The recent defeat of a transportation sales tax in Clark County was characterized by some officials as proof folks in Vancouver oppose light rail. But the characterization was an ill-informed screed by 10 southwest Washington Republicans protesting the design and financing of a new bridge linking Portland and Vancouver and the light-rail line built into it.
The failed tax had nothing to do with building light rail. It was put to Clark County voters against the wishes of those advocating the Columbia River Crossing, among them the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce, to raise about $4.5 million. Slightly more than $3 million of the revenue would have gone to operating and maintaining an $850 million light-rail line the U.S. government intends to build in partnership with Oregon and Washington. The feds simply need evidence that somebody along the way will pay to run the line.
But that didn’t stop Washington state Sen. Don Benton of Vancouver from reading smoke signals in the vote and being angry with those who disputed the analysis. He told The Oregonian’s Richard Read: “This whole (CRC) thing has been a master scam perpetrated on the citizens of Washington by Metro in order to bring light rail into Vancouver.” Meanwhile, southwest Washington’s Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, who otherwise argues a new bridge is necessary, cited the vote in declaring the $3.5 billion project will fail if light rail is pushed upon a community that doesn’t want it.
The claims are phobic and without evidence. After weighing several project alternatives, the Vancouver City Council four years ago endorsed the CRC as configured. And there have been no substantive, Vancouver-based light-rail protests in several years of CRC public sessions and hearings to remedy one of the region’s key economic and quality-of-life challenges: replacing an I-5 bridge whose slowdowns and danger constrict the flow of freight and commuters.
To get the CRC launched after $160 million in planning and design work, the legislatures of Oregon and Washington must in 2013 commit to their doable shares of the funding, at $900 million to be financed over decades. Only then can the Northwest congressional delegation make its case for the release of federal transportation money, likely unavailable or harder to win in subsequent years owing to the nation’s fiscal challenges. The U.S. Department of Transportation, meanwhile, has declared the CRC to be a project of national significance, high up the priority list. Starting a full-on redesign could set things back for years.
An action now to stall the CRC’s momentum would thwart job growth. The I-5 bridge is at the center of a transportation and trading system supporting one in five jobs in Oregon. Freight industries using the bridge support roughly 130,000 jobs at warehouses and distribution centers near the ports of Portland and Vancouver. This is to say nothing of the estimated 1,900 new construction-related jobs that would be sustained over an eight-year period to build the CRC — or the spending that all those new paychecks would allow in both Vancouver and Portland.
Key things still need working out. The U.S. Coast Guard must approve revisions in the bridge design to provide more clearance for river traffic below. At a hearing Wednesday in Vancouver, however, the Coast Guard for the first time reportedly acknowledged that clearance for each and every industry affected might not be feasible — but that the CRC would need to show it had taken every measure possible to accommodate them.
With so much at stake, it’s no time for shoot-from-the-hip blasts. Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt, long involved in CRC deliberations, told The Oregonian’s editorial board the claims that Vancouver folks fear light rail derive from “a minority of individuals in our community who really aren’t concerned about economic growth, jobs for our citizens, (or) effective and efficient mobility for cars and transit. …” He allowed he’d recently had “disturbing conversations, fueled by some of the electeds, about ‘those people’ coming to Vancouver on light rail.”
Funny, we would be those people. So, too, would many Clark County residents who commute to and from their jobs in Portland.
It’s time to move ahead. Fear-mongering and deliberate confusions have no place in a project so complex and vital as a new I-5 bridge, even one that connects Vancouver with more than 50 miles of light rail lacing Portland.
