Latest player to move their corporate headquarters out of Oregon is AVI BioPharma. Hard as it may be to believe, they're abandoning Oregon's biotech hotbed in favor of new space in Seattle. Meanwhile, Washington's Democrat Senator Patty Murray has donned her sneakers and begun pushing the FTA to fund a light rail "extension" over the behemoth new bridge planned for the Columbia River, the liar's budget for which is currently projected at over $4 billion. The FTA doesn't seem to think it'd be a cost-effective "investment", so Murray inserted a provision into the DOT budget that would require the FTA to alter the way it analyzes projects for cost-effectiveness.
Portland officials and Oregon's congressional delegation have complained that the FTA holds transit projects to a strict, artificial standard of cost effectiveness per transit rider, but there is no such evaluation for highways. In view of the fact that light rail has never been cost-effective, the way to get to the federal funding needed for adding light rail to the bridge seems to involve changing the way cost-benefit is calculated.
Comments