Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
QuickTake:
Several councilors are calling for a review into how much of Lane County’s potential liability from the planned recycling facility Eugene could inherit.
Eugene city councilors are questioning how much of Lane County’s potential CleanLane recycling liability could land on city residents’ trash bills.
The county’s former top staff lawyer alleged county officials withheld key information from commissioners before the county signed the contract for the planned $150 million recycling facility. Internal records obtained by Lookout Eugene-Springfield show that Rob Bovett, the former county counsel, had concerns the county could face potential liability of more than $300 million if the project fails.
Now, elected officials in Eugene, the largest customer base for Lane County’s Short Mountain Landfill, have pointed questions about what this means for city residents.
Last week, Councilor Mike Clark called for the city to launch a “full review of Eugene’s exposure and a clear explanation” of how large the city’s liability could be, how it could impact residents’ waste bills, and “what options the city has to protect them.”
Clark said he has secured three of the four needed council votes to schedule a work session on the topic sometime before the council’s winter recess in December, and that he believes he will soon get a fourth.
“If Eugene residents are the ones being left with the bill, we deserve to know exactly what we are facing,” Clark’s reelection campaign posted on Facebook.
Clark wrote in his post that under Eugene’s agreements with Lane County, residents of Eugene, not other cities, would be responsible for “any CleanLane liability passed on by the county.”
CleanLane liability in the county’s contract isn’t directly linked to Eugene, but the city does rely upon the county’s waste management system.
At issue is Eugene’s 1999 intergovernmental agreement with the county. Private haulers are required to take the city’s trash to the county’s Short Mountain Landfill and pay system benefit fees, which fund the county’s waste management system.
The 1999 agreement gives Lane County “sole discretion” to set the system benefit fees for haulers in Eugene. Neither the city nor the county directly collect trash off curbs, but the system benefit fees, when raised, can be passed on to customers in the form of higher bills.
The city’s agreement remains in effect until terminated. The city must provide a 60-day notice to do so.
The agreement came well before the county started planning the CleanLane project for the region.
But not all cities are under the same obligation. No similar agreement is in place for Springfield, and Creswell recently exited from its agreement. The entire county receives waste management services from the system benefit fees, even areas like Springfield and Creswell where haulers don’t pay the fees.
Councilors have argued that Eugene customers are already essentially subsidizing the cost of waste management for other communities that don’t pay into the fund.
In recent years, the hauler Sanipac has sent much of its local trash to its landfill in Jackson County instead of Short Mountain Landfill. As a result, fees collected at the landfill have declined, forcing the county to close a rural transfer station and make other cuts.
The worries about the county’s liability for CleanLane have intensified, records show, as the county has failed to secure the land-use approvals needed for the project to move forward in Goshen, where it was originally proposed. County officials could build CleanLane at Short Mountain Landfill instead, but that would require an amendment to the county’s contract with Bulk Handling Systems, a Eugene-based company that will build and operate CleanLane.
To be sure, the $300 million scenario outlined in memos is a worst-case one. It’s based on expected profits for Bulk Handling Systems during its 25-year contract. Records show county staff believed a two-year liability cap on the profits, estimated at $20 million a year, would help shield the county.
But Bovett had concerns before he left that the language in the contract was too ambiguous and worked to clarify that in discussions with the company, records show.
Yet that worst-case scenario is a lingering concern.
If the county were to face potentially hundreds of millions in liabilities related to its CleanLane recycling project, some city councilors worry customers in Eugene would absorb more of the financial burden than other cities, in the form of additional or higher fees passed on by haulers.
“We are the primary client for the dump and for Lane County with recycling and all of this stuff,” Councilor Greg Evans said in an interview. “That means that our garbage rates are going to go up both on the residential side as well as the commercial side.”
He added: “We may be on the hook, and we don’t have any way of mitigating the damage to our residents.”
In response to questions from Lookout about the city’s exposure to the county’s potential liabilities, spokesperson Caitlin Wallace said “the City has no comment on these issues at this time.”
Eugene city councilors have brought up their concerns about this before.
Evans and other councilors asked questions about this issue at a Sept. 25, 2024, work session about the CleanLane project, which was attended by Lane County Waste Management Division Manager Jeff Orlandini.
