Business View Magazine - August 2023

143 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 8 THE OREGON TRUCKING ASSOCIAT ION those roads for truckers and all motorists. Talking of the I-Five corridor, there’s a historic bridge over the Columbia River. It’s more than 100 years old, and its pilings don’t go down into the bedrock beneath the river. “It’s an accident waiting to happen,” says Jarvis, and so she and the OTA are lobbying the legislature as hard as they can to do something about this bridge in that assembly’s current session. Jarvis serves on an advisory committee, trying to determine the State of Oregon’s costs for replacing said bridge, which will be shared with Washington. Lack of labor How has the lack of skilled labor affected the trucking industry? Jarvis says in Oregon, this shortage has created long-term problems. “The pandemic created all kinds of interesting dilemmas for us,” she says. “There were several drivers on the cusp of retirement, and the early pandemic conditions were so adverse for drivers that many of them said, ‘It’s time to retire,’ and so the shortage got worse in the short term. We are actively engaged. Oregon has nine workforce boards, and for many years those workforce boards were focused on other industries outside of transportation.” “I have a member who is my former chairman of the association, who got involved with his workforce board in 2015, and he realized there was an opportunity to connect what the state was trying to accomplish with what our industry was trying to accomplish. As a result of that, we now have eight participants. We are in the process of getting eight trucking participants out of the nine workforce boards. We will work hard to get that ninth one placed sometime here in the coming year, and that allows us to work alongside the State,`` she continues. There are 55 bills during the current legislative session that are aimed at workforce issues, mostly in areas outside of transportation.