What made the announcement surprising was that the closing came 17 months after Pioneer Resources LLC purchased the 45-year-old mill, its timberlands and the 120-acre mill site for
$10 million.
The latest surprise is that Lane County is paying $475,000 to settle a lawsuit over methane gas seeping from a west Eugene property that the county operated as a landfill more than three decades ago. The landfill is located adjacent to the former Lane Plywood site. Both properties were purchased by Frontier Recovery, which planned to develop an industrial park.
In addition to the $475,000 settlement, the Register-Guard reported that the county also will spend $30,000 or more building and monitoring a trench to intercept methane gas coming from the former landfill now owned by Frontier Recovery, which planned to develop an industrial park.
The newspaper said the settlement concludes a lawsuit filed by the property's owners against the county in 2009 in U.S. District Court in Eugene seeking $12 million to compensate for his company’s inability to develop the land, plus costs it has incurred in investigation and gas remediation.
In its lawsuit, Frontier Recovery had alleged that the county dumped waste at the landfill from 1974 to 1978 but then never followed state requirements to properly close up the site. The county countered that it was Frontier’s development work that released the gas, the newspaper reported.
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