Oregon Developer Pleads Insolvency, Superfund to Pick Up Cleanup Tab

Desler Pleads Insolvency, Superfund to Pick Up Cleanup Tab

At last report, Eugene, Oregon businessman and developer Dan Desler had been charged with felony violations of the Clean Air Act for his activities at property he owns through a foundation in Sweet Home, Oregon.

Desler, 65, was arrested May 11 in connection with an ongoing investigation by the Oregon State Police and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and at that time it was supposed that Desler - who reportedly netted $600,000 from his operations (with an additional $6 million in land assets ascribed to his foundation) - would pick up the tab for cleaning up his Sweet Home property.

That is no longer true. Desler has been found insolvent, a federal official has called the cleanup "urgent", and it's likely that the federal Superfund program - an environmental remediation program established to address abandoned hazardous waste sites and funded by a nationwide tax on chemical and industrial producers - will be required to foot the bill, at least until a true accounting of Desler's assets is arrived at.

Desler, who in 2004 acquired property in Sweet Home with the intent of building a housing complex called Santiam Commons that would create jobs for unemployed Sweet Home loggers, is - through his non-profit foundation, Western States Land Reliance Trust - sitting on an old mill site highly contaminated with asbestos, as well as an old gravel pit. Desler is also the proud owner of at least 12,000 dump truck's worth of trash, which former Weyerhaeuser paper plants in Springfield and Willamette paid Desler to dispose of on his property.

Desler hired Charles Corp and began deconstruction of the mill site in 2007, without the oversight of either local or federal asbestos remediation agencies, and without hiring certified personnel or providing appropriate equipment for asbestos remediation. His stated intent was to salvage and reuse wood and fiber from the old mill as fuel.

At that point, the Sweet Home City Council stopped the deconstruction and called in the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, which then referred the matter to the EPA.

Judge Glen Baisinger has granted a continuance of Desler's trial until August 3, and the Superfund is ready to plunge ahead cleaning up the asbestos - that part of it that hasn't already gotten into the air and water around Sweet Home.

Desler, who faces seven counts felony violation of the Clean Air Act, as well as three misdemeanors in connection with the same statute, is also being charged with reckless endangerment for failing to provide appropriate safety equipment to Corp and giving false information to the DEQ. Desler has publicly said that he didn't know the mill site contained asbestos, even though the original structure is dated to the 1930s.

That part, at least, may be true. The former mill owner, Willamette Industries, said when donating the property to Desler's foundation that it was not aware of any asbestos in the building. Willamette has since been purchased by Weyerhaeuser Co., which spreads the legal culpability more widely.

Dan Heister, who works with the EPA's Emergency Response Unit out of Portland, has identified friable asbestos in roofing materials, and asbestos in concrete rubble. The friability level, Heister notes, is low to medium. Neither Heister nor the EPA has estimated the cost of cleanup, though Heister has admitted the price tag will be "expensive". Desler estimates cleanup costs as about $250,000.

LeeRoy Rice, who lives in Sweet Home, has said that Superfund cleanup would merely pass the cost along to taxpayers, since the Superfund has been notoriously underfunded since 1999 due to understaffing and its inability to assign blame (and thus collect revenue) in individual cleanups.

Asbestos, a fibrous mineral used in insulation, floor and ceiling tiles, and tile cements up until the middle of the last century, can cause a number of diseases like asbestosis, lung and digestive system cancers, and mesothelioma. This latter is a silent killer that lies dormant for about three decades before exploding into lethal cancers that have no known treatment. Most patients diagnosed with mesothelioma are given about 18 months to live.

Because deconstruction at the mill site was done so haphazardly, cleanup will be accomplished by wetting the material and hauling it to the Coffin Butte Landfill in Corvallis in dump trucks. The half-demolished buildings, however, will be left standing, an unpleasant reminder to the citizens of Sweet Home that the promise of jobs and wealth carries a hidden price tag.

Source: The Register Guard

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