A Bridge too False

Eyre Brewer is a freshman Republican representative from Hillsboro, as well as a former leader of the local chamber of commerce and the planning commission, where she got chummy with big Washington County employers like Intel, Solarworld and Genentech. 

She won her House seat with big campaign checks from lobbying groups such as Associated Oregon Industries, the Oregon Business Association and Associated General Contractors.

Eyre Brewer, 45, is also a CPA for Harsch Investment Properties—the Schnitzer family real estate empire—and has plenty of experience analyzing complex financial deals.

Yet Eyre Brewer is saying no to the state’s single biggest job-creation plan: the proposed $3.6 billion Interstate 5 bridge project between Oregon and Washington, known as the Columbia River Crossing.

The state’s most powerful interests want the project: big business (including Eyre Brewer’s top campaign donors), labor unions and Gov. John Kitzhaber.

Eyre Brewer is standing up to the project’s backers for a simple reason: She thinks the arguments for the Columbia River Crossing are flimsy, ill conceived and often untrue. 

“Before I got here, I thought the important questions about the CRC had been asked and answered,” Eyre Brewer says. “I was terribly surprised.”

She is not alone. More than 20 lawmakers—Republicans and Democrats—have raised hard questions about the project. They say Oregon hasn’t taken a serious look at the project’s risks or at cheaper ways to fix the traffic problems at the Oregon-Washington border.

In the current legislative session, lawmakers have debated the proper size of chicken cages, whether it’s OK to use plastic bags, and what kind of dirt should be named the official state soil. But they have only glanced at the project known as the CRC.

Lawmakers supportive of the project introduced a toothless measure, House Joint Memorial 22, which urges Congress to fund the CRC but doesn’t commit a single dime of state money—yet.

Eyre Brewer and critics oppose even that feel-good memorial, saying if it passes, backers could claim the Legislature supports the CRC. March hearings on HJM 22 exposed growing skepticism and opposition to the project.

“We’ve had no substantive debate on the project,” says State Rep. Mitch Greenlick (D-Portland), a CRC critic who calls the project “a steamroller headed off a cliff.”

Neither Eyre Brewer, Greenlick nor any of the growing number of CRC opponents deny there is a traffic problem between Portland and Vancouver. 

But the specter of the CRC brings Oregon to a defining moment. If built, it would be the biggest transportation project since the 1966 completion of I-5 and—in modern terms—would rival the construction of Bonneville Dam.

Yet Oregonians have failed to grasp the possibility its leaders might dump billions on a massive road project that emphasizes cars over mass transit and, as the state’s own records show, relies on faulty assumptions and won’t fix the traffic problem.

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