Eric Dion was sick. He was feeling constant migraines and throwing up regularly for the past few days. One morning, “He woke up really, really early, throwing up, in extreme pain,” Eric’s wife, Lisa Dion, said. “And he just started talking gibberish to me.”
Lisa rushed Eric to the emergency room, which turned into a seven-week hospital stay. His doctor diagnosed the 33-year-old with no family history of cancer with diffuse leptomeningeal glioneuronal tumors, an extremely rare brain and spinal cord cancer.
“I had periods of being at the hospital for days that I don’t remember,” Eric said. “It just changes how you do things. It’s painful.”
Because of his cancer, Eric has experienced dementia-like memory loss and a surgery that saved his life but nearly paralyzed him, Lisa said.
Eric grew up next to J.H. Baxter, a wood processing plant in the Bethel neighborhood. After decades of receiving pollution violations, the plant was shut down by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality in 2022.
A variety of toxins were found in the properties surrounding J.H. Baxter, including dioxin, a family of chemicals used to treat wood. Dioxin has been tied to adverse health effects, including cancer.
“It’s not just Baxter,” Lisa said. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality found dioxin in Trainsong Park nearly a mile away, but couldn’t determine its source. It could have come from J.H. Baxter, but there are also 34 other industrial polluters in the west Eugene 97402 zip code, according to the city of Eugene.
“Health problems are huge out in west Eugene,” said Arjorie Arberry-Baribeault, Community Organizer at local environmental group Beyond Toxics. She said Beyond Toxics has seen high rates of asthma and cancer in west Eugene, including in her daughter who was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma when she was 13.
The Oregon Health Authority’s 2021 West Eugene Cancer Analysis determined Hodgkin’s was more common in west Eugene than the rest of Lane County.
Now Arberry-Baribeault and other Beyond Toxics employees are working with the City Council on four policies meant to help the community recover from J.H. Baxter and curb further industrial pollution.
“Nobody should have to go through cancer because of where they lived,” she said.
Public Health Overlay Zone or Land Use Code Update
“Driving down Roosevelt Boulevard, there’s J.H. Baxter on one side and houses on the other side of the road,” Lisa said. “All the chemicals that are spewed or that were spewed from J.H. Baxter, these people living on the other side of the road don’t have any protection from that.”
Following Eric’s diagnosis, Lisa has advocated for a public health overlay zone, an extension of city zoning designed to limit activity that harms public health within it like industrial pollution.
Beyond Toxics has advocated for such a zone. Its original proposal would draw a zone around the industrial areas in west Eugene. New facilities in the zone would be banned from 28 specific uses linked to negative health effects, including wood preservation.
New or expanding facilities would be required to manufacture indoors if they’re within a quarter mile of schools, parks or homes; keep structures 25 feet from property lines; follow stricter standards around emissions, vibration and noise; and hold public meetings.
So far, city councilors have leaned toward city-wide protections by changing city land use code instead of drawing a public health overlay zone. City councilors said the effect would be the same, but citywide.
“Pollution knows no ward boundaries,” Councilor Matt Keating said at a work session Sept. 26. “I’m very interested in protecting the public in all corners of our community.”
Arberry-Baribeault and other Beyond Toxics employees have welcomed that approach.
“I’m excited for it to be citywide. Statewide. Worldwide,” Arberry-Baribeault said. “Pollution is a real problem.”
So far there has not been concrete action toward either. At an April 19 work session, councilors asked city staff to explore both options as well as the possibility of a Bethel neighborhood plan.
Arberry-Baribeault’s daughter is now cancer-free, but not everyone has made this recovery, including Eric, who has a GoFundMe to pay for cancer treatment and missed work.
“The public health overlay zone is a great start, and then having a health code into city law regarding industrial pollution like in the public health overlay zone is part of that,” she said. “I’d like us to get stricter with industrial polluters.”
Fossil Fuel Risk Bonds
As environmental fines piled up at J.H. Baxter, the company declared bankruptcy, allowing it to shut down and saddle the state with cleanup expenses.
“After decades of polluting the west Eugene community, we have this large industrial polluter that’s essentially trying to walk away from the site and say that they don’t have any money to pay for any cleanup,” Beyond Toxics employee Zach Mulholland said.
These proposed risk bonds are a way to combat that. Details are preliminary, but city staff used the analogy of an insurance policy. Polluters would pay into a fund which would then be used to clean up after an incident like J.H. Baxter.
City staff plan to model it after the Fossil Fuel Risk Bonds passed on May 2 in King County, Washington. There, the county assesses the risk polluters pose, both if there were a disaster and as part of their contributions to climate change, and requires polluters buy insurance to offset that risk.
Most city councilors were receptive to the idea at a May 10 work session and voiced support for broadening it. “I would like to expand on this to – environmental and human harm that’s caused by – not just fossil fuels – but from all chemicals and all industrial processes,” Councilor Alan Zelenka said. “Spills, leaks, explosions, air pollution. I think what this is really about for me is preventing another J.H. Baxter where polluters declare bankruptcy and walk away.”
The work is still preliminary, but councilors voted unanimously to tell city staff to explore the possibility at the work session.
Bethel Neighborhood Plan
Neighborhood plans are a tool for the city’s planning division to rework an area. For example, the current neighborhood plan focuses on River Road and Santa Clara and outlines 18 goals for the neighborhoods, ranging from encouraging multi-modal transportation to cultivating local habitats, all with corresponding policies to achieve those goals.
The policies “vary in their scope and implications” according to the plan and include specific actions, directives to address when outlining land use and “aspirational calls for collaboration.”
City planning staff have enough resources to focus on one area at a time, and that has been River Road-Santa Clara since spring 2017. At the beginning of 2024 they plan to switch to a new area. Shortly before then, the City Council will choose which neighborhood to focus on next.
The Active Bethel Community Neighborhood Association has been pushing to be that neighborhood. They want to transform the area away from industry to be more livable. Mulholland is also part of that association and said based on surveying that residents want reduced pollution, a redeveloped Highway 99, more commercial businesses and a more walkable and bikeable community.
Some councilors were receptive to this idea at an April 19 work session. “Bethel is a very unique area that deserves attention,” Councilor Jennifer Yeh said. “When we have council goals around equity, I find it hard to not figure out a way to address this neighborhood’s needs.”
Other councilors wanted to instead focus on the university neighborhoods, their reasoning being that they need to address the housing shortage caused by the University of Oregon’s growth, and that these neighborhoods started asking for a neighborhood plan before Bethel did.
“I appreciate the impact that [Bethel is] seeing, but I’m not seeing a rationale for saying to one part of the city, ‘yet again, we’re going to bump you for a different project because you’re not as important,’” Zelenka said.
Councilors avoided voting on which neighborhood would be next and chose to revisit the topic later in the year.
Lisa sees these policies as ways to keep more people from experiencing what she and Eric have gone through.
Lisa, who watched the work session, said she was frustrated at the councilors who argued against Bethel going next. “We’ve got to get this done now,” Lisa said. “They have a moral and ethical obligation.”
