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Many thought city planners had stopped the proposed facility, where liquid fuel would be moved into trucks. But an appeal has kept the decision unresolved at the state level, and the city said it won’t meet its own target for sending new information to the state. Meanwhile, neighbors are still waiting for answers about safety and health.
Most who walk into the Trainsong Hairshop are looking for a cut.
That wasn’t so on a summer day in 2024, when a visitor stopped at the red-trimmed doorway but never came inside.
“They didn’t knock,” said owner Waffles Hidalgo, who later found a flyer on his door about plans to develop a facility to transfer fuel between trains and trucks at the railyard across the street.
“They just hung it, and disappeared,” he said.
Credit: Ashli Blow / Lookout Eugene-Springfield
Hidalgo was among at least five people to get the flyer in the Trainsong neighborhood, a “pizza slice” area between Bethel Drive and Highway 99.
The facility, proposed by Texas-based USD Clean Fuels, would sit near the crust of that slice, along Roosevelt Boulevard on Union Pacific property.
With no clear point of contact, residents turned to one another. Some gathered in his shop, sitting in white barber chairs beneath bright lights, mirrors and jars of sanitized combs, studying a rendering on the flyer. It showed rows of tanker cars along the tracks, where trucks would load up to 8,000 barrels a day of fuel blends, including flammable diesel and ethanol.
Nearly two years later, residents are still trying to figure out whether that vision will become reality. The effort has long since outgrown the barbershop, with residents and environmental activists waiting on city planners and the state’s Land Use Board of Appeals to move forward with an overdue decision that was supposed to come by Friday, Jan. 23.
For Rachel Rainwater, a friend of Hidalgo who also lives in Trainsong, the situation is maddening.
Her community is already among the most polluted in the city, according to environmental group Beyond Toxics. It includes the J.H. Baxter Superfund site. That site’s criminal history deepened residents’ distrust of industrial companies, and they want to know whether public health is truly being considered.
“It [the USD project] has been confusing from the get-go,” she said. “We’re all pretty angry.”
The Eugene Clean Fuels timeline
Shortly after Rainwater and Hidalgo learned about the project in 2024, Beyond Toxics and the Active Bethel Community neighborhood association joined them in pressing the city for answers. They learned the city of Eugene’s Planning Division approved the USD Clean Fuels application for the Eugene Clean Fuels facility that May.
Planners decided the land — outside city limits but within the urban growth boundary — was unzoned, meaning there were no rules governing what could be built there, allowing the project to move forward. But amid public outcry and legal pressure from attorneys working with Beyond Toxics, the city changed its position.
Here’s what happened:
- In January 2025, residents sent more than 200 letters to the City Council, and environmental attorneys prepared to challenge the decision before the state’s Land Use Board of Appeals, an administrative body that reviews zoning disputes.
- The city then withdrew its decision, concluding the land was zoned for heavy industrial use. City planners also determined the project would qualify as a “regional distribution center,” a use not permitted under that zoning.
- In response, USD Clean Fuels challenged the city’s new decision to the Land Use Board of Appeals.
- The board of appeals filed its opinion in July 2025, stating the city “misconstrued the law” in how it defined a “regional distribution center.” Because of that error, the board did not rule on whether the project could move forward. Instead, it sent the decision back to the city to correct its legal definition, redo its analysis, and explain how it reached its conclusion.
- The Land Use Board of Appeals does not set deadlines for action in such opinions, but the city set a six-month target to issue a new decision, which fell Friday.
Elle O’Casey, director of communications for the Eugene city manager’s office, confirmed the city did not meet that target.
“This decision has been delayed due to constraints related to staff capacity and working to fill vacancies within the city’s land use planning team,” O’Casey said. “We anticipate having the decision rendered in the coming month.”
USD Clean Fuels, whose business license remains active for Clean Eugene Fuels LLC, did not respond to questions from Lookout Eugene-Springfield.
When the city withdrew its first decision last year, the reversal gave many residents outside the Trainsong community the impression the project was finished. But those living in Trainsong knew it was far from over.
