To learn more about the Eugene Clean Energy Fund, go here.
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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. Nobody likes their taxes being raised, but an organization in Eugene wants to raise taxes on major retailers to help offset their carbon footprint. It's an action based on a similar model in Portland, and if it qualifies for the ballot and gets passed by voters, some of the nation's largest retailers may be impacted by their operations here in the city. The amount is not insignificant: If passed, it could raise millions. Today on the show, you'll hear from the organizers and why they think it's necessary and passable. Then in the second part of the show, a different kind of environmental story: the saga of the Coffin Butte landfill in Benton County, and how county officials have done a 180 on expansion. Aya Cochran with the Breach Collective, also a community member and chief petitioner on the initiative, and Dylan Plummer, acting deputy director of the Sierra Club's Clean Heat Campaign and a resident of Eugene. Welcome to you both. Thanks for coming on and chatting with us.
Both: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Dunne: Aya, I'm just going to start with you. What is the Eugene Clean Energy Fund campaign?
Aya Cochran: The Eugene Clean Energy Fund would require large retailers, that's billion-dollar corporations earning more than a billion dollars nationally and half a million dollars in gross profits within Eugene, to pay about 2% of their gross profits annually into a fund that would benefit clean energy and community justice projects.
Dunne: Dylan, lay out the current situation that led to this ballot measure. Can you quantify how much pollution and how much destruction of the environment is being caused by the targets this initiative is going after?
Dylan Plummer: This initiative isn't regulating any polluters so much as it's establishing a fee to generate revenue that can be used to support reaching Eugene's climate action goals and building a more sustainable and vibrant community for all Eugene residents. It was really inspired by some of the bold goals set by the city of Eugene, first in 2014 with the Climate Recovery Ordinance, which committed the city to reducing its fossil fuel use by 50% of 2010 levels by 2030. We know fossil fuel use is driving the climate crisis, and right now, despite the best efforts of our city, we're still well behind those goals with 2030 fast approaching. We see this fund as a critical step to ensuring that there are funds available to make investments in renewable energy, in active transportation like protected bike lanes and public transit, and in the mechanisms we know will help us reduce our emissions while making a more affordable and livable city for Eugene residents.
Dunne: Aya, how close are you to qualifying for the ballot?
Cochran: We're right at the beginning of this campaign. We filed the initiative petition on Feb. 20, and we recently received our ballot title from the city. Now we need to collect signatures. We're aiming for about 10,000, which would be more than we need but would ensure we qualify for the ballot. We need to collect those by the end of summer. So we have a lot of work to do, but we know the community is really supportive of climate action.
Dunne: Dylan, pull on that thread a little. Why do you think you'll have broad support for this?
Plummer: First and foremost, I'd point to what happened in Portland in 2018. They ran a similar initiative, the Portland Clean Energy Fund, almost 10 years ago now, and it passed overwhelmingly with widespread support from labor unions, environmental activists, community members, you name it. Since then, they have dispersed not just tens of millions but over $100 million toward clean energy projects, whether it's net-zero affordable housing projects, heat pump installations or energy efficiency programs in small businesses. The variety of projects has already produced significant benefits for the community. We're looking to Portland for inspiration, and we know that Eugene residents have long been supportive of ambitious action to protect our climate and environment. We expect this will be an easy sell to Eugene residents, and we look forward to all of the benefits we can start seeing in our community once we are holding these big corporations accountable for their pollution and their impacts, and making sure those funds are being routed toward projects our community supports.
Dunne: Aya, this initiative is targeting big retailers. Can you explain the carbon footprint of the retail industry and how it contributes to greenhouse gases and global warming?
Cochran: These large corporations, the ones we're talking about affecting with this fund, are your Walmarts, your Home Depots, your Amazons. They have an outsized effect on community pollution while giving back very little to the communities where they operate. For every dollar spent in communities, only about 14 cents goes back through these large businesses. It's really important that they pay their fair share. We've certainly seen examples in our community, specifically J.H. Baxter, which is now a Superfund site. We're really trying to turn this on its head and say: We're going to take money from these big corporations that are polluting more and contributing less to our communities, and do something positive with it. What could we do with a Superfund site like J.H. Baxter? Could we turn it into a site for public power? I'm going to stay with you, Aya, because I want to ask: What are you up against? These are big multinational corporations with deep pockets, and I imagine there's going to be some significant lobbying against this initiative. Talk about that conflict.
