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Lane County’s stalled $150 million recycling project initially was due to break ground in 2025. County officials are now exploring another location to build the facility as more haulers are taking their trash to landfills outside Lane County.
A few years ago, Lane County officials boldly predicted that construction on a massive, modern recycling facility would start in 2025.
They were so confident they signed off on a $150 million contract for the CleanLane project, with the schedule calling for equipment to be installed in 2026 in a newly built facility.
An outdated entry on the county’s website still promises a 2026 grand opening.
For years, Lane County officials have worked toward that goal, planning for the county to construct a recycling facility intended to process at least 120,000 tons of trash every year.
CleanLane is an ambitious project intended to help the county reach a recovery rate of 63% under a state recycling law, which includes recyclables from trash, as well as pulling food and organic waste and putting it in an anaerobic digester to turn into recyclable renewable gas.
That goal was set in 2023, when the county signed the deal with Bulk Handling Systems, a Eugene-based company, for the project.
Fast-forward to 2026. Construction is yet to begin. A bond for the county’s share of the project has not been issued for financing. What’s more, the county failed to get the required special-use permits at the intended 26-acre site in Goshen, which it purchased for $1.5 million.
The project is intended to divert at least 80,000 tons of trash annually from the county’s Short Mountain Landfill, with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and extending the life of the landfill by another 20 years.
“The board had to contemplate … do you want to invest in the most efficient technology available to process waste?” County Administrator Steve Mokrohisky said in a recent discussion with commissioners about solid waste. “That’s the CleanLane model, right? Which is invest in technology that takes all of our waste and puts it into an anaerobic digester and captures the methane gas.”
County officials are back at the drawing board. To ultimately be successful, the county’s next chapter for CleanLane will likely involve navigating land use requirements at Short Mountain Landfill, avoiding the payment of penalties in the contract with Bulk Handling Systems and negotiating with a waste management company that’s shipping waste out of Lane County communities to a different landfill near Medford.
CleanLane’s future is far from certain — both its eventual location and what costs the county may shoulder if the impasse continues. Meanwhile, the project’s overall costs — future and past — continue to draw criticism, especially from some candidates running for the Lane County Board of Commissioners in the May 19 election.
Here’s a look at how the project came to be — and the challenges and complications that lie ahead.
Cost questions
County officials have estimated the total initial costs at $150 million, with the county paying $35 million for building and site development, and Bulk Handling Systems paying $115 million.
Under the arrangement, Bulk Handling Systems is responsible for supplying the sorting equipment and operating the facility after construction. Once operating, the facility is expected to have 65 employees.
In August 2024, Lane County commissioners decided to take on new debt to finance its share of the project’s construction. County commissioners approved a $35 million bond, a form of loan that requires repayment with interest.
Those interest payments are estimated to add $23.6 million to the total, meaning the county will pay about $59 million to settle the debt by the time the bond reaches maturity, county records show.
Total annual bond repayments could be as high as $2.9 million annually, county records of the expected repayment schedule through 2044 show. (Those figures are preliminary estimates and the interest rates will need to be recalculated when the county issues the bond, a county spokesperson said.)
In 2024, the county’s goal was fairly straightforward: The previous December, commissioners approved a series of solid waste disposal fee increases for the facility’s construction and future operations: 8% increases in 2024 and 2025, with 6% increases in 2026 and 2027. Those fees are collected when haulers take trash to Short Mountain.
The goal behind those increases was for the project to pay for itself. These are part of so-called “tipping fees” that haulers pay to dump trash at Short Mountain Landfill. The fee increases fall in line with the approach of the county’s overall solid waste disposal fund, which primarily relies upon user fees rather than tax revenues to fund the county’s Waste Management Division operations, including the landfill and recycling program.
The initial 2024 fee increase was projected to generate about $2.2 million in new revenue annually, county records show. Other fees and revenues from recycling would also help the project’s cost.
But since then, neither the county’s intended location for CleanLane nor its plans to pay for the project with additional fees have worked out as intended. Those setbacks have left the county with a contract with Bulk Handling Systems for CleanLane, but without a finalized location in hand or a volume of trash the project’s contract requires.
