Glenn Jackson was the closest Oregon ever had to a Robert Moses-type character in transportation development. He was also considerably more enlightened than Moses, supporting the original Banfield Light Rail after support for the Mt. Hood Freeway faltered.
Jackson was CEO of Pacific Power and Light, and for many years chair of the Oregon Highway Commission. Our I-205 bridge across the Columbia is named after him. He was the last great mover and shaker in transportation in the state.
At last week’s Oregon Business Plan conference, State Senate President Peter Courtney expressed nostalgia for the era when Jackson could get things done with his relationships and force of personality. Courtney’s comment “there is no visible force in transportation today.” The Oregonian echoed this sentiment in an editorial on Friday:
Those were the days, businesspeople say, when public investments occurred because a few well-placed people practiced the best principles of civics; when business and government ran on more-or-less parallel tracks, with a common sense of direction. While the process wasn’t particularly open, it was productive.
Both however noted that the era of Glenn Jackson will never return. Power and influence are much more distributed now.
So my question today is, how do we assemble collective leadership that can move us out of the era of disinvestment and relative stalemate that we find ourselves in today related to transportation?
12 responses to “Pining for Glenn Jackson”
We are hardly in a period of disinvestment…Airport MAX opened in 2001, Interstate MAX in 2004; Streetcar, the Green Line and Commuter Rail are all important investments.
What we have not done is invest in more freeways, which is a good thing. Remember Jackson gave us the Marquam Bridge and the Eastbank Freeway…which he regretted…two monuments as bad as anything from Mr. Moses.
The resounding defeat of the last gas tax increase indicates that a significant number of Oregonians do not want to give ODOT a blank check.
Time to “make it do or do without.”
When the gas tax can’t pay for maintaining existing roads, I call that a period of disinvestment :-)
But the post was more about the deficit of consensus (and leadership). How do we stop working at cross purposes and move forward?
The problem is a combination of disinvestment and misinvestment (is an interchange at Highway 26 and Jackson School Road really more important than basic maintenance).
Let me suggest that the problem of business leadership is much larger than transportation. There was a time when business leaders were primarily focused on the process of manufacturing a product and/or selling it. Even bankers were successful by understanding their customer’s business well enough to evaluate loaning them money. Today’s top business leaders are mostly money managers and/or marketing gurus.
So while there are still business people who get involved in public projects, they are often the second tier or lower like most of the transportation specialists who participate in things like TPAC. Or they are guys like Dick Reitan whose business is something of an anachronism.
Guys like Phil Knight are neither interested in, nor do their businesses depend on, public investment in infrastructure. When they do get involved it is usually their personal interests, not their business, which is driving it. So Phil Knight doesn’t like sitting in congestion on his way to work, neither do any of the rest of us. (To be clear – I don’t know what Phil Knight thinks, I’m using him as a type.) His financial contributions may give him clout, but the fact that he owns Nike does not give him any special insight.
The second change, is that local infrastructure is not the central barrier to business success that it once was. Nike has far more concern about port operations in Long Beach than they do Portland. And they probably have more concern with port operations in Asia than they do in the US. And that includes the quality of the airport operations where proximity is probably more important than the quality of the service.
And of course, human capital is playing a lot bigger role in the success of every business, not just large corporations. So there was a time when the quality of the port, the roads, the railroads and other physical infrastructure was vital to the success of the typical business. But now its the quality of the workforce, the livability of the community and access to higher education. And I think you have seen some business leaders step up on those issues.
So its not a question of leadership, its that these types of decisions are no longer central to the business community. So you don’t get the major leaders involved in evaluating the details very easily unless they have a direct interest.
I think there is a pretty broad consensus that investing in roads is a poor one, and that the region is on the right track investing in high capacity transit. The road network is built out for the most part and additions are very expensive. Meanwhile I have a hard time believing that $600 Million per year, or whatever ODOT gets, is not enough to do maintenance of the existing network.
Meanwhile I have a hard time believing that $600 Million per year, or whatever ODOT gets, is not enough to do maintenance of the existing network.
All I know is that several years ago Henry Hewitt said that “we are already at that point” when asked when it would get to a point where ODOT was going to have to rebuild some roads, at much greater expense, because it wasn’t spending much smaller amounts to maintain them properly. Once deferred maintenance starts its like a cancer and the longer it spreads the more difficult it is to stop.
we really do not need another Columbia River crossing at present, the existing bridges carry the interstate at least minimally… the Vancouver light Rail wasthe first to go under in the 30,s… would support a Bart type tube from about 82nd street to the industry centers in east Clark County to allow Multnomah County workers to compete for the jobs there.. why not use existing tracks to provide commuter service to Longview and the towns on the route..
Meanwhile I have a hard time believing that $600 Million per year, or whatever ODOT gets, is not enough to do maintenance of the existing network.
If the Government is responsible for maintenance, and they aren’t accountable to shareholders than you better bet it isn’t enough. Hell, just that bridge they want to build is 2 Billion. Imagine all the bridges in this state!!
If the Government is responsible for maintenance, and they aren’t accountable to shareholders than you better bet it isn’t enough. Hell, just that bridge they want to build is 2 Billion. Imagine all the bridges in this state!!
Aren’t the voters the shareholders? The same voters who defeated the last several attempts to raise the gas tax? What happens when the shareholders vote instructions to the board of directors that are not healthy for the business?
As for the numbers, the ODOT handout at the Business Plan Summit suggests that ODOT spends just over $1B per year (and they spent only $59M last year on new capacity) and they need $2B per year on an ongoing basis for maintenance.
The biggest maintenance expense that ODOT is dealing with now is the enormous program of bridge replacement and reconstruction throughout the state caused by (a) ODOT (and its predecessors) failing to design bridges strong enough for the enormous loads that the modern trucking industry has tricked Oregon into allowing or (b) ODOT and its predecessors failing to stand up and tell the legislature that if they allowed trucks to be that heavy, they would wear out the state’s bridges decades ahead of schedule and cost the state a gigantic amount of money.
How much more ordinary and routine maintenance could we afford if we weren’t desperately trying to avoid precipitating a couple a semis, a few motor homes, and a bunch of cars into a canyon or a river?
And would we even need near as much routine maintenance? Those big cracks in modern slab freeways aren’t caused by automobile traffic, they’re caused by heavy trucks.
Why don’t we make the trucking industry pick up its real share of our road expenses? They have been subsidized by the taxpayers for way too long. If they were paying their fair share, a whole lot more intercity freight would be moving on railroads where it belongs, highways would be safer and less congested, and fossil fuel consumption would be lowered.
Aren’t many of those bridges at or near the end of their planned design life with or without heavier trucks?
How can you hold a Highway Depart engineer 50 years ago accountable for not knowing how heavy trucks would be now?
Aren’t many of those bridges at or near the end of their planned design life with or without heavier trucks?
How can you hold a Highway Depart engineer 50 years ago accountable for not knowing how heavy trucks would be now?
Chris –
Does that figure include the OTIA projects. I thought that was a $500 million+ committment.
As I understood it the failure of the bridges was a surprise. This was not expected.
The problems was not the highway engineers fifty years ago, it was the decisions since to allow heavier than designed weights on the roads. I think, however, that is more the fault of Oregon’s elected officials than ODOT leadership. Its another example of the power of campaign contributions.
I don’t have the piece in front of me, but I think OTIA was excluded, because it’s a one-time injection (actually a series of them), not ongoing revenue.