LRAPA to hold Cleaner Air Oregon meeting Wednesday about Seneca Sustainable Energy

The Lane County Regional Air Protection Agency will host its first community meeting Wednesday night so residents can discuss questions and concerns regarding Seneca Sustainable Energy and its participation in the Cleaner Air Oregon program . 

Seneca Sustainable Energy operates the wood-fired electrical cogeneration powerplant at Seneca Sawmill Co. in Eugene. 

The virtual meeting will be from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday. Registration for the Zoom webinar on LRAPA's community engagement page can be found at lrapa.org/338/Community-Engagement. 

LRAPA in 2019 adopted Cleaner Air Oregon, which gives the agency a wider jurisdiction for regulating potentially harmful pollutants based on their capacity to cause adverse health effects. Previous regulations were focused on how much pollutants were created.

Previous coverage:Cleaner Air Oregon regulatory process to engage Lane County community in public health risks

Seneca Sustainable Energy is one of the first large sites in Lane County to go through the LRAPA Cleaner Air Oregon program, a regulatory process of inventorying pollutants coming from industrial sites and assessing their possible effects on nearby residents.

J.H. Baxter & Co. and the Willamette Valley Co. likewise have been called into the regulatory program. LRAPA also intends to bring in International Paper's Springfield mill.

Seneca Sustainable Energy has completed a preliminary risk assessment of the plant’s air emissions, as required by the program, according to a LRAPA news release. During that process, LRAPA inventoried how many of the 600 pollutants Cleaner Air Oregon regulates the plant produced, determined who in the community is exposed to them and assessed potential health risks of exposure to those chemicals.

The risk assessment can be found on LRAPA’s webpage for the Seneca Sustainable Energy facility: lrapa.org/328/Seneca-Sustainable-Energy-LLC-SS

“LRAPA anticipated a very low potential health risk from the cogen plant, and the preliminary risk assessment indicates that’s the case. In fact, it’s so low that community engagement isn’t required by Cleaner Air Oregon rules,” LRAPA spokesperson Travis Knudsen said in the news release. “However, we know the community has a high interest in the plant so we’re pausing the process to allow time for a public meeting where air concerns can be raised, and questions can be answered.” 

Contact reporter Adam Duvernay at aduvernay@registerguard.com. Follow on Twitter @DuvernayOR.