Shownotes
In this episode, we'll get into the weeds of anti-freeway activism.
You may have heard the story of how Portlanders successfully turned back the Mt. Hood Freeway plan and removed a major downtown highway in the 1970s. About 40 years later, activist rallied again to fight the Columbia River Crossing, a plan to widen I-5 between Portland and Vancouver.
The latest fight is being waged against the I-5 Rose Quarter project — right in Portland's backyard. Despite a state that is literally on fire due to climate change, and the fact that the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon comes from transportation, the Oregon Department of Transportation wants to add lanes to I-5 between Interstate 84 and the Fremont Bridge.
But standing between ODOT and their $800 million project is a plucky, all-volunteer nonprofit named No More Freeways.
In this episode, I interview one of their leaders, a 33-year-old community organizer named Aaron Brown. He's spent four years building an opposition campaign against ODOT's project that includes thousands of followers, hundreds of donors, three lawsuits, and a lot of snarky tweets.
We talked about how he became the face of the freeway fight, why he doesn't trust ODOT, what it will take to stop building freeways, how he's navigated racial tensions around his activism, and more.
Transcripts
Welcome to the BikePortland Podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Maus. In this episode, we'll get into the weeds of anti-freeway activism. You may have heard the story of how Portlanders successfully turned back the Mountain Hood Freeway plan and removed a major downtown highway in the 1970s. About 40 years later, activists rallied again to fight the Columbia River Crossing, which was a plan to widen I-5 between Portland and Vancouver. The latest fight is being waged against the I-5 Rose Quarter project, right in Portland's backyard. Despite a state that is literally on fire due to climate change, and the fact that the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon comes from transportation, the Oregon Department of Transportation wants to add lanes to I-5 between Interstate 84 and the Fremont Bridge. But standing between ODOT and their $800 million project is a plucky, all-volunteer nonprofit named No More Freeways.
Jonathan Maus (:In this episode, I interview one of their leaders, a 33-year-old community organizer named Aaron Brown. He spent four years building an opposition campaign against ODOT's project that includes thousands of followers, hundreds of donors, three lawsuits, and a lot of snarky tweets. We talked about how he became the face of the freeway fight, why he doesn't trust ODOT, what it will take to stop building freeways, how he's navigated racial tensions around his activism, and more.
Jonathan Maus (:So Aaron, thanks for coming on the show. Here we are sort of four years into No More Freeways. I know you have a birthday coming up. We'll get to that at the end of the show, though, so you can give a shout out for the details on that. I'm really curious, sort of how did you end up as the face of No More Freeways?
Aaron Brown (:That's a great question, Jonathan. Definitely spent a couple long nights wondering how we got ourselves into this mess over the last four years, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. So I grew up here in the suburbs of Portland. Oregonians are like salmon. You leave, and then you find that the big ocean is salty and full of mean people trying to eat you. I remember getting really excited in high school about this notion of, "Why aren't there sidewalks to my high school?" Growing up in the suburbs, and I always got really interested in these questions of urban planning. And when I returned from college, I thought, "Oh, you know what? I'm going to go save the world. I'm going to go change the world through urban planning."
Aaron Brown (:And I had an internship at a government agency, and I definitely spent some time around a lot of really smart, technical people. And I was always was sort of on the edge of always, "I'm going to go to grad school, and get a MERP or a planning degree." But it became really obvious to me over my couple years back in town, bouncing around a lot of different non-profits and stuff, that the planning world has a lot of technical solutions to offer, but the stuff I was really interested in were more the political and policy questions that a planner doesn't ...
Aaron Brown (:A planner gets paid for someone else to solve on someone else's terms. The planners are not the ones themselves that are determining, "Who shows up at that meeting? Who's invited to that meeting? What questions are we asking the planners to address?" Right? Are we asking the planner to figure out how to minimize people not finding parking? Are we asking the planners to address latent white supremacy? Are we asking planners to reduce carbon emissions? Those are all different questions, and different government agencies and different consultants get asked to do that stuff.
Aaron Brown (:So I came back to Portland thinking I really wanted to be your stereotypical ... This was 2011, so Portlandia was out, right? I was so thrilled to be living a block off of Mississippi and spending $300 a month in rent, and going to Pedalpalooza rides. I pay a lot more in rent now, but I still am excited about the whole Portland bike scene stuff. But the more time I spent in it, the more the intersections of it led me to understanding my relationship to the roads, and the surrounding universe, and the privileges that I have to be in these spaces, as well as, yikes, that one time when you get hit by a car, it really changes your mindset about street safety, right? And realizing I'm fortunate that my bike commute is the most dangerous thing I do, because in my neighborhoods in Inner Portland is actually pretty safe.
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah.
Aaron Brown (:And I got involved with Oregon Walks. I was the board president of Oregon Walks from 2013 through 2017, and really taking those experiences of what it meant to be a bicyclist, but looking at it through this whole lens of, "Well, not everyone bikes, but pretty much everybody walks." And the ways in which I would sit on some of these committees as a doe-eyed, eager young person, and all these adults would be sitting in the room, rubbing their beard, like, "We need more streetcars." And then I would be spending my evenings volunteering at David Douglas High School, trying to cross Stark Street in 2012 with seven high school kids, none of them white, none of them driving.
