One month after J.H. Baxter agrees to pay DEQ debts, no signs of payment on the way
The owner of a shuttered wood treatment plant in west Eugene has not yet paid any of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in outstanding fines owed to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, though interest is now accruing.
J.H. Baxter & Co., whose facility in west Eugene DEQ holds responsible for contaminating nearby residential yards with chemicals as well as a slew of environmental regulation violations, owes DEQ a lot of money but has not indicated if or when it will pay. Earlier this year, Baxter closed down its Eugene plant and claimed it couldn't afford to clean the yards.
"As you know, J.H. Baxter & Co. is mothballing its Eugene wood preserving facility effective January 31, 2022. This decision was made for a number of reasons, including rising costs associated with operating the facility and dwindling sales margins due to shifts in the market," says a Jan. 28 letter to DEQ signed by company president Georgia Baxter.
DEQ already is planning to use its own funds to cover upfront costs to restore the soil at Baxter-contaminated yards. There are at least half a dozen yards in the area DEQ says Baxter contaminated with dioxins, a class of toxic chemicals.
Last month, Baxter dropped its plan to appeal more than $220,000 in fines levied against the company in 2021. The fines covered a variety of environmental regulation violation, but the largest portion concerned the improper use of its equipment to boil away process waste instead of doing so in a dedicated evaporated, which was broken at the time.
DEQ this year levied new fines against Baxter associated with those violations, raising the debt to more than $305,000.
Read more:J.H. Baxter drops appeal, agrees to pay more than $300K for violations
Dropping the appeal means the company owes DEQ the sum of the penalty and the agency will purse its collection, DEQ spokesman Dylan Darling said in an email. Dropping the appeal means Baxter cannot contest the fines it owes.
"Baxter’s payment of the fine was due to DEQ on July 14, 2022, the day the settlement agreement was signed by DEQ," Darling said in the email. "Baxter has not given a date by which it plans to pay some or all of the fines."
DEQ is charging 9% per annum interest on the unpaid fines, Darling said in the email.
DEQ filed a lien on Aug. 8 with Lane County for the Baxter properties in Eugene, Darling said in the email. Lane County finalized separate liens on the properties on May 4 that DEQ’s cleanup program filed earlier this year, Darling said.
The debts Baxter owes DEQ are separate accounts with their own payment schedules, Darling said in the email. The Oregon Department of Justice is assisting DEQ with collection of both civil penalty and clean up debts, Darling said.
More:Oregon DEQ delays cleanup of west Eugene yards contaminated by J.H. Baxter & Co. plant
Though DEQ originally planned to clean up the dioxin-contaminated yards starting in the early summer, the process has been delayed until at least September, Darling said. He said DEQ is still securing crews and planning out the work.
"It’s been a busy summer near Baxter. We’ve been collecting more samples to determine how deep the removal will need to be and to gather more data specific to individual yards. Each yard cleanup will be unique, so we need yard-specific data information to create individual workplans. All this work takes a lot of time," Darling said in the email.
Because Baxter says it can't pay to clean up the yards, DEQ plans to use its industrial orphan site fund to pay for the upfront cleanup costs, intending to eventually recover it from the company. It's not clear how much the work will cost.
Contact reporter Adam Duvernay at aduvernay@registerguard.com. Follow on Twitter @DuvernayOR.
This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Contamination fines owed by J.H. Baxter to Oregon DEQ still unpaid
