"there have been many criticisms that PDOT wasn't doing something for east Portland"

There have been many criticisms because SE 82nd has about half of the top ten most dangerous intersections for vehicular accidents.

The amount of money spent improving SoWa (about $85M so far and still a lot of work left), rebuilding the downtown mall yet again and then $85M to "fix" 1.5miles of Burnside in comparison to a 15+ yr backlog of road repairs that is a crisis (to paraphrase Mr Adams) is where the not doing anything for neighborhoods outside of downtown comes from.