Aaron Brown (:And just that dichotomy of how in Portland, we are simultaneously full of a bunch of stoogey boomers thinking about building five more pearl districts, but not even caring about the affordable housing. Just being like, "Oh, this is the urban forum that we need." And meanwhile, in the same city, seven miles away, it's a death trap for kids to walk to the largest, most diverse high school in the State of Oregon.
Jonathan Maus (:Right. Right.
Aaron Brown (:So those kind of experiences started radicalizing me in a lot of ways, of just understanding our transportation justice system through the lens of what I sort of assumed the problems were. And the more time I spent time doing some of these different community advocacy things, the more time I learned what problems people in Portland and the region were facing.
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah. I noticed too, you mentioned walks, and Oregon Walks, and sort of the latter part of your time being really more involved with Oregon Walks. I noticed that you actually led a Steptember event walk, which was related to fighting freeways. I think you walked down to Tom McCall Waterfront Park or something, just to maybe, I'm assuming, talk about Mountain Freeway stuff, and Harbor Drive removal. So it's almost like you were just chomping at the bit to get to this freeway fight. So what about this I-5 project, and ultimately no more freeways, what about that in particular animated you so much to devote yourself to this?
Aaron Brown (:Yeah. They're terrible. Freeways are terrible. They're so expensive. Jonathan, the planet's on fire. We want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on fossil fuel infrastructure, and it gives kids asthma. I mean, it's so bad, right? Working on with Oregon Walks, you'd go to some of these pedestrian vigils, and you'd be out in East Portland, and it would be the saddest thing you've ever been to. And then you'd be like, "Wow, why haven't we put a crosswalk here between this affordable housing complex full of senior citizen Russian ladies, and a bus stop?" And the answer was, "Oh, it's ODOT's road, and they just don't give a damn." And that crosswalk was only going to cost $100,000 at most, for the most nice crosswalk, and just basic pothole maintenance you could possibly imagine.
Aaron Brown (:For East Portland roads on a November night, when it's dark at 4:00 PM, and cars are going 40 miles an hour, right, this is a dangerous situation, and learning and recognizing that, "Wow, this state entity just does ..." There's no opportunity to put political pressure on somebody to fix this. It's bad enough it's happened. It's even worse that you can't fix it, right? It's like school shootings. It's like, these are these random acts of violence that we just sort of do not have any mechanism to hold anyone accountable to.
Aaron Brown (:When 2017 came around, right after House Bill 2017 passed, the bipartisan legislature, I had just finished working on some campaigns. I had just passed the school bonds, and I was a bit underemployed at the time, and was looking for what my next gig was going to be. And No More Freeways never became a gig, to be clear, but it was more like, "I have time on my hands." And the legend, the shoulders on which all of us stand, Chris Smith, had asked a bunch of us to come to Lucky Lab and talk about fighting the freeway.
Aaron Brown (:And as I was chatting with all of those folks, it was evident that there was a lot of smart people that had a lot of really good ideas, but there's a particular pedagogical skillset of running a campaign of like, "How do you get media? How do you community organize? How do you show ... Clipboards. Social media. Twitter."
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah.
Aaron Brown (:"What are the meetings coming up, the government meetings in which you need to go track down and make sure your elected officials hear from you?" And those are skills that I've sort of developed between my time in Oregon Walks, my time with Next Up Oregon, previously The Bus Project when I was there. Working on the gas tax in 2016, and then the school bond in 2017.
Aaron Brown (:It was one of those ... Really to get to the blunt answer of your question, Jonathan, it was sort of a like, well, I had some time on my hands. I had all of the skills necessary that I realized had not ever really been channeled in this direct direction. And for as terrible as freeways are, a lot of our beloved community partners tiptoe around the responsibility of addressing it, for reasons that I'm not here to critique anybody, because we all have our different politics to play and different organizations are ... Our realm, even the people we think of as the big moderate folks that don't go hard enough on bike ped transit stuff, they're still the good guys fighting other good fights, and they have to pick and choose how many good fights they choose to wage, right?
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah.
Aaron Brown (:And part of No More Freeways is about building the energy that everyone feels, "Okay, I'm going to chip into that."
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah. And I wanted to ask about that in particular. I've been kind of sort of fascinated. I mean, one of the things I do is I just feel like I'm an observer of all this really amazing activism that happens in Portland, in the region, the state, and stuff. And so one of the things is I've been looking at No More Freeways and the work that you all have been doing, is that style. And I feel like you're doing something a little different. No More Freeways to me feels different, because it is sort of ... I feel like maybe it's being run more like a political campaign. There's a directness to your style that I know exists, obviously.
Jonathan Maus (:But in terms of my purview of looking at these transportation issues, I don't think we'd really sort of seen that style in this realm, in terms of, like you said, coming out on Twitter. Being direct. Really saying the things that sort of polite Portland advocacy isn't saying, and doesn't typically say.
