Oregon is creating a new office within the state’s transportation department to focus on addressing the Portland metro area’s traffic woes and ensuring big-ticket freeway projects like the Rose Quarter expansion are constructed.

The state announced the Office of Urban Mobility and Mega Project Delivery in a news release Tuesday. Kris Strickler, the state’s transportation director, said the office is a sign Oregon is serious about “addressing congestion on all fronts.” He added that its evidence of a “new way of doing business” in Oregon.

“The agency will enhance its efforts to grow beyond just a highway department into an organization focused on providing transportation options for all users,” Strickler said, “making decisions through the lens of social equity, and ensuring equitable access to transportation choices and economic opportunities for communities and individuals across our state.”

The office will be charged with helping three Portland-area freeway projects specifically highlighted by lawmakers as critical to the region’s transportation system – the Rose Quarter bottleneck, Abernethy Bridge on Interstate 205 between West Linn and Oregon City and a plan to widen a 4-mile stretch of Oregon 217 – be constructed.

Anti-freeway expansion groups rallied against the Rose Quarter project, in particular.

Last month, the state pressed the pause button on the Rose Quarter project after Gov. Kate Brown asked for additional study. Brown weighed in after many Portland-area politicians, the Metro regional government, local school board and other groups asked for additional study.

“We cannot build our way out of congestion by inducing greater demand on the system,” Brown wrote in a letter last month to the Oregon Transportation Commission, the state’s top decision-making body on road and freeway projects. “We must manage demand to reduce congestion while also reducing emissions consistent with our state’s greenhouse gas emission goals.”

Brendan Finn, a veteran political aide who worked for nearly two decades for former Portland Commissioner Dan Saltzman before becoming Gov. Kate Brown’s transportation adviser in 2018, will direct the new mega projects office. Finn starts the new job March 1.

“I am excited to join the ODOT team after the legislative session as they continue to advance as an agency," Finn said. "When Governor Brown signed HB 2017 into law it established a multi-modal transportation agency to meet the mobility needs of all Oregonians so that everyone in our state has better experiences and access to transportation. The infrastructure and demand management projects directed by the legislation are one component to a system-wide approach. I look forward to contributing to that effort in a manner that is consistent with our climate and equity goals.”

The Rose Quarter project had money specifically set aside in the landmark $5.3 billion state bill in 2017, but funds for the proposal to widen I-205 and either seismically retrofit or replace the Abernethy Bridge haven’t been identified, though tolls are likely to help pay for that project.

Finn’s office will also lead the agency’s nascent effort to bring congestion pricing to sections of I-5 and I-205. Finn previously sat on a state committee that sought to recommend a tolling plan, a process that was set in motion by the Legislature in 2017. Oregon applied for federal approval in late 2018, but freeway pricing is still likely years away.

Joe Cortright, a Portland economist who has been an outspoken critic of several large freeway projects, said it’s too soon to say whether the changes are substantive or “rearranging the deck chairs,” but he said it’s a “hopeful sign” that the state wants to link the congestion pricing to the major projects. “This is an opportunity for ODOT,” Cortright said, “to kind of move into the 21st century.”

McGregor Lynde, an ODOT deputy administrator in the delivery and operations division, said the new office does not yet have a total budget, thought there is money for Finn’s position and two additional hires announced Tuesday. “There has been funding directed to some of the efforts that will now be led by this new office – Rose Quarter Project, the design work for the I-205 project, and the initial efforts around Tolling/Congestion Pricing work to date,” Lynde said in an email.

Mega projects are, at least initially, defined as anything costing more than $100 million, depending on the scope, size and complexity of the project. One of the reasons to start up the new project, Lynde said, is “to grow our acumen around the delivery of these really big projects – statewide.”

“As additional funding becomes available, this Office will be asked to deliver mega projects and operational improvements in other parts of the state as well,” Lynde added.

Finn will be paid $178,608 per year and will be on par with the five ODOT regional directors in terms of seniority.

Region 1, the district encompassing the metro area, will still oversee “operations of the system” across the Portland area.

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

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