A coalition of Portland anti-freeway activists are suing the U.S. Department of Transportation to block construction on a crowded stretch of Interstate 5 in Portland.
The complaint, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court in Portland, alleges that federal officials didn’t fully assess the environmental impact before approving the Rose Quarter Improvement Project, which aims to widen a 2-mile stretch of I-5 in north Portland and improve safety on surrounding streets.
The $1.9 billion project, which received funding from the Oregon Legislature in 2017 and a recent $450 million federal grant, is a top priority for lawmakers and state transportation officials. They say it’s crucial to reduce congestion and crashes on a major freight route that has more than three times as many collisions as the statewide average.
But the groups that filed the lawsuit, led by No More Freeways, argue that the Rose Quarter project will only add more pollution and disruption to Portland’s historically Black Albina neighborhood, which was sliced in two when the freeway was built. Instead, those advocates want transportation officials to move ahead with plans for a highway cap, essentially a very wide bridge over the interstate that reconnects the Albina neighborhood, without also widening the highway.
“Portland can absolutely move forward with capping this freeway without expanding it,” No More Freeways cofounder Christopher Smith said in a statement. “The inspiring, community-led and federally supported effort to heal the Albina neighborhood with generational investments in Black wealth creation shouldn’t be delayed or blemished by ODOT’s stubborn insistence in doubling the width of the freeway.”
The suit names the U.S. Department of Transportation, its Federal Highway Administration and the highway agency’s administrator. A spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
The Eliot Neighborhood Association, Oregon-based environmental nonprofit Neighbors for Clean Air; Families for Safe Streets of Oregon and Southwest Washington, which provides support to people who were injured or lost loved ones in traffic incidents; the nonprofit Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates, which advocates for public transit; and BikeLoud, which advocates for bicyclists, joined No More Freeways in filing the suit.
The complaint alleges that federal transportation officials didn’t do enough to weigh the Rose Quarter project’s potential environmental impacts, including by completing an Environmental Assessment instead of the more-rigorous Environmental Impact Statement.
No More Freeways and several of the other plaintiffs filed a similar suit against the Oregon Department of Transportation in Multnomah County Circuit Court in May, alleging that the project didn’t comply with comprehensive growth plans adopted by the city of Portland and the Metro regional government. That case is still pending.
The 2-mile stretch of I-5 in the Rose Quarter is the only urban two-lane section of the highway between Canada and Mexico. It’s also where interstates 84 and 405 intersect with I-5, and state transportation officials think they can prevent collisions and congestion by adding ramp-to-ramp lanes so drivers going from I-405 to I-84 or vice versa don’t have to fully merge.
Ongoing state and federal lawsuits could complicate lawmakers’ work on a transportation funding package during the 2025 session. Finishing the Rose Quarter project and replacing the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington are top priorities for lawmakers who otherwise are focused on finding enough money to maintain existing roads, not build new ones.
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