Jonathan Maus (:So I wonder, is that just Aaron being Aaron? Or is that an intentional choice to kind of shake things up, given the size of the foe that you face, and the sort of freeway industrial complex? What's the sort of thinking behind your specific style of activism?
Aaron Brown (:Yeah. I'm a jerk sometimes on the internet, but also I think that the goal that we've come up with is benevolent antagonism, is kind of the phrase that we've come up with. Which is to say that there are many agencies and individuals that agree with us that some of these projects are terrible, or at the very least, they would rather be funding something else. And maybe they were supportive or neutral to start off with, and four years of ODOT shenanigans has really worn them down, and four years of coverage and skepticism has really changed the dynamic.
Aaron Brown (:And I think that we have to be a little militant on some of this stuff, right? And I think that the militancy needs to be aimed at the institutions more than the individuals. And I don't claim to be perfect on that, and it's been a learning process of figuring out, "What does that tone look like, and how do you target the right institutions?"
Jonathan Maus (:Right.
Aaron Brown (:Because the problem here is, there is a bipartisan coalition of lobbyists that are part of the freeway industrial complex, that have tons of money to throw around, to hire really good consultants, to make fancy videos, to spend 10 times what we spend on Facebook ads and stuff. You'll just be scrolling through your phone and you'll see these beautiful ads that ODOT did, right? They're getting op-eds in the newspapers. And those are real skills, right? It takes somebody that knows how to work community groups. It takes someone who knows how to write something really well.
Aaron Brown (:So as opposed to me getting paid to do that for bad guys, I'm just kind of doing it to pay my rent on this planet. And because as a transportation advocate, as a social justice advocate, as a climate advocate, as a housing advocate, as someone that has spent a lot of time in all of these different universes, I see the explicit ways that the status quo of the freeway industrial complex directly hinders our ability to build the bigger world that we want. As opposed to the green new deal, I always say the freeways are the great old deal, and they have to be retired to fund the good stuff that we want to see.
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah. I feel like you're sort of ... Often you're saying things that these agencies and maybe other advocates, electeds, they can't say.
Aaron Brown (:Right. Yeah. No. We're the Key and Peele skit, we're Obama's anger management translator, right?
Jonathan Maus (:Right. Right.
Aaron Brown (:So there is a little bit of that, right?
Jonathan Maus (:So I'm assuming, do you get texts or DMs or something from agency people that are like, "Oh, I'm so glad you're saying that"?
Aaron Brown (:The short answer is yes.
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah. I figured.
Aaron Brown (:People have their own careers, and their own strategic times that they chip in, and sometimes people are on our side for one thing, and then they're like, "Well, this other ... The 205 Freeway stuff that's coming up, this is already a done deal. I can't really stick my neck out into this." But there are a lot of bureaucrats at a lot of agencies that have No More Freeways buttons in their desks.
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah.
Aaron Brown (:And it's indicative of, again, ODOT is in this ongoing cold war with PBOT and Metro about, Jonathan, your reporting over the years, right? The question of the bike lanes outside of Cleveland High School. The question of how wide the bike lanes are over I-5 in North Portland, in your neighborhood. These are pedantic little details that ODOT and PBOT fight over all of the time. And ODOT just has so much more money, and power, and statewide oomph, that every ounce of us chipping away at that inevitability that ODOT, as the state DOT, should be calling all of the shots, not just of the freeways, but of the roads, the connector, or near the freeways, and that the state supremacy of that legally is what's relevant, there's no way we build the beautiful Portland, with dense, walkable housing connected by frequent, reliable transit, and bike lanes, and sidewalks, unless that normative stance gets completely changed.
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah. And I think No More Freeways has done a good job sort of being that animating force in the ecosystem of just being different, louder, more direct, saying things that other folks aren't able to say, or aren't willing to say, I should say. But in addition to that, I feel like your work wouldn't be so impactful if it were just Aaron Brown, Joe Cortwright, Chris Smith yelling and screaming all the time, and I think that it seems to me you've made an intentional choice, and if not, I think you've done a pretty good job of reaching out and having other messengers carry your messages, right?
Jonathan Maus (:And I think particularly how, for a while now, No More Freeways has reached directly out to young people, young activists. And I know the physical proximity of Harriet Tubman Middle School to I-5 and the impacts of the project, that it sort of makes sense that Harriet Tubman's involved, but we've obviously seen a level of involvement from these youth climate activists, the youth strike with ODOT, and it just became sort of this stronger and stronger thing with working with youth. And other folks too. I think No More Freeways has reached out to climate justice groups, transportation justice groups, in a good way.
Jonathan Maus (:So I just wonder, can you speak to how that sort of impacted the work and the fight against these freeways?
Aaron Brown (:Two thoughts to that. First, yeah. The message is a lot less important than the medium and the messenger. Chris and I can go chat about the climate implications of every freeway from here on out, right? I remember in 2017, going to an event that was hosted by Business for a Better Portland, and it was about transportation, and I was possibly the youngest person in the room, and I raised my hand and was like, "Can we talk about climate? You guys have been talking for 90 minutes about climate." And the elected squirmed a little bit, but they were like, "Yeah, no. We agree it's important." And that was 2017.
