Note: This article reflects only the views of the author and not Portland DSA.
You just got home from work on Tuesday, May 19, and it’s the last day to turn in your ballot. You’re frantically thumbing through the Oregon voters guide to finish your ballot. Yes, you heard that ballots get lost in the system and that the vote-by-mail system is under attack by Trump, but perhaps you live in a district with only uncontested primary races, or maybe there’s just not much to get excited about. While you leaf through the rather anemic voter’s pamphlet, you pass the section on… Measure 120? And it has a whopping 28 “No” arguments vs 7 “Yes” ones? Oh, this is that Gas Tax thing that’s been in the news for a year? It’s not even clear how you should vote on it, AS a socialist!
What if I told you that this might be the most impactful vote many Oregonians make this year?
First, we should establish what Measure 120 even does. After the failure of our state government to pass a transportation package last summer, Governor Tina Kotek called a special session and successfully passed a less ambitious package, House Bill 3991. Although 3991 was heavily compromised to secure the support of the most conservative Democrats and to prevent Republicans from walking out, Republicans played to win and gathered enough signatures to refer *elements* of it to the voters.
A “Yes” vote simply allows the legislature to enact the bill they passed. A “No” vote cancels some chosen elements of the package, while retaining others. Which ones?
Well, you have to follow some legislative horse-trading to figure out what’s at stake with Measure 120. Democrats once again succumbed to GOP “bait” during the recent session, when they agreed to water down the spring session’s attempt at a transportation package to get something through (transit funding, sidewalk funding, raising the gas tax enough to make up for inflationary losses). Concessions in hand, the Republicans then executed the “switch” and referred the parts they didn’t like to the ballot anyway.
A “No” vote on 120 erases specifically any benefits for our side, but retains the parts of the deal we don’t like. It’s just not a good deal! On that alone, a “Yes” vote should be the obvious choice.
While Portland DSA takes no position on Measure 120, the chapter’s May 2026 Voter Guide (comingn soon!) offers excellent guidance for evaluating ballot measures, when it asks voters to consider 3 benchmarks:
- Whether a ballot measure is endorsed by member-led organizations or unions.
- Whether a ballot measure increases funding for broad public services, like public schools, fire departments, or public transit;
- That a ballot measure does not support or empower local, state, or federal police.
For Measure 120, the answer to all three questions is “Yes”!
Tepidly, the Portland Mercury agreed:
“We encourage a “yes” vote because Oregon is in desperate need of more funding in order to provide basic transportation services to its residents, and because the debate here has been exploited by Republicans who are misrepresenting the Oregon Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) accountability problems for their own political purposes. But we aren’t going to try that hard to convince you to vote for this, either—why would we, when Oregon Democrats aren’t even putting in the effort to campaign for the bill they worked so hard to pass?”
Just like the progressive, tax-the-rich ballot measures socialists have championed in the past, the referral tells a narrative: state and local governments are flush with cash, they just need to have waste and inefficiency rooted out (this usually ends up meaning cuts to programs used by people of color & lower-income people, with the preservation of programs used by whiter & more affluent people). When your suburban municipality serves as a tax haven for Portland wealth, it’s very easy to look around at your well-maintained, sparsely used roads and assume everyone else is doing just as well.
If you know me for any one thing, it’s probably my single-minded dedication to transit funding. Maybe you’ve heard that the package will affect Trimet Revenue. Candidly, the Democratic Party of Oregon has already sacrificed transit funding at the altar of bipartisanship. If you followed the 2025 Transportation Package from beginning to end (sorry), you might remember the initial ask by Trimet of a 0.4% bump to the Statewide Transportation Improvement Fund (STIF). That would go on to be negotiated down to a 0.2% bump in the final package, which would tragically fail. The governor’s special session again negotiated the bump down to 0.1%, and to add insult to injury, sunset that meager 0.1% after 2 years. 2 years of additional funding for a transit agency is not very useful; you aren’t going to hire new bus drivers for 2 years!
The HB 3991 transit funding is just treading water until a comprehensive transportation package can (hopefully) be passed in 2027. Transit is too important for me to pretend that life raft doesn’t matter.
