Statehouse Fight Over Ferry Maintenance Budget Intensifies
Coastal legislators say deferred maintenance is a safety issue; inland members call the ask a blank check.
Coastal legislators are pressing for a dedicated ferry maintenance fund after a winter of cancelled sailings and emergency dry-dock visits that scrambled commutes.
The season’s numbers are the argument. Between November and March the ferry authority cancelled 412 sailings, 287 of them for mechanical cause rather than weather. Two of the four vessels serving the Port Meridian-Cape Talbot run went to emergency dry dock, one for a propulsion coupling and one for a hull plate that inspectors downgraded during a routine survey. The unplanned yard time cost $6.1 million against a maintenance budget of $19.4 million, which meant scheduled work on the two remaining vessels slid into next year.
The proposal would ring-fence a slice of transportation revenue rather than force ferries to compete annually with highway projects. Inland members call the structure inflexible. As drafted, House Bill 1147 would dedicate 2.4 percent of motor fuel and vehicle registration receipts - roughly $31 million in the current biennium - to a marine capital and maintenance account that could not be swept for other purposes without a three-fifths vote.
Union marine engineers testified that overtime on aging systems is itself a risk.
“We can keep them running,” said engineer chief Paul Okonkwo. “We cannot keep pretending running is free.” Okonkwo, who has thirty-one years in the engine rooms and now supervises the authority’s shoreside maintenance staff, told the transportation committee that his department logged 11,300 overtime hours last fiscal year, most of it concentrated in a rotation of about forty people. He described a sequence he said the committee should understand: a fatigued technician signs off on a repair at hour fourteen, the repair holds for six weeks, and the failure that follows is recorded as a parts failure.
## The inland objection
The opposition is not caricature. Rep. Hollis Ferrand, whose district runs along the upper river and who chairs the transportation subcommittee on capital, has voted for ferry appropriations five times and voted against this one in subcommittee.
“I am not arguing the boats are fine,” Ferrand said. “I am arguing that a dedicated fund is a permanent answer to a question we have not finished asking. Once you carve out two-point-four percent, that money never comes back to the table, and the authority never again has to explain to this body why its yard costs run forty percent above the regional average.” He wants the maintenance backlog audited by the legislative fiscal office before any dedication, and he wants the audit to cover procurement, not just condition.
That forty percent figure is contested. The ferry authority’s chief financial officer, Ingrid Solheim, says the comparison group Ferrand cites includes systems that outsource all major work to yards with lower labor costs and longer queues, and that the authority’s in-house yard exists precisely because a two-hundred-day wait for a berth is not survivable on a four-vessel fleet. The fiscal office has not published an opinion on either claim.
Ferrand’s deeper point is arithmetic. His district’s bridge backlog carries a state-estimated $208 million in structurally deficient spans, including the Rill Creek crossing that has been posted at twelve tons since 2023, forcing a nine-mile detour for loaded farm trucks. “Every dollar in that carve-out is a dollar that does not compete against my bridge,” he said. “I am told to trust the process. The process is what put my bridge at twelve tons.”
The governor’s office floated a compromise: a two-year surge appropriation with audit requirements, postponing structural change. Coastal leaders called that a patch. The surge would run $24 million over the biennium - less than the dedication in year one, more than it in year two - and would require the authority to submit a twenty-year lifecycle plan by December 2027 before any recurring structure is considered.
Sen. Marisol Vane of the Port Meridian delegation said the office’s framing gets the causality backwards. “We do not have a lifecycle plan because we have never had a lifecycle budget,” she said. “You cannot schedule a mid-life refit against an appropriation that expires before the refit does. That is the whole problem in one sentence, and the answer we are being offered is another appropriation that expires.”
Legal counsel reminded the body that findings of fact in the staff report will be read closely if litigation follows. That warning slowed the rhetoric more effectively than the gavel. The reference was to a 2019 petition by a riders’ association that sought a court order compelling minimum service levels; it failed on standing rather than on merit, and its lead attorney has told members she considers the winter’s cancellation record a materially different record.
A committee vote is expected before the recess. Port Meridian’s delegation is unified; the swing votes sit in river districts with their own bridge backlog. By the Ledger’s count, the bill needs thirteen votes on a twenty-five-member committee and has eleven firm. Five members are firm no. The remaining nine have either declined to state a position or have conditioned it on the audit language.
Two of those nine represent districts with no coastline and no ferry terminal, but with commuters who drive to one.
Ferrand keeps a laminated photograph on his office wall in the statehouse annex: the Rill Creek bridge in 1961, the year it opened, with a line of trucks crossing it and a crowd on the bank. He points at it more often than he points at spreadsheets. “That was a dedicated fund too,” he said. “Somebody carved it out, built the thing, and then spent sixty years assuming it would take care of itself.”
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s politics desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com