Aaron Brown (:And think about where we are now, and all we can talk about is climate, right? And obviously Portland being thrown into the hellscape fires of ... Fires and heat waves, right, is part of it. But also, I went to one of the first, the inaugural hub launch of Sunrise, and just being in a space with all of those young folks, and I've become the goofy transportation uncle there, which is to say that as all these little Sunrise Hubs across the country are launching. Sunrise is this national organization. The local Portland hub is figuring out how they want to engage with stuff. And being like, "Look, if you want elected officials to shout about climate change, 40% of Oregon's carbon emissions come from transportation. We've never had a sustained, 'Holy smokes. What are we doing on climate?' Shouting dynamic directed at the freeway industrial complex. Would you enjoy doing that?" And they changed the dynamic, right?
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah. Totally.
Aaron Brown (:I mean, those conversations helped pressure the Metro hearings last year, in the lead up to the Metro Transportation measure. There's been multiple times where they've gotten that press and attention.
Aaron Brown (:But then just to your bigger question, because I'd worked on school bonds, because I've done work with school districts, I've worked with a couple of school districts now, I'm very comfortable going to a PTA. The Tubman community, and I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but it's not like ODOT was going to the Tubman community being like, "What do you think about this freeway?" Right? It was Aaron Brown.
Aaron Brown (:And part of it is, you show up, and I think this is a lesson I would hope anyone that's kind of an aspiring advocate kind of can process and think about, which is that I would show up at those PTA meetings at Tubman, and I thought I was this young, handsome man that had a bunch of flyers about air pollution, and I was going to go chat up all of these friendly parents, and most of them are moms, and they'd be like, "Look at this nice young man, coming to talk to us about this stuff." You think you're the savior in all of this. I do, right? It's easy to kind of come with that approach. And then you show up and you're like, "Yikes. This school, their math teacher's just left. Something went down."
Aaron Brown (:And PPS is a beautiful institution, and there's many specific schools that are going through a lot of stress just due to the displacement and socioeconomic despair, and this was pre-pandemic at this point, right? And you can go to that mom and be like, "Don't you care about the fires that are burning five years from now? Metaphorical fires of like, your kids getting more asthma?" And they're like, "I care about my kid getting algebra, because he's going to be in high school next year, and right now he doesn't have a math teacher."
Aaron Brown (:And that level of, you can't just show up and expect people to sign your stuff. You have to listen to what they care about, and you have to find common cause, and sometimes you'll just show up and shut up, and not say anything, and hand out some flyers, and be like, "I'd love to chat with you in the next couple weeks." And that's slow and steady work. It happens over months, right? But you have to build that trust, and you have to demonstrate that you're not just there for the transactional, "By the way, come sign onto my freeway," thing, as much as, "Oh my goodness. I'm so sorry to hear, PPS, that this is how your experience is."
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah.
Aaron Brown (:"Tell me more about it." People are more-
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah. That's interesting because to me, that gets to the tension or the dynamic, the difference between working a political campaign, or a more traditional campaign, where it's like, "Here's the end date. We got to get this money. This Metro bond major's coming," or, "This person needs to be elected." Versus the work of community organizing against a massive freeway industrial complex, and changing the arc of how we do transportation and transportation reform. The timelines are so different. And I feel like it's interesting, because you're sort of like, if I hear you right, and if I'm observing you correctly, you're sort of bringing both of those things into this fight. It's like the direct, "We must do something now. Let's be really loud." But then also building the relationships on the side.
Aaron Brown (:Yeah. I mean, if you want, choose your lefty goal. If you want $15 minimum wage, if you want health care for all, whatever, Medicare for all, you have to engage in both the electoral politics and in the community organizing. Both are necessary, right?
Jonathan Maus (:Right. Right.
Aaron Brown (:And the direct actions, like Sunrise doing events outside of ODOT.
Jonathan Maus (:What do you think about the fact that, compared to other efforts to fight freeways in the past, a huge difference is social media, which is something that No More Freeways has absolutely taken full advantage of. And it's a force multiplier, obviously. It's just this amazing messaging tool. I don't know. How has being able to engage on there impacted the fight, and also do you see some perils in this sort of being only on social media, or too much Twitter activism, and not ... Do you face those kind of detractors?
Aaron Brown (:Yeah, no. I was actually having a conversation with my friend this weekend, less about the freeway fight specifically, but about this question of, in a lot of the youth climate organizing spaces I'm in, Sunrise, especially national Sunrise has developed some phenomenal pedagogies about doing community organizing around social media. But you know, Jonathan, to you and I, social media means Twitter, right?
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah. For the most part.
Aaron Brown (:To 22-year-olds, it means TikTok, right?
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah.
Aaron Brown (:It means Instagram is too old. What are your daughters on? Right, Jonathan? Right?
Jonathan Maus (:Right. Yeah.
Aaron Brown (:And there are some phenomenal videos that they can make that really get at this, but it's done from a different messaging, and it's a different platform, and what I was saying earlier about the medium is the message, right? If I'm a 18-year-old that watches what the hell's happening to this planet right now, I'm certainly not going to trust any adults. And what do adults use? Facebook and Twitter? No. But if something comes in on TikTok with a young person speaking that way, they're going to be like, "Oh. I can just already tell this is something that was designed by and for people like me." Right?
