Oregon’s top transportation decisionmakers on Thursday agreed to delay a key vote on what to do with a more than $715 million project on Interstate 5 through the Rose Quarter until March and to further study how to build covers spanning the highway to accommodate multistory buildings.

The Oregon Transportation Commission, a volunteer board appointed by the governor, approved a series of initiatives designed to signal the state’s understanding that it needed to be more inclusive of Portland neighborhoods’ and politicians’ views on the increasingly polarizing freeway project.

“We are trying to listen and learn,” Bob Van Brocklin, a Portland attorney who chairs the commission, said in comments following the vote.

Last Friday, Van Brocklin proposed a series of amendments to tap the brakes on the project, if only for a few months, and to set up committees of Portland stakeholders to help advise the project. He called for an independent review of the state’s past environmental work and a decision no later than March 20 on whether the state should conduct a more extensive Environmental Impact Statement or proceed with project design. State transportation officials say an EIS would delay the project by three years.

Van Brocklin’s proposals came on the heels of increasing tension bubbling to the surface from Portland leaders.

Portland City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson, Metro President Lynn Peterson and Michael Alexander, a former head of the Urban League of Portland and the treasurer of the Albina Vision Trust, bluntly aired those grievances to the commission before the vote Thursday. A representative from Mayor Ted Wheeler’s staff also testified before the commission.

The politicians and civic leaders’ complaints centered on what they say is a lack of awareness of I-5’s place in Portland history. When it was built in the 1960s, it carved through the lower Albina neighborhood and displaced African American families and businesses, precipitating what would be a wave of similar displacements and racist policies like housing discrimination targeted toward communities of color in the area.

Eudaly said the project needs to not just remedy a “poorly engineered interchange,” a nod to the project aspect that adds merging lanes between the 1.7-mile stretch of I-5 between I-84 and I-405, but it also needs to remedy the wrongs brought by the freeway.

Peterson said the issue playing out is not just a lower Albina problem – “it’s an I-5 problem.“

“We need a larger recognition that I-5 north needs to be discussed in its full context,” she said, adding that congestion pricing – tolling -- needs to be in place before the project is finished.

Alexander said whatever is done on the freeway there must account for what he said is the hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen wealth from the community displaced by the freeway decades ago.

“We cannot afford to repeat this story or leave it unaddressed,” he said.

He added that Albina Vision Trust leaders were frustrated that a recently released report on the project’s rising costs highlighted that freeway caps that allow for multistory buildings would add $200 million to $500 million to a project that now ranges in cost from $715 million to $795 million. Alexander said Albina Vision Trust leaders have been trying to put this issue on the front burner for years, and the state has shown “either an inability or unwillingness to understand this issue.”

Last May, ODOT signaled it would hire an outside contractor to help study the freeway cap issue, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Van Brocklin said by approving his proposal to make recommendations “on or before Oct. 1," unless otherwise directed, on how the state could help the neighborhood rebuild “in a manner that creates economic opportunities for area residents and resident minority-owned businesses” the state is showing it’s serious about the issue. That study is estimated to cost $1 million, he said Thursday.

He also acknowledged the inner North and Northeast Portland neighborhood where the freeway is today is “a very unique area in the state with a very long history, and we’re trying to be respectful to all the considerations that have been raised.”

That includes “environmental, social, economic and otherwise.”

He added: “We are probably not going to make every single person happy every single day, but we’re trying to be smart about it.”

The board is next scheduled to meet March 20.

-- Andrew Theen; atheen@oregonian.com; 503-294-4026; @andrewtheen

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