What’s more, even as the planned $150 million project marks an expansion for the county’s waste management division, Lane County officials face larger challenges in the overall division’s budget apart from CleanLane. County officials are facing the need to cut existing infrastructure like transfer stations where rural county residents take their garbage to make up for a budget gap.
Unsuccessful attempts at Goshen
Understanding how Lane County got into this situation first requires looking at the past.
From the start, Lane County’s efforts to get the Goshen site approved for CleanLane faced resistance.
In November 2024, Lane County Public Works submitted an application for a special-use permit for the project at the Goshen site, which the county’s planning director approved the following month.
In response, several organizations filed appeals, including Sanipac Inc., a subsidiary of Texas-based Waste Connections, and Lane County Garbage & Recycling Association, a group of local garbage haulers concerned about the CleanLane project.
Sanipac is now in the county’s crosshairs as officials search for a way to lure the hauler to its Short Mountain Landfill so the CleanLane project, when built, has enough tonnage to pencil out financially. (More on this later in the story.)
The appeals of opponents succeeded. In April 2025, a Lane County hearings officer denied the county’s request for a permit for the site, determining that the “waste-related” use was prohibited in Goshen’s limited industrial zone.
Every county effort to jumpstart the project since then has failed. The county appealed the denial to the state’s Land Use Board of Appeals, which upheld the hearing officer’s decision in December. The county subsequently filed an appeal of that decision, losing that effort as well.
The final appeal was essentially a last-ditch effort. Even while awaiting the verdict, county officials signaled that they were moving on.
In December, the same month that the Land Use Board of Appeals decision came down, county commissioners voted 3-2 to amend the CleanLane contract to move the facility from Goshen to its Short Mountain Landfill. Commissioners also committed $1.3 million in preliminary engineering costs to explore the location change.
That $1.3 million is in addition to the initial $150 million project cost and the county’s interest payments on the bond.
County-caused delays can lead to higher costs
The county’s contract with Bulk Handling Systems can lead to potentially high costs if penalties ever take effect.
Under the contract, reviewed by Lookout Eugene-Springfield, the county is required to pay a $12,000-per-day penalty for every day it fails to meet the project’s timeline. Under the timeline in the contract, the county already has missed the deadlines to start construction, records show.
However, county officials maintain the delays are not the county’s fault and, therefore, Lane County is not required to pay.
“The County is not in default,” Devon Ashbridge, a spokesperson for Lane County, said in an email when asked if the county has to pay the fee. “Delays have been caused by land use appeals, not by the County.”
So far, the county has not needed to pay any penalties, even as the project falls behind schedule.
But the county’s waste division budget is being squeezed elsewhere. Even after increasing fees, the county is facing the prospect of making cuts in its waste division in the upcoming fiscal year as less trash comes into the landfill.
Critics of the project say the increased fees are driving haulers to take their trash outside the county, driving down both revenues that would have gone to the county and the volume of trash that would go to CleanLane.
These newer budget challenges did not exist back when the CleanLane deal came together. But, even then, some officials were more cautious than others — both within the county government and outside it.
County contract for CleanLane decision
In December 2023, Lane County’s trash situation was a bit different. At the time, Lane County was receiving about 138,000 tons of waste annually that was eligible for recovery through the CleanLane project, Ashbridge said in an email.
This was the same month county commissioners voted 3-2 to approve plans to move forward with Bulk Handling Systems to construct and operate a waste processing facility. Commissioners Ryan Ceniga and David Loveall have voted against this proposal, while the other three — Pat Farr, Laurie Trieger and Heather Buch — have supported it.
The county’s CleanLane contract was based on the assumption that trash would continue to flow at that volume. A provision in the contract requires the garbage — also called “tonnage” — to reach a threshold of 120,000 tons annually. If the county’s input falls short of that threshold in any year, the county is on the hook for the operating costs for each ton of the shortfall.
That comes to a $78.69 fee per ton under the contract, meaning the county would owe $786.90 if it was 10 tons short of the goal. The dollar amount can quickly accumulate if the tonnage is far below the threshold.
The price — and minimum threshold — is now a challenge for Lane County, as more trash has diverted to a Waste Connections-owned landfill near Medford instead of going to the county’s site.
Since the 2023 vote, county officials have increasingly noted more trash diverted from the Short Mountain Landfill, where tipping fees are collected, to the Medford-area landfill.