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah.
Aaron Brown (:And I bring that up just to follow up on your question about social media, to say that as an organizer, we spend plenty of time on Twitter. Most of the work is not happening on Twitter. Most of the work is happening behind the scenes. Twitter is a way to meet people. I've used Twitter to meet someone. "Hey, it seems like you're doing cool work. Can we ... I'd love to learn more about you sometime." Right?
Jonathan Maus (:Right. But I think it's a good illustration of a larger issue that I see, which is this gap, this gap between what people who are more online-focused, to generalize, lets call them younger people, a gap between the urgency that they feel around these issues, and how excited they get to go against freeway supporters, or ODOT, or whoever it might be. The gap between them, and then the actual, the bureaucrats and the agency leaders, the electeds, right? Because we see continually sort of a lack of urgency from them when it comes to weighing in on this stuff. And that's often a question for me. I feel like I'm kind of in the middle. I'm not quite one of the old folks. I'm sort of not young still, but right? So I can kind of see both sides, and it's shocking to me, where you have these electeds continue to sort of pretty much support the status quo, when you have No More Freeways and everybody on Twitter and social media saying, "Oh my god. The climate arson. Climate leaders, don't widen freeways." And all these things.
Jonathan Maus (:So that gap is really there, and I think social media sort of accentuates that, but I also wonder for you, how do you bridge that gap a little bit? Because if those older folks who don't really care as much about social media are the ones making the decisions, how are you going to make progress if you can't close that gap? Or sort of how do you close that gap?
Aaron Brown (:Yeah. I mean, we use social media ... Just as sort of the follow-up from the comment I was just making of, there is very specific pedagogies around community organizing. And by pedagogies, I mean there was a generation of labor organizers that knew exactly, "Okay, you want to do a strike? You need to get X percentage of people to sign off your card." Like, "Don't hold the vote until you've got X amount of ..." There was a playbook on what organizing looked like, right? And some of those elders are often kind of skeptical of social media, because you're like, "Okay, you guys are good at coms, but you're all bark and you're no bite." And I think there are some valid critiques in that, but I also would think that now, current generations, the bark is louder than it used to be, and more powerful than it used to be. Because it used to be that you'd have to phone tree, right?
Jonathan Maus (:Right.
Aaron Brown (:People that taught me community organizing, they would tell you these stories of showing up somewhere with this big book, and they'd be like, "Okay. We're having an event in two weeks. You have to call 10 people, and those 10 people each have 10 people that they call."
Jonathan Maus (:Wow.
Aaron Brown (:Imagine the world that we live in, Jonathan. Remember what it used to be with when we all had landlines, right?
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah. Yeah. And just to make a point, you are turning out real numbers and real people to do real things. Thousands and thousands of comments constantly. People sending messages to their legislators. So that's definitely happening, and that is part of it. So it is really kind of like, yeah, building a base of people that get this stuff. It's not all just online, but I know that that is kind of a gap there.
Jonathan Maus (:So I want to switch over to kind of state stuff specific and ODOT. So I'm going to say, the way I see it on the state stuff, pushing the freeways, you got basically four parts. Oregon Transportation Commission, Oregon Department of Transportation, Governor's Office, and you got legislators. From your perspective, which one is sort of the biggest help? Which one's the biggest hurdle? Are all those just like, "Throw them all out. We need to reform the whole thing"? Where are you at on sort of where the biggest enemies or allies are on those four?
Aaron Brown (:That's a great question, Jonathan. And it's one that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, and I don't have succinct answers as much as I do think that the state legislature is ultimately the ones with the purse strings, and this last session more than anything else, it became very apparent to me how the two or three people at the top of the Joint Committee on Transportation are the ones that are determining where the money goes.
Aaron Brown (:And fascinating to me that representative Susan McLean has TV Highway running through her district, one of the most deadly roads in the entire state of Oregon. 40% of all traffic fatalities in Washington County happen on one road that bisects this legislator's district. She did not care about prioritizing fighting for TV Highway the way that Representative Pham fought for 82nd Avenue. She was one of the forces behind making sure that House Bill 30-55 passed, which will allow ODOT to bond against future tolling, not even congestion pricing, future tolling. So ODOT's going to put on tolls not to minimize the amount of cars driving, but to maximize the amount of revenue, bond against that for indefinite, like 20, 30 years, just to build these massively oversized expansions at 205 at Abernathy, and then in Wilsonville. And yikes, those are big projects.
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah.
Aaron Brown (:That's a lot of money. That's like an ODOT slush fund into the indefinite future. That was the legislature that pushed and made that happen, and that is under ... The caveat, a lot of this is black box for us. I'm not in those meetings, and they're obviously, you know. But it's very apparent to me that there is a road and freeway industrial complex that knew how to pick up the phones, that knew how to prioritize stuff. And at that same time, Senator Byers, the other person that's in that committee that was very pushing and all that, and he was the one that was telling the Street trust and folks that were testifying on 395, "Sorry, were broke. We can't pay for the Senate Bill 395," which was increasing the bike ped Safe Routes funding a certain amount, right? That the Street Trust were working on.
