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This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the state.
As Gov. Tina Kotek works toward a special legislative ses sion to mitigate nearly 500 layoffs looming at the Oregon Department of Transportation, some observers are still trying to understand the failure of House Bill 2025.
That bill, in the works for a year, would have raised $15 billion in new transportation funding over the next decade. And in the session’s waning days, few lawmakers played a bigger role in the drama around the bill than state Rep. Kevin Mannix (R-Salem), one of the most wily and experienced elected officials in Oregon politics over the past four decades.
Mannix voted no three times on HB 2025 in committee before abruptly announcing the day before the session’s end (when the bill was on its way to the House floor) that he’d broken with Republicans and switched his vote to yes.
It ultimately didn’t matter. Democrats had hoped they could rely on the three-fifths supermajorities they hold in both legislative chambers to pass HB 2025. (The Oregon Constitution requires a supermajority to pass new taxes.) But with Rep. Hoa Nguyen (D-East Portland) mostly unavailable due to cancer treatment and Sen. Mark Meek (D-Gladstone) opposed to the bill, Democrats desperately needed to find Republican votes. That was a tall order, given GOP leadership’s stated belief that ODOT’s budget should be cut rather than increased.
Mannix’s reversal came, he says, because Democrats trimmed the new taxes enough for his taste. But others point to the timing of his reversal, just days after lawmakers approved a $100 million earmark to deepen the shipping channel in the Port of Coos Bay.
A group including former state Rep. Brian Clem (D-Salem) proposes to build a multibillion-dollar container port there and to ship goods by rail to and from Eugene.
Mannix is a vocal supporter of the Coos Bay project and previously an investor in companies that could benefit from its construction. He says he no longer has a stake in one of the companies he formed—Coos Bay Marine Terminals LLC—but he’s still actively involved in rail-related companies that hope to provide container traffic to the Coos Bay-to-Eugene rail line.
Mannix acknowledges he’s long been a booster of state investment in the Coos Bay project. “I think the state should be more visionary when it comes to Coos Bay,” he says. But he adamantly denies that he traded his vote in exchange for the $100 million for the project.
“While I support the appropriation, I was not engaged in any discussion with leadership about it,” Mannix says. “My willingness to vote yes [on HB 2025] had absolutely nothing to do with Coos Bay.”
Scott Moore, the chief of staff to House Speaker Julie Fahey (D-Eugene) supports that account. “The speaker had many conversations about HB 2025 with legislators, including Rep. Mannix, who is a member of the joint committee,” Moore says. “For the record, he never once mentioned Coos Bay to her.”
Yet the end result was that a project important to Mannix got a massive financial boost just three days before he switched his vote—and the size of the Coos Bay earmark came as a surprise to many, even the House member who represents Coos Bay.
Mannix, 75, grew up in Ecuador, Panama and Bolivia (his father served in the Foreign Service) before earning undergrad and law degrees from the University of Virginia. He made his way to Oregon and joined the Oregon Department of Justice, but his oratorical skills and passion for civic affairs led him to politics. He first entered the Legislature in 1989—as a Democrat. A bill-writing machine, he says on his website that he was “the chief sponsor of more successful legislation (135 bills) than any other single legislator since 1859, when Oregon became a state.”
Mannix also authored numerous ballot initiatives, most notably Measure 11 in 1994 that created mandatory minimum sentences.
After running unsuccessfully for attorney general as a Democrat in 1996, Mannix switched his party affiliation to Republican and soon embarked on a second act, pursuing higher office in earnest. He ran again for AG in 2000, nearly won the governor’s race in 2002, ran again for governor in 2006, and then for Congress in 2008, battling Democrats over ballot measures all the while.
In 2017, having left electoral politics, Mannix noticed that the large transportation funding package lawmakers passed that year created opportunities for rail freight.
“That got me involved in rail transportation issues,” he says.
Records show he established a series of companies seeking to create rail-shipping capacity for agricultural interests in the Willamette Valley.
In 2022 Mannix returned to the Capitol for a third act, winning an open Salem House seat. In the statement of economic interest required of all lawmakers, he disclosed on his 2023 form investments in three rail-related companies: Willamette Intermodal Group LLC, Oregon Independence Railroad LLC, and Coos Bay Marine Terminals. In 2024 he disclosed those same investments.
