Agency presentations to legislative committees
are typically routine affairs in which senior managers present unremarkable
information to lawmakers whose committees have policy or budgetary oversight of
them.
Monday night’s presentation by the Oregon
Department of Transportation to the Joint Committee on Transportation, however,
was anything but routine, leaving one lawmaker sputtering in frustration.
About one hour and 10 minutes into a
hearing on the state highway fund, Travis Brouwer, ODOT’s assistant director
and top finance official, told lawmakers how the agency had made a more than $1
billion error in its 2023-25 budget.
To put the “error” in perspective, a
January audit of ODOT pegged the actual mistake at $1.1 billion out of a $5.9
billion biennial budget. In other words, the agency expected to have nearly 19%
more revenue than it actually did.
In his presentation to lawmakers, Brouwer
explained that the model ODOT uses to project revenue makes incorrect
assumptions about when ODOT can expect to receive federal funding.
Brouwer termed the error “an
overestimation of federal funding in our project delivery and local government
budgets by about $1 billion.”
Brouwer went on to explain that the
agency discovered the error in late 2023 and notified the Oregon Transportation
Commission, which oversees the agency, in early 2024.
ODOT then ordered an audit, which was delivered in January.
In the audit, first reported by Salem’s Statesman Journal, auditors found
that ODOT had failed to perform a basic accounting function: reconciling actual
revenues to the projected revenues in its budget.
“There was no check on the reasonableness
of the figure with historical actuals,” the audit found.
In other words, ODOT established a budget
based on what it projected it would receive but did not take the step of
checking whether the money had actually arrived.
Auditors minced no words in describing
the error.
“In developing the agency’s budget, the
process did not ensure that a reasonable federal revenue figure was used for
the Delivery and Operations Division budget,” the auditors wrote. “An
over-reliance on the highway cash flow model and a lack of understanding on how
Statewide Transportation Improvement Program programming impacts that model
drove the budget error.”
Monday night’s hearing came at a delicate
time for the agency.
For the past year, ODOT has traveled the
state with key lawmakers, building a case for giving the agency more money in
the 2025 session. The department has focused its need for more cash on the
failure of gas taxes and other revenue sources to keep pace with the costs of
road maintenance and completing major projects.
Although the agency had previously
disclosed the billion-dollar error to the OTC, Brouwer’s presentation caught
many interested parties and at least one member of the Joint Transportation
Committee by surprise.
“I’m totally disappointed and just cannot
believe what I’m hearing,” state Sen. Mark Meek (D-Gladstone) said to Brouwer.
“Don’t you have any reconciliation process?”
“I’m incredibly disappointed in the fact
we have made this error,” Brouwer replied. “It was a significant impact and one
we have worked very hard to address.”
But on Wednesday morning, state Rep.
Shelly Boshart Davis (R-Albany), vice chair of the Joint Transportation
Committee, said ODOT had a lot of work to do before her caucus would support
additional funding for the agency.
“A billion-dollar budget mistake coupled
with a more than 300% increase on the cost of the Abernethy Bridge [on
Interstate 205] are just two examples, although massive, of problems that need
to be fixed and accounted for before we ask Oregonians for another dollar,”
Boshart Davis said.
—This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit investigative newsroom for the state of Oregon. Learn more at oregonjournalismproject.org.
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This article appears in The Source Weekly February 27, 2025.
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The whole ODOT administration should be fired immediately, if this was you or me John or Jane doe we would be in jail, doing a good Tina
This is a prime example of what Musk and Trump are doing on a federal level. You morons can’t even verify the actual money you got on a federal level with a projection. No wonder you work for government
I know one financial report the State of Oregon won’t mess up. The report for their PERS funding.