Cochran: Again, we can look to Portland for an example. We did see some of the big businesses push back on that initiative, and we do expect some of that here in Eugene. But this fund is going to give back to our community. It's going to support local business. It's going to create jobs, good, well-paying union jobs. We're expecting some opposition, but we're also expecting this to be a really exciting rallying point for our community. We do expect some pushback, and we look forward to winning the community over and showing them what we can do with this incredible opportunity.
Plummer: I'd add that especially with the Trump administration's attacks on climate policy and the rollback of hundreds of millions of dollars from clean energy and community resilience projects here in Oregon, we think this initiative is more important than ever. While big businesses might try to scare residents with misinformation and big-dollar advertising campaigns, we know that Eugene residents are hungry for corporate accountability, for climate action, and for our city to forge its own path toward supporting a transition away from fossil fuels and to clean energy, especially with the uncertainty coming from the White House and these attacks at the federal level on climate programs.
Dunne: Dylan, if this initiative were to pass, do you think it can coexist with economic growth?
Plummer: Absolutely. The funds generated by this fee will go to supporting our community and supporting local businesses. Eugene has been a vibrant community in large part because of our focus on environmentalism, on access to nature, on bike paths and walking paths, and our beautiful greenway along the river. This fund will only contribute to that and make our city a more desirable place for people to move to, increasing our tax base and potential customers for local businesses and large businesses alike. We don't see this as mutually exclusive with economic growth at all. We see it as critical to ensuring that Eugene remains a nationally renowned environmental leader and a desirable place for people to move, raise their families and grow old.
Dunne: Can a local ordinance make a difference?
Cochran: It absolutely can make a difference, both for the lives of the people who live in our community and beyond. This fund is not just reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It's going to reduce energy bills for working families. It's going to support local businesses. It's going to create jobs. So it's going to have a huge impact on the everyday lives of families in Eugene, and it also sets an important example for other communities of how we can hold these big businesses accountable and really take things into our own hands and move the needle on climate action.
Plummer: Eugene is widely known as an environmental leader nationally, so if Eugene can pass a clean energy fund, other cities will be looking to us as a model to replicate. We know it's only by taking action at the individual and local level that we can build toward the systemic action necessary to address the climate crisis and save lives. No action is too small, and this action would be fairly significant, not just in building a greener and more desirable city and creating jobs, but also in reducing emissions, building energy resilience and expanding access to community solar programs and other programs that will keep the lights on even during power outages.
Dunne: She's Aya Cochran with the Breach Collective, a community member and chief petitioner on this initiative. He's Dylan Plummer, acting deputy director of the Sierra Club's Clean Heat Campaign and a resident of Eugene. Really appreciate both of you coming on and explaining this initiative.
Both: Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you, Michael.
Dunne: Now our reporter fills us in on the major reversal in Benton County on the Coffin Butte landfill. KLCC reporter Nathan Wilk. Nathan, thanks so much for coming in and talking with us.
Nathan Wilk: Thanks so much for having me, Michael.
Dunne: You've been on this Coffin Butte story for quite some time. For our listeners, give us the 30,000-foot overview of the twists and turns on this particular landfill.
Wilk: The Coffin Butte landfill is located north of Corvallis, near a small town called Adair Village. It collects a lot of trash from surrounding counties as well as from Washington state, and it's been trying to expand to extend its lifespan for several years. It says it has a little over a decade left. A previous attempt failed in 2021 when Benton County shot it down, and the landfill has come back in recent years trying to extend southward. A lot of community members have been very upset with the Coffin Butte landfill. They've described what they call dump days, days when the odor from the landfill has been overwhelming and made it difficult to go about their daily lives. They've also raised concerns about road impacts if the landfill were to expand, and about fire risk. That's been backed up, in their view, by recent investigations. Several EPA inspections have found huge methane leaks, including one at twice the minimum explosive quantity. So they've been fighting this expansion request for several years.
