling in March, but the concept remains one of the ways the agency could generate new money in the future.

New revenue measures in Oregon must start in the House. In the absences of a three-fifths Democratic supermajority, any transportation tax increase will require Republican votes (new taxes require a super-majority vote in both chambers). That means the House GOP caucus leader will likely hold the key to any ODOT funding package.

Here’s what Helfrich had to say:



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