The concerns didn’t appear overnight either. Springfield city officials weren’t sold on the county project in 2023 — and expressed reservations before the vote.
Skepticism from Springfield unheeded
Records show that Springfield city officials were skeptical about the project before county officials signed the contract.
Shortly before commissioners voted in support of the project in December 2023, the Springfield City Council sent a letter to the county expressing concerns, including the potential impact on customer rates and unknowns at the time.
“The uncertainty of cost remains the highest concern for Springfield,” the letter said. “While Lane County staff outlined the tipping fee increase percentage for the next six years, they were unable to translate that into real dollars.”
County staffers said its cost analysis demonstrated the CleanLane facility would be the cheapest option, even accounting for higher tipping fees, the letter said.
Springfield councilors urged commissioners not to move forward with the project “unless it is clear that long-term success will not depend upon flow control.”
The commissioners went forward with a 3-2 vote, with Loveall and Ceniga opposed.
Waste exportation issues arise
Apart from CleanLane, Lane County is facing a revenue problem in its solid waste division.
Sanipac is taking trash from Springfield to a landfill near Medford in Jackson County, county records say. Waste Connections owns that facility, called Dry Creek Landfill, located in White City, having acquired it in 2022.
Meanwhile, the county lost $5.2 million in the last fiscal year in fee revenue, most of it due to Waste Connections’ diversion of trash, county records show. When haulers bring their trash to Lane County’s landfill, they pay fees that feed into the county’s solid waste disposal fund.
Based on state data, the county estimates that the Waste Connections-owned landfill near Medford receives about 7,000 tons of waste a month from Lane County, or more than 80,000 tons a year. Overall, the county’s landfill tonnage has dropped nearly 15% in the past year.
Now, the county is trying to negotiate with Sanipac to return in exchange for a reduction in the tipping fee from $112.46 a ton to $100, with a five-year agreement and rate increases only for inflation. Currently, the $112.46 tipping fee at the Lane County landfill includes a $53.63 system benefit fee to pay for waste and recycling services.
Meanwhile, the county’s budget for the next fiscal year, which starts in July, proposes about $3 million in cuts to the waste division budgets.
Those cuts would force the closure of at least three of the county’s 15 transfer stations and fee increases at the transfer stations that remain. Those cuts would be less drastic if the county succeeds in reaching a deal with Sanipac.
In an April 14 letter to Ronald Mittelstaedt, Waste Connections’ president and CEO, Mokrohisky, the county administrator, asked the company to consider the community impact and the county’s historical role in waste management and collecting fees from haulers to support that system.
“Residents and local advocacy groups are submitting public comments to their elected officials, sending letters to our local newspapers, and examining their choice in haulers,” he wrote in the letter. “Their concerns include the likelihood of increased illegal dumping due to transfer station closures, the increase in carbon emissions created by trucking waste hundreds of miles farther than necessary, and the erosion of a valued public system that has been in place for nearly 30 years.”
Sanipac questions county’s motives
But Sanipac’s initial response, through its attorney, shows the company isn’t interested in the arrangement and still has unanswered questions for the county, records show.
Sanipac’s attorney, E. Michael Connors, told the county the company finds the offer “difficult to accept,” in a May 8 email provided through a public records request.
Connors said the company doesn’t have the cost data and profit-and-loss statements needed to understand the county’s financial-hardship claims and why transfer stations would be forced to close. In the email, Connors said that the information has not been provided to Sanipac even after multiple public records requests.
“The County cannot present Sanipac with an offer and expect good-faith engagement while withholding the very information Sanipac needs to evaluate the offer and explore other solutions,” Connors wrote in the email.
Connors said the uncertainty of what would happen after five years is another factor because significant increases could follow.
“A five-year rate reduction, standing alone, is not a viable solution because it fails to address the underlying issues that are truly causing the County’s financial concerns,” Connors wrote.
Connors wrote that elected officials in Lane County cities have made the choice to not have intergovernmental agreements with the county that would require trash to be hauled to Short Mountain Landfill.
