Eugene’s J.H. Baxter & Co. faces federal criminal charges

J.H. Baxter & Co. has faced numerous fines from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality for violating state environmental regulations. The Eugene plant treated wood products with creosote and other chemicals from the 1940s until it closed in 2022. Now, the company and its owner are facing federal criminal charges for allegedly boiling off 1.7 million gallons of toxic waste and venting the fumes into the surrounding air.

Christian Wihtol covered the federal charges for Eugene Weekly. He joins us with more details.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. J.H. Baxter & Co. had a plant in Eugene that treated wood products with creosote and other chemicals for about 80 years. It closed in 2022. As we’ve talked about in the past, it faced numerous fines from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality for violating state environmental regulations. Now though, the company and its owner are facing federal criminal charges. Prosecutors have alleged that it illegally boiled off massive amounts of toxic waste and vented the fumes into the surrounding air.

Christian Wihtol has been writing about the Baxter site for more than a year now, including a recent article for Eugene Weekly. He joins us now with the latest details. Good to have you back on the show.

Christian Wihtol: Thanks for inviting me.

Miller: Can you give us just, first, a brief reminder about what J.H. Baxter & Co. did at its Eugene plant?

Wihtol: They creosoted poles and other lumber to make it insect [proof] and waterproof, and in the process created an enormous environmental mess that probably will take a long time to clean up.

Miller: We talked before because the company, as I mentioned, had already been targeted by Oregon regulators. What kinds of violations or fines has the state levied against the company already?

Wihtol: The state has focused primarily on polluting groundwater, polluting the soil, also on off-site pollution caused from fumes wafting away from the plant, and cleaning up soil and water. So those are the primary complaints that the state DEQ filed against the company over a number of years.

Miller: And that’s separate from these new federal criminal charges. What are federal prosecutors alleging the company did?

Wihtol: The federal criminal charges stem from a long investigation that the state Department of Environmental Quality did into Baxter in 2020 and 2021. And during that investigation, the state found, allegedly, that Baxter had been boiling off a very, very large amount of toxic waste residue and venting it directly into the neighborhood’s air. And they had been doing this throughout 2019 and even before that. So using that state investigation as their kind of basis, the federal government then elaborated on that and filed the criminal charges in late 2024.

Miller: What was the company supposed to do with that waste?

Wihtol: Well, waste came from this treatment process of immersing poles and other wooden items in this highly toxic stew of protective chemicals, and the waste was a kind of a watery sludge left over from that. Then Baxter, according to the DEQ, had equipment that it could use to process and purify this waste, and kind of extract the pollutants from it. That equipment, however, was broken, according to the DEQ. It was not functioning. So, J.H. Baxter kept accumulating large amounts of this waste material. And their solution was to pour the waste material into these large processing vats, turn up the heating elements in them, open the lids on them and boil the material directly into the air, bypassing any kind of pollution control.

They allegedly boiled off something in the vicinity of 1.7 million gallons over the course of that time and I figured that’s enough to fill about 114 standard 25-yard swimming pools. So it’s a lot of waste that was allegedly boiled off directly into the air. And the plant, of course, sits right next to a neighborhood.

Miller: What are the potential health effects of the widespread contamination from those particular chemicals?

Wihtol: Well, I know I wouldn’t want to have them around me, but I don’t think anybody’s figured that out. I mean, this material, allegedly, if it is alleged it actually took place, went up into the air. And what exactly happened to it, I don’t think anybody has really studied or determined.

Miller: What would the company’s financial incentive have been to cut these corners, as opposed to fixing or putting in an actual functional system to treat this legally?

Wihtol: I think the DEQ estimated that it would have cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to put in a new piece of purification equipment.

Miller: So we’ve been talking about the company because that’s the first named entity in this federal criminal suit, but prosecutors at the federal level have also levied accusations specifically at Baxter’s current owner, Georgia Baxter-Krause. What have they said about what she’s done?

Wihtol: Again, this is based on the DEQ’s investigation – DEQ asked, in kind of a written interrogation, have you been boiling off this waste in this fashion? And Baxter-Krause allegedly had responded that this has just been done occasionally and just using one particular boiling vat. But it was occasional, number one; and number two, that there were no records of this. What the DEQ determined, and the federal government is using this as the basis of the lawsuit, that actually Baxter was using four large different vats to do this boiling – so a lot more usage – and also that there were very detailed records of this. So the federal government alleges that she was lying to them.

Miller: Has she responded publicly to these charges?

Wihtol: She, herself, has not come out and said anything publicly that I know of. She’s hired lawyers and lawyers have acknowledged that they are now her lawyers, but they have not yet filed any responses to the federal charges.

