Both houses of Congress are poised to approve a compromise version of the 2005 highway funding bill that allocates $23.5 million for the Newberg-Dundee Bypass - more than any other highway project in the state of Oregon.
That represents a surprisingly large victory for supporters of the project, who were ecstatic when the news broke just before noon this morning.
The House version included $11 million voted out of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee back in March. The money was included as an earmark - an allocation for a specific project made outside the main framework, and thus not subject to the usual discretionary authority of the Department of Transportation.
That was cut to $8,545,600 in a joint House-Senate conference committee charged with rectifying the versions passed by their respective chambers. However, members of the committee added $15 million from the Senate version of the bill, pushing the total allocation well past the $23 million mark.
In today's fiscal climate, marked by record deficits, congressional aides say that represents a welcome but most unlikely windfall.
Yamhill County Commissioner Leslie Lewis said Congressman David Wu, the House's bypass champion, had set his sights on wringing $9 million out of the conference committee for the House allocation. And the 1st District Democrat, who released the final House figure in a late-morning phone call, ended up coming close.
Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith announced their success in coming up with $15 million on the Senate side in one of their famous joint press releases, issued late Wednesday afternoon.
The conference committee report wasn't formally signed and release until this morning, but the two senators, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, were confident enough Wednesday to make a public statement. And Wyden augmented that with a call to chief bypass advocate Dave Haugeberg.
The highway funding bill still needs to win approval in both House and Senate floor votes and earn the president's signature. However, no floor amendments are allowed at this point, and the president has no reason to exercise his veto power, so the skids appear to be greased.
Haugeberg, a McMinnville attorney who has devoted years of toil to the project, was overjoyed when he took Wyden's call.
"This is new money, brand new money for the bypass," he said. "It is substantial."
Lewis termed the surprisingly large allocation, presumably owing to the clout of the state's bipartisan Senate duo, "a big feather in our cap."
But supporters acknowledge they still have a long way to go in their drive to alleviate the two-lane Highway 99W bottleneck through Newberg and Dundee - a source of continuing frustration for commuting motorists. Haugeberg estimates building a bypass around the two northern Yamhill County communities along the proposed route will end up costing around $300 million.
They say they are trying to slay a two-headed monster.
On the one hand, they have planning, community support and environmental impact to deal with. On the other, they have money.
"The other side of this is funding, a great deal of funding," Haugeberg said. But he said Oregon's congressional delegation had been "tireless" in its efforts to pry dollars out of the federal treasury, and it appeared to be paying off.