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah.
Aaron Brown (:So the legislature, I think, is where the money is. And I think always when you want to rob a bank, when you want money, you got to go where the bank is, right?
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron Brown (:I think that the OTC could potentially be helpful someday. I feel like they were squirming a lot in some of the testimony we've provided. I think they realize that things aren't going well, but they also are in a position where they're just being told by the legislature what to do.
Aaron Brown (:ODOT doesn't have to be terrible, right? There is a deep state of ODOT currently. There are plenty of younger folks that work in different channels of ODOT that actually, I think, are not terrible people, and are actually trying to do the right stuff. ODOT has a remarkable Safe Routes program. It's just heavily underfunded, right? ODOT has pennies for some of these other little projects, whereas there's hundreds of millions of dollars for the big expansions. And so this question of how I want a state department of transportation to exist that's funding passenger rail up and down the Willamette valley, that's funding buses from Eugene, to Bend, to Baker City, right? We need a state department of transportation. They're just too road-focused and it will require systemic cleaning house that will be a very difficult task.
Aaron Brown (:These are also spaces, I would point out too, that there's a lot of shady ground of who's getting contracts on all this ODOT stuff. And I think there are these meaningful questions of, this agency just has not had any transparency or accountability. No one's paid attention to where ... Everyone's just like, "Well, we need more roads." That was such a bipartisan ... I point to other state agencies, like the foster care system, where people certainly poke around, and they're like, "This is a mess, y'all. And it's really screwing over poor people in very specific ways." And I think that that urgency around ODOT, we are trying to cultivate that to get legislators and others to start paying attention to the fact that there needs to be these levels of reform for issues of air pollution, for climate, for congestion, for jobs, right? None of ODOT's stuff is ... There's so much of that that you could be cultivating that level of energy around.
Aaron Brown (:And what was the fourth one? OTC, ODOT, the legislature, and-
Jonathan Maus (:Well, the Governor's Office, which I get obviously sort of like the legislature. But the governor has an ability to stand up and say things, and I think the way I see it, she's sort of part of the sort of progressive Democrat blind spot around transportation. I mean, she just tweeted a photo yesterday or last week with US DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and all happy about changing the world, and I think she mentioned electrification of our transportation system, which to me, is the least bold thing you could possibly be tweeting in a moment when you have actual potential momentum from the federal government to do bolder things. I mean, Buttigieg has freeway removal funds they're trying to put through, and here you have Governor Brown still not really going very far to reform and to address the problems that you've been mentioning. And instead she's using that platform, and again, it's just one little snippet, but she's using that platform to talk about, "Hey, more electric cars and charging stations," which is, come on. We got to do more, right?
Jonathan Maus (:So how do you explain that blind spot, and the fact that Governor Brown had so much trouble or so much reluctance in entering into these reforms like they've done with other agencies? Transportation continues to be something they're not really moving on. Why do you think that is?
Aaron Brown (:It's a great question. And I would say that there's a little bit of slack to be cut for the fact that Governor Brown's been very busy over the last year, as we all have, right? I would not wish her job on anyone, and I would not necessarily say that I approve of how things have gone as much as that a lot of the systemic failures and difficulties, difficult decisions about opening and reclosing, and schools and stuff, are indicative of the fact that there's just too much money sloshing around Oregon politics. The wrong people have too much power. The Governor was faced with a bunch of unpopular, miserable choices, and bringing it back to transportation, I would say that during the chaos of the last couple of years, the Governor hasn't really had a transportation policy advisor really over the last couple of years. She has somebody serving in that role now, but even so, they're sort of that plus climate a little bit, and they're kind of new to the ropes. The Governor's only got about another year left, right?
Aaron Brown (:We are trying to build a zeitgeist around the fact that reforming ODOT is something that the Governors has the opportunity to really make a massive improvement in the material quality of lives of Oregonians. Fortunately, we have what is appearing to be the first competitive gubernatorial race in my lifetime in Oregon, if we're being honest, right? We haven't actually had a democratic primary where it was like, "Open seat. Who wants it?" We're going to see probably a dozen candidates step forward, some of whom will be all over the political-ideological spectrum. We've got some urban, some rural. Casey Kulla is running from Yamhill County, right. There will be more to come. But I think that that represents a really awesome opportunity for transportation advocates, and I'm working on some of this stuff, and there will be more soon.
Aaron Brown (:But how do we make sure that every candidate that runs for Governor, Democrat and Republican, have been provided with sort of the white papers on, "Here's what you could do to change how ODOT functions to make transportation work better for Oregonians." And some of it's, yeah, the lefty, climate, environmental bike stuff that we're interested in. Some of it's project labor agreements for transportation, for TriMet, right? The Governor appoints the TriMet board. The Governor appoints the Oregon Transportation Commission. Think about how many wonky or climate radical lefty folks that have every right to be throwing down, being like, "Trimet, why the hell aren't we running a bus every five minutes?" The Governor has the opportunity to set the tone in the entities that oversee those other agencies.
Jonathan Maus (:Right.
