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The U.S. House’s passage of a sweeping tax policy bill backed by President Donald Trump jeopardizes high-profile federal transportation grants that state and local officials have penciled in to their budgets—including $488 million for an overhaul of Portland’s Rose Quarter.
The U.S. Department of Transportation awarded that money via two grants in 2024.
The larger grant, $450 million, would go to the Oregon Department of Transportation to place caps on Interstate 5 as part of the long-planned widening of the freeway at the Rose Quarter. The smaller grant, $38 million, would go to the Portland Bureau of Transportation to reconfigure lower Broadway in connection with the I-5 expansion.
Both grants stemmed from the advocacy of the Albina Vision Trust, a nonprofit formed to rebuild the historically Black neighborhoods in North and inner Northeast Portland destroyed decades ago by the construction of I-5 and nearby urban renewal projects.
The grants Albina Vision Trust helped secure are crucial to a delicate compromise among multiple governments to expand the highway at its pinch point in the Rose Quarter (a priority for ODOT) and build a new neighborhood above the highway (an idea favored by the nonprofit and City Hall).
The grants were also the largest the feds awarded through the Reconnecting Communities program, which aimed to mitigate some of the damage done to cities by the development of the interstate highway system. It was part of another federal program called the Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant Program.
The project, which ODOT would build, started with a $450 million budget that the Legislature approved in 2017. Since then, that cost has risen to $2.1 billion. After the failure of a state transportation funding package last week, most of the money ODOT is counting on to begin construction would come from the federal money Albina Vision Trust helped secure.
But the Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by the House on July 3, includes a brief but potentially consequential section affecting the grants. Here’s that language in section 60019 of the act, which is titled “Rescission of Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant Program”:
“The unobligated balances of amounts made available to carry out section 177 of title 23, United States Code, are rescinded,” the section says.
J.T. Flowers, the government affairs director for Albina Vision Trust, says the nonprofit is seeking to determine what “unobligated” means in the context of the bill Congress just passed.
“Does it mean signed agreements are safe, or that every dollar that the federal government hasn’t forked over yet is canceled?” Flowers asks.
The feds signed grant agreements with ODOT and PBOT before President Joe Biden left office. Those signed agreements could meet the definition of “obligated.” On the other hand, ODOT has previously told WW that the money doesn’t actually change hands until the projects start. That hasn’t happened yet.
Joe Cortright, a Portland economist with No More Freeways, which opposes the Rose Quarter expansion due to environmental concerns, wrote today that section 60019 sounds a death knell for the project, in a piece titled “The Rose Quarter Freeway Widening is Dead.”
Neither ODOT nor PBOT immediately responded to requests for comment on the status of the Rose Quarter projects.
Either way, Flowers says, Albina Vision Trust remains cautiously confident.
“If we have learned anything in this process, it’s to plan for the worst and hope for the best,” Flowers says. “We have made a concerted effort to proceed from a long-term perspective even in the face of all this chaos.”
Flowers notes that the Trump administration has identified a closely related project, the replacement of the Interstate Bridge to Vancouver, as a top transportation priority. He says one of Albina Vision Trust’s guiding principles is that rebuilding the neighborhood is a long-term process.
“This moment seems optically a little more dire than it is. These are projects that take many years to build,” Flowers says. “When we zoom out, there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic about the federal government’s participation in the delivery of the Rose Quarter project.”
Flowers notes that numerous red cities also got federal transportation grants under the same program, and he expects there will be bipartisan pressure on the Trump administration to follow through.
The trust built a broad statewide, bipartisan coalition comprising labor, business, ranching, agricultural and other interests to help protect the grants. Flowers says the central location of the Rose Quarter at the intersection of two interstate highways makes the project a matter of regional significance.
“There’s no such thing as a red or blue highway,” Flowers says. “These grants support pieces of infrastructure we all rely on and we all use.”
Oregon Journalism Project senior investigative reporter Nigel Jaquiss contributed to this story.
