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This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the state.
To better understand the high stakes of the final days of the 2025 legislative session, it’s useful to consider one fact that was largely absent from the debate over House Bill 2025, the multibillion-dollar transportation funding measure that failed in numerous incarnations: The biggest immediate loser will be the members of Service Employees International Union who are set to be laid off later this week.
Fully half of ODOT’s nearly 5,000 employees are SEIU members: 1,700 in maintenance, operations and headquarters jobs and about 800 at the DMV, Oregon Driver & Motor Vehicle Services.
Immediately after the session ended, ODOT director Kris Strickler sent an email to all employees, warning of 600 layoffs. That message was consistent with agency messaging over the past year, but still came as a jolt.
“ODOT is finalizing the list, and we expect hundreds of workers to receive layoff notices on July 7,” SEIU spokeswoman Pati Urias tells OJP.
The ODOT budget bill, which was separate from HB 2025, showed that layoffs would fall most heavily on ODOT’s maintenance workers, who perform the basic, essential duties of keeping the state’s 8,000 miles of highway and 2,700 bridges in good working order.
The agency is a vast presence across Oregon. It owns or leases 1,200 buildings, including 88 maintenance stations and 59 DMV field offices.
In the legislative session’s final week, Democratic leaders worked themselves into a frenzy, trying unsuccessfully to pass some version—any version—of a multibillion-dollar transportation funding package that was supposed to be the centerpiece of the 2025 session and stave off cuts to ODOT’s current service level.
Lawmakers focused enormous amounts of energy on the department’s budget, even though polling conducted on the funding package showed Oregonians ranked transportation far down their lists of concerns.
All those efforts failed, despite a last-minute push by Gov. Tina Kotek. Formerly the longest-serving House speaker in Oregon history, Kotek worked the building furiously in the session’s final hours, to no avail.
In a post-session press conference, the governor bashed legislators for leaving two days before the statutory end of session, calling their failure to fill ODOT’s funding gap “disappointing.”
“The Legislature adjourned two days before constitutional sine die without meeting even the basic needs of our transportation system,” Kotek added in a June 28 statement, using the Latin term for session’s end.
Melissa Unger, executive director of SEIU Local 503, used the same word repeatedly in an interview with OJP about the looming ODOT layoffs.
“Our members are disappointed generally that we didn’t figure out how to pass this package,” Unger says.
“As a union we often try to do hard things. Oregonians expect our elected officials to do hard things. Did elected officials do what they needed to do to keep our roads, highways and bridges safe and our traffic moving? The answer is no.”
SEIU, the state’s largest public employee union, with more than 72,000 members, wields enormous clout in Salem. The union’s main political action committee spent $2.2 million supporting Democratic candidates in 2022 and $1.8 million last year. Its ability to mobilize members for door-knocking, phone-banking, and other activities adds additional value.
The union’s support helped elect Kotek and gain Democrats the supermajorities in both chambers required to pass new taxes—like the transportation bill, which in its largest incarnation would have yielded about $15 billion over the next decade.
That amount and skinnier versions ultimately proved too much for lawmakers to swallow, but Unger says she’s hopeful Kotek and legislative leaders will find a way to create a more palatable package, either in a special legislative session or in next year’s short session. In the meantime, SEIU is scrambling, hoping ODOT will cut only vacant positions and find every penny of savings it can.
“We are trying to do everything we can to save these jobs right now,” Unger says. “Workers are very stressed out.”