“Sanipac is concerned that the County is attempting to direct waste flow not because it best serves local communities, but as an attempt to fulfill its contract with BHS for the CleanLane project — which includes a minimum tonnage guarantee subject to significant liquidated damages provisions,” Connors wrote, using the acronym for Bulk Handling Systems. “The decision to enter that contract was seemingly based upon faulty information about market conditions and tonnages; but rather than the County foregoing that project based upon siting issues, impossibility of performance, and other factors, the County seems to be solely focused on pursuing a path that will ultimately result in significantly higher costs for municipalities and their constituents.”
At a March 31 meeting, Loveall also raised concerns about what would happen after five years.
“We’re going to have debt service on that and in five years, who knows what implosion we’re going to face economically if Waste Connections comes in and says, ‘Yeah, it was a nice five years. Thank you very much. But we’re going to go back to Dry Creek (landfill),’” he said.
Loveall suggested the county rethink its approach.
“I see us throwing a lot of blame out there and a lot of finger-pointing when maybe we need to come back and have some serious discussions about if our model going forward is sustainable,” Loveall said.
Waste Connections has given campaign contributions to Loveall and his opponent, Springfield Mayor Sean VanGordon. Both received $2,500 donations, as did Jake Pelroy, who is running for county commissioner against Buch.
Pelroy has been a vocal opponent of the CleanLane project, suggesting that the projected annual $11 million cost could be put to other purposes, such as public safety. Pelroy, who runs a political consulting firm, also has served as president of the Lane County Garbage and Recycling Association, and has called the project wasteful, as have supporters like Cottage Grove Mayor Candace Solesbee.
On the flip side, supporters are urging patience as the county looks for a path forward and modernizes its system in an environmentally responsible way.
Supporters of CleanLane defend project
In a recent county meeting, Buch asked Mokrohisky about “members of the public” who have stated the $11 million in expenses for CleanLane could go towards public safety or other services.
“Is there truly another bucket of money that we have not sought for public safety?” Buch asked.
Mokrohisky said the funding for waste management is not a fund that can be used for public safety. Further, much of the cost would go toward running the landfill instead of CleanLane if that’s where the trash was dumped, he said.
“The statement ‘could we just cancel the CleanLane project that cost $11 million and then put that into public safety?’” he said. “No. Absolutely not.”
He added: “It doesn’t exist in that way. It’s either you invest those dollars in the new facility or you continue to pay for the cost to operate the landfill, which is just a less efficient way of processing.”
At the end of the day, he said, “it is a choice.”
“Do you want to invest resources in a legacy generational investment in processing waste efficiently for the future or do you want to spend the money the way we’re currently spending it managing the landfill?” he said.
A timeline of key events in the CleanLane saga
2015: The state of Oregon announces required materials recovery goals for counties starting in 2025. Lane County selects a 63% rate for a voluntary goal, up from 49.7% at the time.
2020: Lane County’s Climate Action Plan identifies Short Mountain Landfill as the highest contributor (77%) of greenhouse gases from the county’s operations.
December 2021: Waste Management Division staffers and Bulk Handling Systems give a presentation on waste processing technologies in use in other communities that may work in the county to meet its recovery goals.
March 2022: Lane County issues a request for proposals for waste recovery facilities to meet or exceed a 63% recovery goal. After a competitive process, the county picks Bulk Handling Systems for a contract to “further explore” building a facility near Short Mountain Landfill.
April 2022: The board adds this objective to its strategic plan: “Fully vet the construction of a waste processing facility for the Short Mountain Landfill.”
December 2023: The county approves plans to contract with Bulk Handling Systems to construct and operate the CleanLane project at the Goshen site and purchase the land. Commissioners voted 3-2, with Loveall and Ceniga opposed. The county also approves fee increases to help pay for the facility.
August 2024: Lane County commissioners approve $35.35 million in bonds for CleanLane. The terms include another $23.67 million in interest payments from 2025-2044, totaling $59 million.
November 2024: Lane County Public Works submits a request for a special-use permit and site design review for CleanLane.
April 2025: A Lane County hearings officer denies the county’s request for a special-use permit.
December 2025: Lane County loses the appeal it filed with the Land Use Board of Appeals. The county subsequently files an appeal in court.
Separately, county commissioners vote 3-2 to amend the CleanLane contract to move the facility from Goshen to Short Mountain Landfill and put $1.3 million toward engineering work at the new site.
April 2026: Lane County loses its court appeal in its bid for the recycling facility in Goshen.
