The White House has announced that the President will be in Portland this week. He will be in town on Thursday. There are no other details about the trip. Due to the sensitive nature of the president’s travel and security, details of presidential events are held until a day or two before. The President will travel to Seattle as well on Friday, April 22, which is Earth Day. The White House press release stated that Biden will talk about, “his Administration’s efforts to continue bringing down costs for American families and growing our clean energy economy.”
This will be another event where Biden will be promoting the “unprecedented” bipartisan infrastructure bill. President Joe Biden will use the visit in Portland on Thursday, April 21, to speak about investments being made from the recent infrastructure bill. The Portland Medium has run a couple articles on the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project where a Black-owned company, Raimore Construction, is a prime general contractor working on that project.
Infrastructure plans are huge for the economy. Dem president Biden has highlighted the I-5 Bridge between Portland and Vancouver, WA several times in promoting the $1.5 Trillion Infrastructure plan. The bipartisan infrastructure bill was passed last November with nearly $200 million set aside for federally funded infrastructure projects in Oregon.
The Interstate 5 Bridge project connects Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. The state, Oregon, estimated that it would receive about $1.2 billion over the next five years. Oregon lawmakers said in November that the state was considering the I-5 Bridge and the Rose Quarter highway redesign project as candidates for a big portion of the federal funds.
The Portland visit will be about infrastructure. The Seattle visit the next day, on the other hand, will be about growing the renewable energy on Earth Day that Friday. Details are also scarce for the visit on where in the city and what time his visit will take place. Washington state anticipates it would get roughly $1.8 billion of the money.
Back in November, Congress passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill and it was announced that Oregon and Washington were going to receive billions of dollars in federal funding. It has been close to seven years since a sitting U.S President has visited Portland. President Barak Obama visited Pdx in May 2014 to attend an event at Nike.
