Editorial: Bill is one-sided look at Oregon transit

Published 8:20 am Monday, January 19, 2026

By The Astorian

The Sunset Empire Transportation District provides vital services in Clatsop County, but has sometimes struggled with funding.

There’s some good old-fashioned task force-packing in a bill legislators are developing to create a transit funding task force for Oregon.

The governor would appoint all 19 of the voting members. And a plurality of those appointed would have to work for or be affiliated with transit.

One would be from the Amalgamated Transit Union, one from mass transit provider, one who represents a tribal transit provider, one who represents a transit provider that provides services in a city with a population of less than 100,000, one from a transit provider from an urban area, one member from a rural transit provider, one from the Oregon Department of Transportation, one from a transit provider that primarily serves people with disabilities and seniors and one who represents transit riders who use a low-income transit pass program.

It wouldn’t be much of an Oregon solution to how to fund transit. That would pretty much make it how transit would pay for transit.

Transit in Oregon has been paid for in part by a payroll tax. It was set to double from .1% to .2% of payroll in a bill passed in a special session. A ballot initiative set for the November elections put that revenue measure and other revenue measures in the special session bill on hold until that election. Gov. Tina Kotek has called for the special session bill to be repealed.

So one question is: How should Oregon fund transit in the future? The task force would be one way to come up with a recommendation for the Legislature.

There would be other members of the task force who are not closely connected to transit but are transit-adjacent, if you will. The task force would also include a representative from the city of Portland, another from Metro, a representative from a city and a representative from a county. So, overall, the majority would be an opinion made by government employees, transit employees or users of the service of how they would like to decide to fund themselves.

We are fans of transit. It can be an efficient, green way to move people around. It provides a service for people who can least afford to pay more to get around. This proposed structure for the task force, though, sure looks like a one-sided conversation about how transit should be funded in Oregon.