Miller: How much is publicly known about Georgia Baxter-Krause?

Wihtol: Not an awful lot. The company, J.H. Baxter, was based in California and I think technically it’s still based there. Whether J.H. Baxter has any assets of any kind is unclear. It doesn’t really seem to have many assets. And Georgia Baxter-Krause appears to live in Bend, at least she signed some paperwork with Bend as being her location.

Miller: How big of a deal are these new federal criminal charges compared to the earlier state level investigations and fines?

Wihtol: The state, over the years, levied some small fines against Baxter when Baxter was operating. But Baxter did pay a few thousand bucks every now and again, as they kept turning up problems in Baxter’s operation. Then, in about 2020, 2021, they levied, finally, a really big fine against Baxter – over $300,000. Baxter didn’t pay it. Then shortly after the levying of that fine, Baxter shut down and the state has never collected on that fine.

This one’s different because there’s no specified amount of money being sought. It’s just seeking penalties for violating federal pollution laws. And it is a criminal charge, so prison time is a possible penalty, technically.

Miller: You’d mentioned it’s not clear if the company has any money right now. Do you know if Georgia Baxter-Krause has the money to either pay the existing state fines, or pay fines that might come in addition to or separate from potential jail time?

Wihtol: I don’t know anything about her personal finances. The state separately is suing her and several companies that she has in Oregon, that have land holdings in Oregon. And the state filed this lawsuit last fall, seeking essentially to seize those pieces of land. But how much those pieces of land are worth and whether the state will succeed in that is not clear.

Miller: One commenter to one of your recent articles wrote: “This makes a ton of sense. The fumes have been so strong at times I’ve had to pull my car over in fear of passing out.” What have you heard directly from people in the neighborhood about the impact of this plant?

Wihtol: Well, the impact of the plant has been horrible on the neighborhood. Previously, when I worked for The Register-Guard, I walked that neighborhood often and talked to neighbors there. This is in the mid-2010s and the smell from the plant was very, very intense. I took a tour of the plant and had a headache almost immediately from going in there. It was amazing to me that people could work there, but they said they were fine working there, and many people had worked there a long time.

But no, people in the neighborhood disliked the facility intensely and the odors coming out of it.

Miller: My understanding is that some of those people in the neighborhood, they’ve filed separate civil suits in federal court against the plant. Has anything come from those suits?

Wihtol: One of those suits, at least, is still alive. It’s a proposed class action lawsuit. Nothing significant so far has happened in that, because the sides are arguing whether that civil lawsuit should be allowed to proceed while there are criminal investigations going on against Baxter-Krause and against J.H. Baxter.

Miller: When we last talked, DEQ – Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality – was starting to remediate toxic contamination from the plant in the surrounding neighborhood, the Bethel neighborhood. Where does that work stand right now?

Wihtol: Well, there’s kind of two prongs to that. One is, yes, the DEQ has been testing soil samples in the neighborhood and cleaning up yards. They’ve cleaned up a half a dozen yards, digging away polluted soil polluted with dioxin and putting down clean soil – and they’re continuing to do so. They have more testing planned to see how much more soil cleanup they need to do.

As for the site itself, the Baxter factory is now proposed as a federal Superfund site, which is a great distinction for Eugene-Springfield. Eugene-Springfield doesn’t have a Superfund site yet. So now, we would maybe get a Superfund site. And that puts all the onus for the clean up on the federal government and its Superfund funding mechanism. Up till now, a lot of the cleanup work has been done at the site. Some evaluation work [was] done at the site by the DEQ, which has spent over $2 million on that.

Miller: One thing that I can’t get past here is how long various violations have gone on for. I mean, Baxter was cited for pollution violations going back to the 1990s, to the 2000s – decades ago. The fact that now they’re being accused of criminal, illegal venting just five years ago, does that show, at least in some way, a failure on the part of regulators?

Wihtol: In my view, yes. I don’t think regulators were really able to get a good handle on this facility. If indeed it’s true that the factory was boiling off – 160-plus days through 2019 – hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic liquid and yet no regulators at the time figured out that that was going on, that shows a real shortcoming. On the other hand, if Baxter was indeed doing what it is accused of, that shows the level of deviousness that apparently matched and outpaced the regulators. But certainly, there’s a colossal pollution mess there and it happened on [the] regulator’s watch or even before that, because the plant actually precedes the creation of the state DEQ.

Miller: Christian, thanks very much.

Wihtol: My pleasure. Thanks so much.

Miller: Christian Wihtol is a columnist for Eugene Weekly. You can read his most recent article there. It’s about the federal criminal charges against the owner of the now shuttered J.H. Baxter creosoting plant in Eugene.

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