J.H. Baxter & Co. and its president, Georgia Baxter-Krause, pleaded guilty Jan. 22 to federal criminal charges of illegally boiling off hazardous waste into the atmosphere at the company’s now-defunct Eugene plant and lying about it to regulators, federal officials announced.
Baxter and her company have agreed to pay a total of $1.5 million in criminal fines, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Oregon says in a press release.
Baxter-Krause also faces up to two years in federal prison and three years of supervised release, prosecutors say. Baxter-Krause, 61, of Deschutes County, will be sentenced April 22, before U.S. District Court Judge Michael J. McShane.
It’s unclear where the company and Baxter-Krause would get the money to pay the fine. Baxter-Krause shut and walked away from the Eugene wood-treatment plant in 2022, leaving the environmental mess in the hands of federal and state regulators. J.H. Baxter is based in California but it is unclear whether it has any assets or ongoing business operations there or anywhere else.
Under the plea agreement filed in federal court, the company and Baxter-Krause agreed to disclose to the federal government all their assets. The deal sets Baxter-Krause responsible for $500,000 of the fine and the company responsible for the rest.
In allegations filed in federal court late last year, prosecutors said that in 2019, and at other times, J.H. Baxter had illegally used equipment at its Eugene plant to boil off large amounts of chemically polluted process liquids, sending the vapors into the air. On-site, the company had equipment it could have used to legally clean the liquids, but that equipment was either broken or inadequate to handle the large volumes of liquids, officials have said.
The factory didn’t have a permit to boil off the liquids, and the Lane Regional Air Protection Agency and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality were unaware of Baxter’s illegal boiling-off, federal officials said.
In 2020, when the DEQ twice asked Baxter-Krause about the practice, she lied in response, officials said.
The plea deal is the latest chapter in a yearslong saga in which the creosoting factory polluted the ground, groundwater and air at its property, infuriating neighbors who lived with the industrial stench.
Separately from the federal criminal case, the state last year filed a civil lawsuit in state circuit court against J.H. Baxter and real estate entities in Oregon that are headed by Baxter-Krause, seeking payment for more than $2 million that the state has spent cleaning up polluted soil at and around the abandoned Baxter factory. The state is seeking in effect to claim pieces of Oregon real estate it believes Baxter-Krause owns. That lawsuit remains in its early stage.
Also, before Krause-Baxter shut the plant, the DEQ levied fines that the company never paid. Those fines, plus interest, now total more than $350,000, the DEQ says.