Mannix tells OJP he ended his investment in Coos Bay Terminals when he reentered the Legislature in 2023 and listed it in 2024 because the company owed him money for legal services. His 2025 form does not include an investment in that company, but lists the railroad and Willamette Intermodal Group. (Mannix says he is a minority owner in both and president of the latter.)
Those companies are aimed at linking the Willamette Valley to the Coos Bay container port.
In June 2021, the OIRR, Mannix’s company, purchased about half a mile of track that formerly belonged to the Valley and Siletz Railroad. In 2022, records show, the Marion County Board of Commissioners awarded another Mannix company, Willamette Intermodal Group, a $1 million grant, part of Mannix’s goal of serving Willamette Valley agricultural shipping needs.
In his application to Marion County, Mannix described plans for a $138 million, 400-acre intermodal rail yard in Woodburn, served by Interstate 5 and major rail lines. Upon completion, his application said, the rail yard would have “maximum capacity of 150,000 containers annually” and, among other possibilities, could serve “as a general distribution location for products moving to and from the International Port of Coos Bay.”
For some time, Mannix has been a zealous advocate for the Coos Bay container port. He says he introduced NorthPoint Development, the company tapped to build the facility, to Coos Bay officials.
Another example: Early in the legislative session, officials from Business Oregon and the Port of Portland pushed a bill that would provide state funding for the latter’s container shipping terminal, which would be a direct competitor to Coos Bay, should the Coos Bay terminal get built.
But during a hearing on the bill, Mannix insisted that the state not play favorites, even though the Port of Portland has an existing container business.
“I want to make sure we are not excluding the Port of Coos Bay,” he said. “I see an amendment coming.”
Mannix later proposed an amendment that changed the bill’s language so that rather than going to an “existing” container port, the state money would go to an “existing or proposed” container port.
That was in February. By late June, Democrats were scrambling to salvage HB 2025, a transportation bill that had veered dangerously off course in the final days of the session.
On June 20, the Joint Committee on Transportation Reinvestment voted to move HB 2025 to the House floor on a party-line vote. Mannix joined his Republican colleagues on the committee in voting against what he called an “obese” bill.
On June 23, the Joint Ways and Means Committee released its capital expenditure bill, the so-called Christmas Tree legislation that bestows funding requested by influential legislators. The bill emerged from a secretive process in which requests for funding far outstripped available funding (i.e., only select lawmakers got their wishes).
Among the biggest expenditures in the bill: $100 million to deepen the channel at Coos Bay to accommodate massive container ships. Lawmakers and lobbyists watching the Ways and Means process reacted with surprise that the Coos Bay project got such a big chunk of funding.
“I had absolutely no idea how that happened,” says state Rep. Boomer Wright (R-Coos Bay), whose district includes the port.
“That’s a crazy amount for Coos Bay,” a transportation lobbyist told OJP.
Then on June 26, Mannix switched his vote on HB 2025. He became the sole Republican to announce he’d support a new, slimmer version of HB 2025 on the House floor.
“We need to remember the basic goal of this legislation, which is to reestablish accountability in our transportation operations but also develop the resources to meet the needs of Oregonians,” he said in explaining his change of heart.
Mannix says he always hoped to find a version of the transportation bill he could support. But the timeline shows that after the release of the Coos Bay news, he saw things the Democrats’ way.
Mannix was one of four Republicans Democrats chose to negotiate with on HB 2025 behind closed doors. That kept him in regular communication with Democratic leaders, who were ultimately responsible for the Christmas Tree bill.
State Sen. Kate Lieber (D-Portland), co-chair of the Joint Ways and Means Committee, which is responsible for the earmarks, including the $100 million for Coos Bay, says she did not cut any deal with Mannix. “We never talked about it,” Lieber says.
Lieber’s committee co-chair, Rep. Tawna Sanchez (D-Portland), did not respond to questions.
In the end, Coos Bay got far more from lawmakers than did the Port of Portland ($20 million), although the $100 million is contingent on Coos Bay raising federal matching funds.
Mannix voted for HB 5006, the Christmas Tree bill, without declaring a conflict of interest. He says potential benefits from his transportation investments are so uncertain and so far off he did not think it necessary.
“Any connections between my projects and Coos Bay are ethereal,” he says, “and way in the future.”