Aaron Brown (:And I think that there's, just to your point about the Governor's Office, I feel bad throwing Governor Brown under the bus, because obviously she has other things that have dictated her time here, but it is evident that there has been no leadership to really critique ODOT, other than to just rubber stamp what they're putting forward. And that is no longer acceptable in 2021, when ODOT and the transportation is 40% of our carbon emissions.
Jonathan Maus (:I want to get into something here around the specific fight on I-5 Rose Quarter project, which has been obviously the focus of No More Freeways. There's a big element of that project that has to do with, obviously a major element of that project has to do with the Black experience in Portland, Blackness itself. The fact that ODOT themselves built the freeway, and subsequent developments rooted out a Black community that lived in that spot, and it was displaced, and has all these wealth taken from them, and all sorts of terrible implications of that. And so here we have No More Freeways coming up and speaking as the loudest voice against the project. And obviously the founders of No More Freeways are white people. And like we've talked about, your style is very direct and loud, for lack of a better word.
Jonathan Maus (:And so I was really taken back in April at a meeting of one of the advisory committees, a specific committee that ODOT set up to talk about the Albina neighborhood's destruction. ODOT calls it the Historic Albina Advisory Board, which is a committee set up of people from the neighborhood, Black people who have family members that lived in part, some of the homes that were demolished to build the freeway. And back in April, they had a meeting. You showed up to testify, as you do. I think so did Joe Cortright. So after hearing a few of those comments back at that April meeting, ne of the committee members named Estelle Lavespere ... Okay. So after of your testimony, this is what she had to say. I'll just play the clip from the Historic Albina Advisory Board member, Estelle Lavespere, talking, responding to some of your testimony.
Estelle Lavespere (:I take great offense to some of the tone of these comments, the paternalistic tone that we as Albina residents, or the descendants of Albina residents, would not not only be educated or not only have real life experience. We're not just sitting here as warm bodies. You don't need to tell us anything. You don't have to come here and tell me about my people, or tell me about my neighborhood, or tell me about anything. We are providing analysis. I'm sorry. I'm greatly offended.
Jonathan Maus (:Hearing those words after your testimony, how did that make you feel? How did you respond to that?
Aaron Brown (:There's a couple different responses, or just things to kind of keep in mind. First of all, this is the third different committee that ODOT has brought to the table to try and get folks to sign off on this project. After the murder of George Floyd, ODOT has doubled down on the racial justice language. They are absolutely interested in messaging that this is economic development for a community, and that there will be significant improvements in minority contracting, which I think is an excellent, laudable goal.
Aaron Brown (:Second, I would say that there's a lot of trauma, right? This woman has been through some really nasty stuff with her and her family, in terms of how the government has treated her and her community. This was a neighborhood that went through systemic, explicitly racist disinvestment and destruction, right? Hundreds of homes were destroyed in the process of building all of these freeways, because ODOT tore them all out. And so when an individual gets asked by ODOT, "Hey, we're going to try and do it better. Come join us," and they are not coming to this space immediately well-versed in the critiques I have been making with ODOT, and why should they, right? And ODOT sets it up so that we get literally one minute of testimony that I don't even have a screen, and we are just trying to flag for them that ODOT is lying about stuff. And they're like, "Who the hell are these young or old grumpy white dudes shouting at me? Because ODAT promised me that things are going to get better." Right?
Aaron Brown (:And I will point out that Estelle, in subsequent testimonies, has come out swinging at ODOT, being like, "Y'all have been lying to us." Right? And I've had some engagements with this person afterwards that have been much more productive, and it's not necessarily appropriate to share or anything else, as much as just to suggest that it was ODOT's deliberate goal to pit and divide the community by having Black contractors on one side, and this kind of coalition of admittedly white, younger environmentalists, as well as the Black restorative justice work that Albina Vision is doing. The entire thing was set up for Estelle to have deep skepticism of what we were doing, and ODOT was never interested in providing other mechanisms or forums for us to reach out, right? We had a previous Community Advisory Committee last year that started asking spicy questions. So ODOT disbanded it, right? There is a deliberate, explicit effort here by the state government to manufacture consent for this project.
Aaron Brown (:Estelle is an exceptional person, from the limited engagement I've had with her. I don't blame her for rolling her eyes at the cranky old, grumpy traffic scientists of Aaron and Joe showing up to just talk about stuff. But I also feel as though a universe in which there wasn't a pandemic, in which these meetings were in person, Estelle and I could meet in person, shake hands, I would go speak to her for an hour, and she might still be supportive of the project or skeptical, but there's a level of engagement there that ODOT is deliberately setting up circumstances that make it impossible for us to have those conversations. ODOT is not interested in restorative justice. They are interested in more lanes and branding ways to make it happen.
Jonathan Maus (:Right. I hear you. Your critiques of ODOT are well founded and understood, but to go back to Estelle specifically, those are the feelings she had. Does it change how you testify? Does it change your style at all? Have you connected with her about her specific concerns?
