Current
Transportation Research
As the federal government curtails its long-standing transportation funding role, and the state’s funding future looks bumpy, the cities, counties, and transit districts in the Portland metropolitan area face the most significant impacts of an inadequate transportation system. When IMS met with over 100 partners in the Portland area in early 2025, one of the key questions that came up from elected officials, advocates, community leaders, and business leaders alike was, “How are we going to fund our transportation system with insufficient and disappearing tools?”
IMS is uniquely positioned to explore answers to that question. Together with Portland State’s Transportation Research and Education Center and former Congressman Earl Blumenauer, IMS is developing a whitepaper that looks at how local transportation spending and funding in our region compare to other regions across the US, including how potential revenue sources align with revenue needs, policy goals, and ease and efficiency of implementation.
Click here for more info about the project.
Tom McCall Waterfront Collaboration
As part of recent efforts to revitalize this downtown asset and regional landmark, IMS and Oregon Solutions (OS) are working together to lead a collaborative assessment of the Park's future and study some of its most pressing needs — all with an eye towards implementation and funding.
Our work will catalyze a strategic vision that connects and fills in the gaps between individual efforts to improve the park — including Portland Parks and Recreation’s design competition and the Human Access Project’s advocacy for river access. It focuses on the tough but necessary questions such as governance and funding mechanisms, so that the vision can actually be accomplished.
By aligning parallel efforts, surfacing mutual interests, and creating a structured, accountable process, we aim to create a shared roadmap to guide stakeholders from study to implementation and a thriving park.
Click here for more info about the project.
Archive
Neighborhood Pulse Project
Neighborhood Pulse provides information about the Portland region’s neighborhoods: how they are changing, who lives there, and the issues of interest to the region’s leaders and residents.
Neighborhood Pulse includes three components:
- Neighborhood Profiles, which provide information about people and housing in each of Portland and Beaverton’s neighborhoods;
- Greater Portland 21, which provides a stories about how our region and its neighborhoods are is changing; and
- Neighborhood Pulse Map Viewer, which provides taxlot-level maps related to specific issues of interest to neighborhoods and advocacy groups.
Neighborhood Pulse complements Greater Portland Pulse by providing a neighborhood view of some of the data provided at the county and regional level on Greater Portland Pulse. We hope to add additional features and data to the site over time.
Bi-State Cooperation Project
Click here to download the draft final report for this project.
Background
On March 16, 2006, Governors Chris Gregoire and Ted Kulongoski met at the 2006 Bi-State Metropolitan Forum to address a group of public and private stakeholders from Oregon and Washington and to identify and discuss issues of mutual concern. Each Governor acknowledged both the interdependence of the two states and the interconnectedness of the region's economy. They encouraged public and private-sector leaders to ignore the state boundary and find areas in which cooperation could improve prosperity, quality of life, and government efficiency on both sides of the Columbia River.
During the forum’s breakout sessions, participants set forward ideas for cooperation which ranged from a bi-state compact for post-secondary education to the harmonization of standards for certified industrial sites. A common theme woven through many of the comments was the need to break through legal and bureaucratic hurdles that place unnecessary restrictions on cooperation between the states. Dozens of participants volunteered to work in groups to follow-up on the ideas generated during the conference.
At a meeting in the office of Congressman Brian Baird on August 11, 2006, a group of leaders from the Portland Vancouver Metropolitan Region continued the discussion and identified a number of potential benefits for more effective bi-state cooperation. However, they also recognized the need to make a strong case emphasizing the benefits of such cooperation to citizens on both sides of the border.
Need
The following were suggested as key products needed to advance the progress of this work:
- An inventory of opportunities for bi-state cooperation that are difficult to capture in the current environment.
- A review of how other states have benefited from developing a framework for bi-state or multi-state cooperation.
- A summary of the key benefits available to the region using a bi-state cooperation framework.
- A description of the key legal and organizational tools that can be used to provide a bi-state cooperation framework.
Project
A team of faculty and students from WSU Vancouver and PSU's Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies addressed the following questions:
- What are the key policy areas that could benefit from bi-state cooperation?
- What problems and barriers can be addressed by developing new tools for bi-state cooperation?
- What are the structure and scope of successful interstate agreements, both here in the Pacific Northwest and in other regions?
- What are the key benefits of existing and potential interstate cooperative arrangements?
- What resources are available to assist in the development of interstate cooperative arrangements?
The primary source of information for this project was interviews with key stakeholders, particularly in the Oregon and Washington business community. This information was supplemented with interviews with key public sector officials familiar with existing bi-state agreements, both here and in other states. The team also conducted a thorough review of public management literature to evaluate the scope and effectiveness of multi-state agreements.
Read the draft final report from the Interstate Cooperation Project here.
Interested in working with us? Email us at ims@pdx.edu.