Dunne: If memory serves, it wasn't that long ago that the Benton County commissioners did approve the expansion. What was their reasoning for granting that application?
Wilk: The Benton County Planning Commission, which is lower than the county commissioners on the decision-making hierarchy, denied it. But when it was appealed to the county commissioners, they approved it on what they call a quasi-judicial basis. Essentially, they weren't looking at whether they liked the landfill or thought it was a good neighbor. In hearings, they spoke about the landfill's current operations as not entirely relevant to the expansion proposal. Basically: Are they meeting the requirements? Does it look like they will meet the land use criteria going forward? They concluded the expert testimony and the models in the application were good enough. Even at that hearing, Commissioner Nancy Wise, one of the two who voted to approve it in a 2-1 decision, cried and said she personally did not like this landfill, did not think it was a good neighbor and did not think it was a good thing for the community. But the testimony from neighbors and environmental organizations was not weighed as heavily as the expert testimony and modeling from Republic Services, the landfill's owner.
Dunne: Fast forward to just this week: a 180-degree change. They voted it down. Talk about that.
Wilk: They used a relatively obscure part of this process. Opponents of the landfill appealed the decision to the Land Use Board of Appeals. Benton County commissioners were allowed, under that process, to pull it back and reconsider it before it went further up the ladder. The reason they did that: just days after they made their decision, a pre-enforcement notice came out from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, essentially telling the Coffin Butte landfill and its owners that their monitoring was incomplete, their covering appeared incomplete, and some of their systems were not large enough. What this did was provide an official, government-agency account of what community members and environmental groups had already been raising as concerns. The commissioners pulled it back and unanimously decided to lean on the DEQ testimony, which county staff said undermined some parts of the application. Some of the assumptions the application had made about odor in its odor study may be wrong, based on the information from Oregon DEQ. That essentially trumped some of the previous testimony in the eyes of the commissioners, and they have now shot this down.
Dunne: In light of this reversal, what have environmental groups and residents been saying?
Wilk: Obviously they're happy about it. Ken Eklund, one of the residents in the area who has been opposing this for a long time, said he was really proud of the local groups that had raised the money to appeal the decision, which then gave the commissioners the ability to pull it back and make the reversal. On the other hand, there is some frustration among environmental groups like Beyond Toxics and neighboring residents that it took this much to get the commissioners to side with what community members had been saying for years throughout this process and at all of the public hearings. So there are mixed feelings, but also a level of confidence going into the next steps now that the county commissioners have given their stamp of disapproval.
Dunne: Any comment from the landfill owner?
Wilk: I reached out to them when the county commissioners made this decision. They said they believed the commissioners had made an error and that they were considering next steps while hoping to continue operating the landfill responsibly. It's unclear right now which next steps they'll take, but that's their position at this time.
Dunne: Any idea of what happens next? Is it dead in the water, or is expansion still possible?
Wilk: There are a few options. They could appeal to the Land Use Board of Appeals. What I'll say is that opponents of the landfill now feel more confident about that prospect than they did before. They were previously looking to the Land Use Board of Appeals to overturn the county commissioners' decision. Now, if it's appealed, the board would have to affirm a reversal rather than flip an approval, and opponents feel they're in a much stronger position. The other option, and we've seen this before: after the previous attempt failed several years ago, Republic Services, which is a huge company with a lot of money and time until this landfill runs out of space, could go back to the drawing board and come back later with an amended application that tries to address some of these concerns. So it's unclear what will happen. But this is not necessarily the nail in the coffin for Coffin Butte expanding.
Dunne: Well said. Nathan Wilk, a reporter here at KLCC. Really appreciate you informing us about this story that, again, could continue. Thanks so much.
Wilk: Thank you, Michael.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Monday on the show, you'll hear from departing Eugene City Council member Alan Zelenka, who's been on the council for decades but has decided, in our toxic political culture, that he's seen and heard enough. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
