A wood-treating conglomerate enmeshed in pollution disputes around the county has leased 35 acres in west Eugene, but says it will use the land only for storing wood poles, not for soaking them in toxic chemicals.
The acreage is a former landfill where the state has banned construction of enclosed buildings because of methane gas emitted by the buried, rotting garbage.
Koppers Holdings, a NYSE-traded utility-pole and railroad-tie treating giant, on Dec. 22, 2025, leased the empty acreage off West 1st Avenue near Randy Pape Beltline, records show. The lease gives Koppers an option to buy the property, which is part of the former Lane Plywood Cooperative mill.
Koppers is using the land “as a laydown yard to temporarily store Douglas-fir utility poles. The company has no plans to conduct any manufacturing or treating operations at the Lane County property,” company spokesperson Jessica Franklin Black tells Eugene Weekly.
The lease is part of Pennsylvania-based Koppers’ expansion onto the West Coast. That expansion has spooked many residents in the tiny Douglas County city of Glendale, 120 miles south of Eugene. Koppers in 2023 bought a vacant lumber mill there, and ever since, residents have worried Koppers will try to start operations there to treat wood with creosote and other noxious preservatives. So far, Koppers hasn’t done that. It has a state permit only to do wood milling, state records show. The mill sits on the edge of the city of 867 residents.
CEO likes Oregon potential
Announcing the Glendale purchase in 2023, Leroy Ball, Koppers’ CEO, said the Glendale property “has the potential to expand our industrial treating footprint into a geographic market that we do not yet serve.” Koppers uses the term “industrial treating” to describe making preservative-impregnated utility poles.
Company spokesperson Black tells EW: “We have no current plans to establish a treating site in Oregon.”
In Lane County, the company peels Douglas-fir logs at a facility called Greenhill Reload in west Eugene and ships the poles out of state for treating, Black says.
The prospect of a wood treating facility opening in Lane County would likely alarm residents who for years battled the notorious J.H. Baxter wood-treating plant, which shut in 2022. Baxter left polluted groundwater and soil, storage tanks of chemical waste and a legacy of fouling the air.
Koppers’ utility pole treatment plants are in the Southeast; its railroad tie treatment plants are in the South and Midwest. It owns no facilities in Oregon, Washington or California.
Old garbage dump
In Lane County, the former Lane Plywood Cooperative land that Koppers has leased is owned by a company headed by businessmen Greg Demers of Veneta and Melvin and Norman McDougal of Creswell, records show.
The site has a grubby history.
About 30 acres of the site was once a garbage dump called the Bethel-Danebo Landfill. From the late 1960s to the 1980s, construction debris, municipal garbage and toxic chemical sludge were dumped there, legal and land records show.
The land was owned by Lane Plywood until the company collapsed in the mid-1990s. The sprawling mill site, including buildings and the vacant land, was then bought by investors, including Demers, the McDougals, Lorane winery owner Ed King, and the late John Musumeci, real estate records show.
At that time, the landfill had been covered up for years, and the buyers appear to have known little or nothing of it. Demers aimed to create an industrial park atop the former landfill, news accounts at that time show. But that fizzled when he began installing roads and utilities, and crews discovered underground pockets of methane gas. The state Department of Environmental Quality jumped in, required Demers to install vents to release the gas, and ruled that until he figured out a permanent fix, no enclosed buildings were allowed. No such fix has yet emerged.
In addition to leasing that site, Koppers in December bought the Greenhill Reload business from Demers and the McDougals for $20.7 million in cash, Koppers’ annual report and other records show. The businessmen formed Greenhill Reload 12 years ago to handle logs, untreated utility poles and gravel. Greenhill Reload runs a log-peeling and storage yard off Highway 126 in west Eugene. The yard is 1.5 miles west of the West 1st Avenue acreage Koppers is leasing.
Koppers has a history of environmental woes. It is under scrutiny for toxic air emissions from its chemical factory in Illinois, and is one of many companies potentially implicated in the pollution of the Willamette River in Portland. “Contamination has been identified and is being investigated and remediated at many of our sites by us or other parties,” Koppers says in its annual report.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.