Lane County commissioners voted 3-2 on August 20 to move forward on a $150 million waste recycling facility in Goshen that will divert 80,000 tons of garbage annually from the county’s Short Mountain landfill.
Rural utilities and trash haulers say this will significantly impact them and that they will be forced to pass on the increased costs to ratepayers.
Commissioners Heather Buch, Pat Farr and Laurie Trieger voted in favor while David Loveall and Ryan Ceniga dissented.
“It will create jobs. It’ll reduce methane in our area. It will have an anaerobic digester that will recycle food waste, which is our largest contributor of greenhouse gasses within the landfill,” Buch says of the CleanLane Resource Recovery Facility.
The waste recycling facility will sift through the trash, sorting out organic waste for renewable natural gas and recyclables to increase the county’s trash-to-recycling diversion rates.
To pay for it, the county is putting up its taxing power as collateral for a $35 million limited-tax bond and increasing garbage fees for trash haulers — while selling off the renewable natural gas that is produced to a fossil fuel company.
Ceniga cited the cost impacts on rural utilities and trash haulers as the reason he made a motion to bring the matter to a public vote, however Buch, Farr and Trieger voted against doing so.
Emerald People’s Utility District says it currently relies on power produced from Short Mountain’s trash methane emissions to fill out five to 10 percent of its power portfolio.
Thomas Robbins, an employee at EPUD’s Short Mountain Power Plant, explains that trash buried at the county’s landfill is decomposing to emit methane among other greenhouse gasses. “Basically this is all one big mountain of trash,” he says.
That methane is then collected through a series of pipes drilled deep into the mountain, laid out across the entire landfill.
Around 70 percent of all methane emissions from Short Mountain are then funneled into four 16-piston engines that generate power for EPUD customers. Thirty percent escapes the mountain into the atmosphere.
But in December 2023,the county voted to enter a partnership with Eugene-based Bulk Handling Systems (BHS) to design and manufacture the machines to extract recyclable materials from a stream of waste. The CleanLane Resource Recovery Facility, previously known as the IMERF (Integrated Materials and Energy Recovery Facility,) BHS has a contract to sell off gas produced at the CleanLane to Northwest Natural, a natural gas distributor based in Portland.
Lane County Public Works Director Daniel Hurley says it will save the county $300 million in landfill costs. EPUD says it will need to spend $20 million to keep up with the electricity demand.
“Our customers are going to get hit twice by this,” EPUD General Manager Kyle Roadman says. All Lane County residents will have to pay for increased garbage hauling rates, while he says EPUD’s customers will have to pay higher electricity rates at the same time.
To fund the project, $15 million will come from a federal tax credit and another $35 million will be paid for by a limited-tax bond Lane County while the final $100 million falls to BHS, according to the county. BHS financing is broken down into a $68 million loan from JP Morgan Chase and a $32 million bond from the state of Oregon, which the company still needs to obtain.
Lane County Public Works says it will be the “most technologically advanced waste processing facility in the country.” Receiving 80,000 tons of garbage annually, diverted from Short Mountain, it will extend the landfill’s lifespan from 70 to 90 years.
“Landfills are the single largest source of carbon emissions,” Hurley says, “This is an infrastructure investment for the long term benefit of the community.”
It will create 65 new jobs and one million diesel gas equivalent of renewable natural gas annually.
In 2022, Lane County held a 52.9 percent diversion from waste to recycling rate — the highest in the state. The county is currently targeting a 63 percent diversion rate.
EPUD’s Short Mountain Power Plant will be significantly impacted by the change, raising costs for ratepayers drastically, Roadman says.
Even though the landfill is approaching 300,000 tons processed annually, losing 80,000 tons is significant enough to put a dent in its energy production capabilities. “It begs the question on whether this thing is sustainable given that it was sized to take most of the county’s garbage,” he says of CleanLane.
Most of this cost will come down onto its ratepayers as well, which Roadman says is more than disappointing.
EPUD says the diversion of trash from Short Mountain to CleanLane will cost it $20 million over the next 20 years — more than doubling its current landfill gas budget while energy output stays the same.
“That makes it very difficult not to increase utility rates,” Roadman says. Short Mountain makes up around 10 percent of the utility’s energy portfolio.
EPUD says that the decision to build the new facility in Goshen instead of on Short Mountain — as originally planned — is due to the Short Mountain gas rights EPUD has in a contract with the county since the 1980s.
Hurley says, however, that this is due to a lack of space to physically fit the facility at the landfill. According to him, they would have had to do a massive excavation of Short Mountain — which would have cost a lot more money.
According to Charles Kimball, EPUD’s board president, the public utility was more than willing to negotiate what to do about gas rights in its current contract.
Kimball says that if BHS — a for-profit private company — is unable to turn a profit, it won’t be around for long. “The county turned away from a public public partnership to a public private partnership,” he says.
“The landfill gas out there is extremely valuable,” Roadman says. “We’ve turned down some pretty lucrative offers to sell that gas off, and instead kept our power generation going.
“They are allowing a legacy fossil fuel business to continue at the expense of our ratepayers and county taxpayers.”
However, BHS will receive the first $5 million of all revenue from renewable natural gas sales, as well as the first $5 million from recyclable materials at CleanLane. BHS will then pay 25 percent of any sales exceeding $5 million.
“We’re not going to be making money off the project,” Hurley says.
To pay off the $35 million bond and its $23.6 million interest, the county will raise garbage tipping fees. A tipping fee is what garbage haulers pay to drop off waste at a landfill or treatment facility.
According to Jake Pelroy, a representative of Lane County’s Garbage and Recycling Association — a collective of family-owned garbage haulers — the county has and will continue to raise tipping fees to drop off garbage at its landfill and potential waste recycling facility.
Lane County Public Information Official Devon Ashbridge says two eight-point raises in 2024 and 2025 followed by two six-point raises in 2026 and 2027 are currently being considered by the county.
Pelroy says all garbage haulers factor this fee into the rates they charge customers, essentially offloading that cost onto the consumer entirely.
According to Ashbridge, the tipping fee raises will see an increase of $2 a month in four years.
However, EPUD says Lane County Public Works, the department behind the waste recycling project, has not engaged with the utility. Pelroy says the recyclers and garbage haulers were also not engaged in discussions surrounding the new facility.
Hurley says the county had several public meetings that EPUD could have attended.
EPUD says it is now considering legal action if the project is approved. Roadman says the utility will have to carefully consider its investment in Short Mountain.
“We want them to take it to a public vote. We want the public to hear all the pros and cons and to weigh this thing out for how expensive it is. If the public chooses this move, then we’ll feel a lot more confident raising our rates up,” Pelroy says.
The next public hearing related to the CleanLane Resource Recovery Facility will be held Sept. 17.
This story has been updated.