Aaron Brown (:Yes. No. I've connected with her specifically, and it took a while, and again, I don't have her email, right? There's an effort of like, "Who do you know, and who can connect you, and how do you make that sort of stuff?" And it has changed, absolutely. No More Freeways has been like, "All right. If ODOT wants to play at this game, we have to be strategic about which voices can speak up." But also there are also times where there are non-white voices that want No More Freeways to speak up, because other community group just have to navigate these tensions as well, right?
Jonathan Maus (:Right.
Aaron Brown (:Again, her feelings are valid, and I'm just suggesting that to contextualize this whole moment, it didn't have to be this way. A universe in which ODOT was more willing to play ball with the Black community members, they might still get extra lanes, but they might also allow space for Black community members to be like, "Well, what if we did X, Y, and Z instead?" Right? In my conversations with a lot of folks, yeah, culturally they're not coming from the same places that I do about why freeways are bad. But when I pitch them on, "Wouldn't it be awesome if the bus ran every five minutes? Many of your peers or elders, and are having a tougher time getting around, if you're in wheelchairs or you've got a mobility device, some more sidewalks, some more crosswalks, making cars go slower, more safe routes to school around Tubman?" People are like, "Absolutely." Right? And being able to articulate, "Well, the reason we don't spend the money on that is because ODOT is giving you one option here, and they're saying anyone that disagrees with it is being racist."
Aaron Brown (:Her critiques are valid, but I would point out that this is the manufactured, inevitable result of a community engagement process designed to divide the community and pit people against each other instead of aiming for, "What are the solutions that meet our racial justice, climate justice, and transportation justice goals?"
Jonathan Maus (:Great. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. Can I just ask you, how is this being funded? Are people donating? How is this kind of happening beyond your obvious just gifting all this work to the community in some ways? But how is this thing surviving financially? I haven't seen big, huge grants come in and stuff like that. Again, we talked about how it's definitely more of a scrappy, grassroots operations, not sort of an institutional nonprofit. So how are you all faring financially? What's going on there?
Aaron Brown (:That's a great question, Jonathan, and your listeners, I'm assuming many of your ... It's like listening to a community radio station. Like, "Funded by listeners like you." But for real, we post on social media. We're doing a fundraising drive, we'll get a couple $10 donations. We'll get a couple $50 donations. We'll get a couple $100 donations. We'll get a couple $1,000 donations. And the $1,000 and $5,000 donations, they add up, and they mean a lot more to us in the long run. And working with Chris Smith on his Metro campaign last year, Chris kind of really became a formidable fundraiser, and he's been able to make some bigger asks that have really ... Many folks listening to this call know who they are, and I am eternally grateful.
Aaron Brown (:I would also say too that I write a lot of thank you cards. We send a lot of buttons and stickers in the mail. And that act of doing it, A, it's just really humbling, and even if it gives me hand cramps. I was watching a Blazers game and just cranking out 30 cards every month or whatever. But it's about building connections.
Jonathan Maus (:Yeah. Okay. Last two things, then I want to give you a chance to mention the birthday thing coming up. But a quick summary, where the fight is currently. What's the latest?
Aaron Brown (:We've filed three lawsuits, technically. Two of them are sort of the same lawsuit, but we filed them in different courts, because we weren't quite sure where it was going to go. The first one was the NEPA case, so the National Environmental Protection Act, so it was going after the feds and saying that ODOT did not follow the protocol that they needed. So all of you that wrote comments back in 2019, during that spring public comment period, this is sort of the federal engagement of that. So we expect to know more in the next couple months.
Aaron Brown (:The second one is, ODOT made some big public statements that their plans were compliant with the city's plan. Part of the fight right now is ODOT trying to line up and being like, "Look at all the ... We checked all the boxes. We engaged all of these different groups, and we've proven that our plans ... The city said that they were going to do this within 10 years, and this project is within that." And us being like, "Actually, the version of the Rose Quarter that they signed off on was a lot smaller than the one that you're pushing, and the city said they had to do congestion pricing first, and you're not doing it. And also the climate crisis, we understand it better."
Jonathan Maus (:So three lawsuits pending at the moment, working their way. Y'all are working them. You've got your lawyers lined up. They've got theirs. And then obviously the ongoing fights and the tracking the meetings, which I always enjoy following. You do a great job live tweeting those at the @NoMoreFreewaysPDX account. Tell me about this birthday event that's coming up.
Aaron Brown (:Is it August 26, I believe? It was around late August, back in 2017, that we had our first meeting ever as No More Freeways, when Chris Smith brought us all together to talk about how much this freeway has done, and who wanted to fight it? I don't expect us to have a ton of programming as much as it's just great to get everybody in a room together. Again, knock on wood that the COVID variant stuff doesn't take off and we have to postpone it or rethink it. But all I'm promising at this point is birthday cake, but we will definitely have some birthday cake for No More Freeways. I hope anyone listening to this podcast is invited. We'll be at Lucky Lab, I think Thursday, August 26, from 6:00 to 8:00.
Jonathan Maus (:Sounds good. I really appreciate you taking time to share all this with us, Aaron, and I appreciate the work you're doing in the community as well. So thank you. And that'll do it for this episode of the BikePortland Podcast. If you appreciated this podcast or any of the work we do on BikePortland, please become a subscriber today and stay tuned for more episodes.