To talk just about transit funding ignores the framing, very deliberately done by OR Republicans, of this as a referendum on the Gas Tax. Many socialists have, rightfully so, recoiled at the idea of an increased gas tax but from the left. It conjures ideas of out-of-touch enviros unilaterally imposing their priorities on priced-out working families. Besides, why doesn’t the state just… Tax the Rich? I want to tax the rich more than anyone! I fight for that frequently myself, but the issue of the gas tax cannot be neatly sorted into the box of “Regressive Tax” and wholly discarded. I’ve collected a few miscellaneous thoughts about road funding that I think are highly relevant:
- The gas tax is a static value charged per gallon. Because of inflation, a dollar today is worth what 97 cents was a year ago. Every year the gas tax isn’t increased, it’s actually going down. At the same time, we create more roads every year and our existing ones fall into deeper, more expensive disrepair. The 2025 Transportation Package attempted to index the gas tax to inflation, but the bipartisan austerity agenda would not have it.
- Other countries use methods other than the Gas Tax, but they all tend to be charges for “road usage”; if you drive your heavy vehicle on the road, that damages the road, and so you pay for the damage you’ve done to the road. There are more progressive ways to do this (Congestion Pricing)! For example, most states charge up-front registration and title fees so that the burden is not placed disproportionately on those who drive the most (e.g. rural households). The failed 2025 Transportation Package attempted to institute a “New Vehicle Fee” which would charge the wealthier buyers of new vehicles specifically, and a charge on distance traveled rather than gas usage, to relieve the burden on poorer owners of older vehicles.
- Wealth and income taxes are great for funding new capital projects (like Seattle’s social housing developer!) or for programs that only some of the population use at once (like universal preschool!). They are less sustainable for services that are used by most people for sustained periods. This is why Social Security is gathered from everyone’s wages, and then distributed back to everyone; broad public services need broad, stable funding. The same is true for roads, which literally every living person relies on daily.
- One example to my “Broad Services, Broad Funding” rule is school funding. Schools are funded by a mix of local property taxes, state funding, and federal funding. When you only consider the local portion, schools are funded along lines of segregation, and those in poorer neighborhoods are not funded like those in more affluent areas. This is where state funding comes in and redistributes from the richer areas to the poorer ones (if you have a functional state government, of course). Building a functional system means balancing “broadness” with redistribution. So, how does one “redistribute” transportation revenue from richer areas to poorer ones? Let’s get into that.
- Where you live, where you work, and how you get there *is* political! If it weren’t, the Columbia river wouldn’t separate the highest per-capita DSA membership from perhaps the most right-wing, ICE-loving, war-hawk democrat in congress. Wealthy residents and businesses threaten to move out of the municipality, “opting out” of taxes and shared responsibility, while still traveling into it for business and services. Portland’s ruling classes have not lived in the city center for decades; they may work here, but they live in Lake Oswego or in Clark County! This is the rationale for regional tolling, something which is very controversial on the west coast, and apparently detonated the 2025 Transportation Package (although it wasn’t even being proposed). I am not sure whether intra-state regional tolling will happen anytime in the near future, but I hope you can at least see the vision.
None of this is to say that these additional taxes and fees won’t hurt. None of this is to say that we can’t strive for a world where the rich pay to maintain our public works. I’m just saying that roads are really expensive; our decision, as a society, to make everyone drive everywhere has resulted in a lot of pavement which self-destructs if not maintained regularly. One can’t “opt out” of this responsibility, unless you consider bent wheels and longer commutes “free”. We can’t deliver socialist programs if our government can’t deliver basic governance and pave the roads.
To be crystal clear: I am not writing this in uncritical support of HB 3991 or ODOT. Just because I want to avoid a “DOGE Mentality” where cuts are always the cure, doesn’t mean that the state transportation system is totally accountable and a wise steward of tax revenue. A lot of work remains to fight for true reform in transportation, and that probably would look like fewer freeway megaprojects and more bus service. The opportunity to fight for those things is next spring, in the 2027 Long Session. We will need your energy to fight for the future we deserve and not just scraps. A “Yes” vote on 120 just ensures we can tread water until that next fight takes place.
Jordan Lewis is an Ecosocialist Working Group Co-chair and an elected member of our Socialists in Office Committee.