U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas pushes for funding of Boone Bridge, other transportation projects

According to Oregon State University, Oregon is the leading producer of Christmas trees in the United States, sending more than half of the state’s trees to California each year and shipping some as far as Hong Kong and Japan.  

These trees are delivered via interstate highway, a system that continues to be at risk from earthquakes and underinvestment.  

U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, D-Salem, represents Oregon’s sixth congressional district, spanning the I-5 corridor from Salem to Wilsonville, and testified before the federal House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Wednesday, Jan. 15.  

She advocated for the reauthorization of federal transportation grants critical to Oregon’s infrastructure including the renovation of the I-5 Boone Bridge near Wilsonville, which regularly has traffic congestion.  

Currently, the Boone Bridge replacement project is on hold because of uncertain funding. A new Willamette river crossing would seismically reinforce the interstate in the case of major earthquakes or other disasters. ODOT will replace several bridge joints that require critical replacement on the northbound side of the bridge this summer.  

“As Oregonians, from our southern border, where we meet California, up to the tip, where we meet Washington, it is our lifeline. It is our economic lifeline … the 17,000 trucks a day that have to cross the Boones Bridge into the Portland metro area. We need to make sure that all of these corridors are safe and traversable,” Salinas said in an interview.  

Salinas’s comments touched on the importance of seismic reinforcement for highway improvements and the economic viability that interstate highway corridors support. This is especially true for I-5 in the Pacific Northwest, uniting Oregon and Washington with California to the south.  

“This is a big conversation that every representative is having right now and certainly is a bipartisan issue because everybody has infrastructure needs,” said Salinas. “We send so many of our nursery products to the Midwest, to Chicago, to New York, to Texas, to other parts of the country. We have this robust agricultural economy here that we need to share with the rest of the United States. You need trucks and you need a highway infrastructure that works across the United States for that – and other communities see the same exact need when it comes to economic development,” said Salinas.  

Salinas called out several highway junctions in Oregon in need of improvement, including the Boone Bridge in Wilsonville and the junction of Highway 51 and Oregon 22 in Tillamook. Without federal grants focused on rural infrastructure, ODOT likely won’t be able to financially support the improvements and the improvements will remain deferred.  

“We would be at risk of actually losing the ability to move forward with some of those projects, right? I mean, ODOT hasn’t given the go-ahead on the Boone Bridge, necessarily. That’s been slow-walked and so we don’t really have a path,” Salinas said. “If we were to shrink some of those grant funding opportunities, we’d be in a world of hurt. Not just in Oregon, throughout the United States, we’ve seen infrastructure neglected.”