I missed a lot of news in the last two weeks, including the Washington legislature defeating a transportation bill that would have provided the Evergreen State's $450 million share of the cost of the Columbia River Crossing project. Richard Read's article in the Oregonian (here) includes one sentence that Oregonians should take to heart. It's this one, eight paragraphs into the story: "Despite its $3.4 billion total price tag, the CRC is a relatively minor item in the current debate for most Washington House members, who concentrated Wednesday on the package that would raise state gas prices by 10.5 cents per gallon." This is significant for two reasons.
First, important as the Portland-Vancouver bridges may be for Portlanders, they aren't much on the minds of Washington's legislature. I doubt they collectively pay more attention to the Interstate Bridges than we here in Portland do to the I-84 bridges over the Snake River that provide the vital link between Malheur County and Idaho.
Second is that the debate that Mr. Read describes is one of the few instances in which the debate about the project is tied not just to the project's cost, but to who is going to pay for it, and how. People are a lot more enthusiastic about projects that they don't have to pay for themselves.