Oregon’s next transportation budget is taking shape around an estimated $200 million funding gap that could eliminate nearly 550 positions from the Oregon Department of Transportation and reduce staffing across highway maintenance, DMV offices, transportation projects and other agency operations. The proposed reductions would reach communities throughout the state, while rural regions face an additional concern because fewer employees can mean longer distances between crews, equipment, state offices and the people who depend upon them.
ODOT is preparing its 2027–29 budget with approximately 193 Maintenance and Operations positions, 125 DMV positions and 120 Project Delivery positions among those being considered for elimination. Additional reductions would occur in administrative, financial, technology, commerce and compliance functions, bringing the potential loss to roughly 11 percent of the agency’s workforce. Some positions are vacant, but ODOT has indicated that eliminating vacancies would not produce enough savings to reach the proposed reduction, meaning occupied positions would also have to be cut.
The maintenance reductions present one of the most immediate questions for motorists because the employees involved perform much of the physical work required to keep Oregon’s state highway system open. Their responsibilities include snow and ice removal, pavement repair, drainage and culvert maintenance, roadside vegetation management, removal of fallen trees and storm debris, response to rockfalls and landslides, assistance at crash scenes and emergency highway work during wildfires and severe weather.
ODOT operates roughly 80 maintenance crews statewide, and the proposed staffing reductions could leave approximately one-third of those crews with five employees or fewer. Crew sizes vary according to location and seasonal demands, but reducing nearly 200 positions would place more responsibility on the employees who remain while the number of highways, bridges, culverts and other transportation assets requiring maintenance would remain largely unchanged.
Winter operations demonstrate the scale of that responsibility. ODOT relies on approximately 680 permanent frontline employees for winter highway service, supplemented by seasonal workers, and maintains hundreds of heavy trucks capable of snowplowing. The agency spends roughly $51 million annually on winter maintenance, an operation that becomes particularly demanding when storms affect several regions simultaneously and crews must respond to snow, ice, fallen trees, crashes and other hazards across large geographic areas.
Southwestern Oregon presents some of the most demanding terrain within that statewide system. ODOT Region 3 covers Josephine, Jackson, Douglas, Coos and Curry counties and includes Interstate 5, U.S. 199 and numerous state highways connecting inland communities, mountain passes, rural areas and the Oregon Coast. Maintenance employees across those five counties work in conditions that can range from wildfire and extreme heat during summer to flooding, wind damage, rockfall, snow and ice during the colder months.
Interstate 5 through Jackson County climbs through the Siskiyou Mountains toward the California border, placing winter maintenance crews on a major interstate freight and passenger corridor where severe weather can quickly disrupt travel. U.S. 199 connects Grants Pass and the Illinois Valley with Northern California and provides an important route toward the coast, while highways throughout Douglas, Coos and Curry counties add hundreds of miles of mountainous, forested and coastal roadway to the region’s maintenance responsibilities.
ODOT has not released a county-by-county or maintenance-station breakdown identifying where the proposed 193 Maintenance and Operations positions would be eliminated. No specific number of potential layoffs can therefore be assigned to Josephine County, Jackson County or another Southern Oregon jurisdiction at this stage, and the local consequences will depend upon how ODOT distributes any reductions ultimately approved through the state budget.
The approaching shortfall follows another ODOT funding problem that required legislative intervention during the current budget period. The agency had faced an approximately $297 million Maintenance and Operations shortfall during the 2025–27 biennium, raising the possibility of substantial workforce reductions and diminished services before lawmakers redirected transportation resources during the 2026 legislative session.
That legislative action preserved operations through the remainder of the current biennium but did not permanently restructure the system used to finance Oregon transportation. ODOT is consequently entering development of its next two-year budget with another projected imbalance, creating a separate fiscal problem for 2027–29 rather than a continuation of layoffs that were prevented earlier this year.
The financing structure behind Oregon’s highways is an important part of the budget calculation. The State Highway Fund receives substantial revenue from fuel taxes, vehicle registration and title fees and other transportation-related charges, while the costs of employees, construction materials, equipment and infrastructure maintenance have continued to increase. Oregon’s principal transportation taxes and fees generally are not automatically adjusted for inflation, and changes in vehicle efficiency have also affected the traditional relationship between highway use and fuel-tax collections.
ODOT reports that it has reduced expenditures by more than $500 million since 2019, but those reductions have occurred while the transportation system itself continues to age. Pavement, bridges, culverts, drainage systems, traffic signals and signs require repair or replacement regardless of annual revenue performance, and many culverts beneath Oregon highways are approaching or have exceeded their anticipated service lives.
State lawmakers attempted a broader transportation funding solution in 2025 through House Bill 3991, which included increases in transportation taxes and fees intended to provide additional revenue. Most of those increases were subsequently referred to Oregon voters and rejected through Measure 120 in May 2026, leaving ODOT to construct its next budget without much of the additional revenue that transportation package had been expected to generate.
The developing reductions would also reach residents who may rarely travel on state highways because approximately 125 DMV positions are among the jobs under consideration. Oregon has added roughly 800,000 residents during the past quarter-century while DMV operates with approximately the same number of budgeted positions it had 25 years ago, placing a larger population on a staffing structure that has not grown at the same pace.
Further reductions could affect the agency’s capacity to process driver’s licenses, identification cards, vehicle registrations, titles and other transactions. The consequences could be particularly noticeable in rural communities, where reduced office hours, staffing or locations can require residents to travel significantly farther for an in-person service than residents of metropolitan areas with several nearby alternatives.
Another approximately 120 positions under consideration belong to Project Delivery, the portion of ODOT involved in advancing transportation projects through planning, engineering, construction and completion. Those potential reductions would arrive while Oregon continues to manage an aging transportation network and numerous projects competing for limited state and federal resources.
The decisions that determine whether these reductions occur will move through Oregon’s political and budget process during the months ahead. Gov. Tina Kotek has convened a transportation workgroup examining the state’s long-term transportation funding structure, and lawmakers will eventually determine how much money ODOT receives when the Legislature adopts the 2027–29 state budget.
The Legislature will be working from circumstances considerably different from those that existed before Measure 120. Voters have rejected most of the tax and fee increases contained in the previous transportation package, ODOT continues to report a structural funding problem, and the agency must present a balanced budget based upon the resources expected to be available.
For residents, the consequences of those calculations eventually appear in practical government services rather than accounting documents. Maintenance staffing determines how many employees are available to plow highways, clear landslides, repair pavement and respond when storms or wildfires close roads, while DMV staffing affects access to routine state transactions and Project Delivery staffing influences the agency’s ability to move transportation improvements from planning into construction.
Those responsibilities become especially important across Southern Oregon because the region depends upon a relatively small number of major corridors to connect communities and move commercial traffic. Interstate 5 is the principal north-south transportation artery through Josephine and Jackson counties, while U.S. 199 and other state highways provide essential connections through areas where mountains, forests, winter weather and wildfire can complicate travel and emergency response.
The exact distribution of ODOT’s proposed reductions remains undecided, leaving the number of positions that could disappear from individual communities unknown. The statewide figures already establish the size of the decision awaiting Oregon, however, with an approximately $200 million budget gap placing nearly 550 agency positions at risk and almost 200 of those jobs connected directly to maintaining and operating the highway system.
Oregon lawmakers prevented a major round of transportation cuts during the 2026 legislative session by addressing the immediate shortfall facing the current biennium. The 2027–29 budget now places the unresolved financing issue back before state government, with the final decisions determining not only how many people ODOT employs, but how much maintenance, DMV access and transportation project capacity the state can provide across Oregon during the next two-year budget cycle.