“It seems like our ratepayers are on the hook if this project doesn’t go as planned and ends up with considerably higher costs,” Clark said at that meeting.
Councilor Alan Zelenka added, “My concern, as expressed by other people, is that if the project ends up not playing out as planned that the ratepayers in Lane County end up footing the bill.”
At the time, there were estimates that the construction of the CleanLane recycling project could result in an annual $24 increase for waste disposal services to residential customers in fiscal year 2025 and another $24 per year increase in fiscal year 2026. Commercial customers could see a $108 annual increase both years, according to the estimate.
The meeting materials state that the “CleanLane facility does not require changes” to Eugene’s intergovernmental agreement with the county.
During that September meeting, which came just over a week before the county signed its contract for CleanLane, Orlandini said the county had “eliminated the risk” if Bulk Handling Systems, the Eugene-based company hired to run the facility, fails to perform.
“The contract that we’re negotiating with them and finalizing basically states that if it does not meet those standards, that the county is not on the hook to purchase that equipment, is not on the hook to continue the partnership,” he said.
But he did not explicitly address how the county planned to eliminate the risk to itself if it, not Bulk Handling Systems, was the party in default.
And, according to an internal county memo reported by Lookout, Lane County would need to pay the company the contract’s “fair market value,” or net profits, if it defaults — an item that could leave the county liable for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Back in 2024, city councilors probed Orlandini about how the county would avoid costs if CleanLane fails.
“How does the county protect itself from that debt being placed on the county? Is it just on Bulk Handling Systems and separate from the county taxpayers?” Zelenka asked Orlandini at that September meeting.
“Yes, it is,” Orlandini replied.
An earlier meeting at the county offices
Thirteen days before that 2024 council work session, Orlandini was in an office meeting with other county bosses: Lane County Administrator Steve Mokrohisky and then-Public Works Director Dan Hurley.
The Sept. 12, 2024 meeting involved a discussion of the estimated net profits that Bulk Handling Systems would receive. At the meeting, Mokrohisky indicated that the anticipated profit information “would not be shared” with the county board, Bovett’s complaint narrative stated, recounting in July 2026 information he uncovered when researching the contract in his role as county counsel.
Bovett filed a July complaint with the county, alleging he faced retaliation after raising concerns about the contract. In August, the county fired him “without cause or comment,” giving him a one-year severance package.
In their internal September 2024 meeting, county officials were optimistic that the liability would be contained to two years of fair market value, or net profits, Bovett’s narrative stated. Even that amount would be close to $40 million.
“Orlandini’s notes indicate that the discussion in that meeting included the Lane County proposed limitation on default FMV damages at two years,” Bovett’s document states, referring to fair market value.
That information wasn’t shared with Eugene city councilors either.
On Oct. 4, 2024, Mokrohisky signed the CleanLane contract. That was just over a week after the city work session and less than a month after county staff reviewed the profit information.
‘Ducking’ questions
In an interview on Friday, Oct. 23, Evans described that September 2024 work session as “particularly strange.” He recalled county staff “ducking” councilors’ questions and said it’s been “my take for a while” that “something is not right with this.”
“We need to know exactly what’s going on and what the city knows, and what the attorneys know, and what the city manager knows, that we don’t know yet,” Evans said.
Councilor Randy Groves said he’s been concerned about the project’s possible financial impacts to city ratepayers “all along.”
“Yes, I would have liked more information, but I’m not sure they had it at the time,” he said.
In response to questions sent to the county and Orlandini, spokesperson Devon Ashbridge said “it’s understandable” that county staff were not able to answer “every question at the time,” given the presentation was provided more than two years ago and before the CleanLane contract was completed.
“We look forward to another opportunity to share updates and answer current questions from our colleagues at the City of Eugene,” Ashbridge said in an email.
Clark said the 2024 work session answered some of his questions, but not all of them. In hindsight, he said, he has “strong questions about whether I got truthful answers from the county representatives involved.”
“The question was, ‘Did we really understand the nature of the risk and liability that the county was signing us all on for?’” Clark said. “I don’t think we did at the time. I had some concerns about it because I thought that the exposure was just too broad to ‘what-ifs.’”