Clean energy transition meets public safety
On a sunny frigid afternoon last week at the Union Pacific railyard, about a dozen people stood on acres of gravel, framed by rows of graffitied boxcars and black tank cars sitting on the tracks.
Among them were residents, activists and elected officials — including state Rep. Lisa Fragala and a staff member from the office of Julie Fahey, the speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives.
“I have not heard a lot about the transfer station here, and I am appreciative of the information and education today,” Fragala said.
The uncertainty of the project was the reason that Beyond Toxics hosted a tour not only showing the railyard but other existing infrastructure for fuels management.
The Eugene Clean Fuels facility in Trainsong ties into larger state efforts to manage energy demand as communities try to decarbonize — shift from fossil fuels toward cleaner energy sources.
On its flyer — still the main source of information for residents — USD Clean Fuels said the facility would supply products tied to Oregon’s Clean Fuels Program, a state effort aimed at cutting carbon emissions in 2035 by 37%.
The flyer pointed to increasing access to clean fuels, which when burned generally produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than fuels made purely from crude oil.
This includes fuels like biodiesel, which is a fuel made from vegetable oils, animal fats and blended with regular diesel. No liquid fuel is produced in the state of Oregon, and it would not be created at the site.
But when transported or stored, these clean fuels carry many of the same risks as traditional fuels, including spills and fires. At full capacity, the proposed Eugene Clean Fuels facility would involve up to 40 tanker trucks making as many as 80 trips a day along Bethel Drive.
That is something Nikki Mandell knows from her work on a community task force focused on Portland’s Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub. The hub is the state’s main entry point for liquid fuels, where about 90% of Oregon’s gasoline, ethanol and diesel arrive through the 400-mile Olympic Pipeline from Washington.
The proposed Eugene clean fuels facility would neighbor the Eugene Terminal, operated by global infrastructure leader Kinder Morgan. The terminal is the pipeline’s final stop.
From there, tanker trucks enter from the Beltline Highway or Interstate 5 to load fuel from above-ground, silo-like storage tanks — why the terminal is commonly called a “tank farm.”
Mandell joined the group Friday, expressing one of her concerns: that current or new laws meant to oversee and regulate risk — such as a major earthquake that could rupture storage tanks — may not apply to fuel stored temporarily in rail cars, which could sit on tracks for unknown periods of time.
“The [Department of Environmental Quality] is not considering rail cars as storage,” Mandell said. “It’s a huge loophole. A real problem.”
‘Lip service’
As Trainsong residents and others are concerned about the project’s potential effects on public safety and health, they’re drawing connections to a different city of Eugene initiative that would try to reduce pollution in neighborhoods that have a mix of residential and industrial properties.
That initiative, the Public Health Standards Project, seeks to amend city code to guide how industrial development is reviewed and communicated to regulators.
Since last spring, environmental and health advocates say the latest draft of the initiative has been watered down, leaving it with limited language to address public health protections. The next public hearing on the Public Health Standards is scheduled for Feb. 17 before the City Council.
Rainwater is among those who have been engaged with the city through both the Public Health Standards Project and the potential development of the Eugene Clean Fuels facility. But she doesn’t feel listened to.
“We’ve attended the City Council meetings, and we get lip service, and we don’t know what’s going on,” said Rainwater, referring to the fuels project.
After the railyard tour, Rainwater drove 4 minutes down along the tracks to the Trainsong Hairshop. Hidalgo listened to Rainwater’s recap of the day as he swept hair into a dustbin.
Hidalgo is not opposed to a fuel transfer station or industrial activity. Living next to the railroad — with its noise and daily rhythms — was part of the life he chose, something that appealed to him, when he moved to Trainsong.
What troubles Hidalgo is the proximity to people’s homes and what he sees as a dismissal of the neighborhood from city leadership.
“My initial concerns were just safety, and then also the continuation of how the city doesn’t recognize this as a residential neighborhood,” he said. “We’ve been dumped on so many times.”