Maxine Bernstein
oregonlive.com
PORTLAND — For more than 30 years, Portland police officers have packed up the rocks of confiscated crystal meth, baggies of weed and blocks of powdered fentanyl and made the 38-mile trek to Marion County .
There, Oregon’s only municipal waste incinerator has burned them to generate power, a crucial step in ensuring the drugs do no more harm.
But that all came to an end in December.
Now police and sheriff’s offices across the state that have relied for decades on the incinerator must find another place to dispose of drug evidence, drug paraphernalia and other contraband.
As they search, they’re holding onto the drugs in their property rooms and evidence warehouses while scrambling for an alternative that so far has proven elusive.
“There’s no obvious solution that presents itself,” said Sgt. Kevin Allen , a Portland police spokesperson.
The closest incinerator that destroys confiscated drugs is in Spokane – presenting logistical and potential legal challenges.
An idea to have Oregon police agencies operate small regional incinerators – like a program in Tennessee — would require hundreds of thousands of dollars and environmental permits.
Destruction of the drugs is an important and carefully orchestrated duty, Allen said.
In Portland, a team would make the trip to the incinerator in Brooks once every six weeks, he said.
Four evidence control technicians would weigh the drugs and load them into a van. The technicians would ride in the van followed by a marked police car with two officers for security.
The van would back up to a conveyer belt at the incinerator. Two of the technicians would load each box directly onto the belt, while the two others watched for each box to drop into the 34-foot deep burn pit.
“We really want to make sure the stuff goes away because it’s so dangerous if it gets into the wrong hands,” Allen said.
The incinerator charged by the pound and Portland police paid about $2,500 a year to get rid of tons of drug evidence as well as crime scene clothing, biohazards and documents.
Once the incinerator closed, Jackson County Sheriff Nate Sickler said his office considered putting a liquid chemical onto the drugs to destroy them.
But it was considered too risky. Evidence officers or technicians would have to remove drugs from packaging, unnecessarily exposing them to fentanyl, he said. The method also likely wouldn’t meet protocols set out by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, he said.
Driving to the Spokane incinerator would mean a two-day turnaround time from southern Oregon and diverting officers from patrol or other duties, Sickler said.
Plus, he said, police powers don’t necessarily carry over across state lines so transporting seized drugs to Washington would likely require some agreement to provide additional authority to the officers hauling the drugs, he recently told state lawmakers.
His office burns about 1,000 pounds of drugs annually and typically made two visits a year to the Brooks incinerator.
Oregon State Police had processed seven to 10 tons a year, making quarterly trips to the incinerator, state police Capt. Kyle Kennedy said.
Shawn Henderson , an evidence management adviser from Texas who teaches about drug evidence disposal, said building out a new drug disposal system means carefully planning to reduce physical risks of exposure but also the risks of misusing or abusing the drugs.
“It’s a safety challenge. It’s a security challenge. It’s a logistical challenge,” he said, as well as a resource challenge.
Henderson recalled driving in a “miserable large crime scene van filled with stinky dope” when he worked for a police department in Carrollton, Texas , a suburb of Dallas.
The trip took two and a half hours to the closest incinerator — “the only game in town for police in northern Texas.”
INACTIVE STATUS
Reworld Marion, previously named Covanta Marion Inc., has operated the only solid waste-to-energy incinerator in the state since 1986.
It processed up to 550 tons of garbage daily until it stopped accepting new waste Dec. 31 and is now burning material delivered before then.
The company cited its inability to meet Oregon’s new emission reporting requirements to more frequently monitor certain hazardous chemicals and pollutants as a significant reason for the shutdown.
The incinerator has two boilers that burn garbage at temperatures that exceed 2,000 degrees to generate electricity by using the heat from the combustion process to boil water into steam, which then turns turbines to produce power.
In a Jan. 10 letter to the state Department of Environmental Quality, facility manager Steve Nipp wrote that the incinerator will “temporarily suspend operations” when it’s done with the remaining waste and go into “inactive status” pending further negotiations with Marion County.
State Sen. Deb Patterson, D- Salem, one of the chief sponsors in 2023 of Senate Bill 488 requiring the increased tracking, said the incinerator previously was required only to conduct annual monitoring and reporting.
Toxic chemicals such as dioxins and heavy metals known to be harmful to health were found near the incinerator, according to studies by the environmental group Beyond Toxics and the U.S. Forest Service .
“The facility is located near a school, homes, a community college campus, a food processing plant and small businesses,” Patterson said. “All Oregonians deserve clean air and water.”
Reworld Marion requested and received extensions for submitting a monitoring and sampling plan to state regulators, according to state environmental records.
But Brien J. Flanagan , an attorney representing Reworld Marion, wrote to the state in October that the company remained concerned that “many conditions are not technologically feasible or cannot be practicably implemented within the timeframe provided.”
The incinerator also was the only one in Oregon that burned infectious waste from hospitals, making an incinerator in Kansas the closest one accepting medical waste.
Sen. Kevin Mannix , R- Salem , said he hopes the state considers what can be done to temporarily keep the Brooks incinerator going while working to bring in another private sector company to partner with Marion County to run the incinerator with a zero-emissions boiler system.
“We need to be creative and aggressive about addressing this issue,” he told The Oregonian /OregonLive.
“The more visionary thing to do is to let them continue operate and bring in modern, efficient incineration equipment that does not have the emissions and get back to the work of destroying illegal drugs, destroying medical waste and destroying regular trash,” he said.
Craig Campbell , governmental affairs director of the Oregon Refuse and Recycling Association , said medical waste likely will have to be trucked out of state — making the disposal more expensive — unless some other method is found that meets state environmental regulations.
“It’s got to go somewhere,” he said. “I know trucks are becoming cleaner and cleaner, but you’re still moving that environmental impact from one place to another.”
Meanwhile, Marion County commissioners plan to push a bill this legislative session to roll back the heightened monitoring regulations.
Commissioner Kevin Cameron said House Bill 3244 would mean the incinerator would continue converting waste to electricity and power Salem “by a means that greatly reduces the carbon footprint required by a landfill (and transportation of that waste to a landfill).”
Patterson will fight that effort, saying the House bill would reverse the strides made two years ago.
“It seems to me the huge company spilling pollutants from this incinerator wants to keep profiting, and it wants the protections of SB 488 rolled back,” she said.
REGIONAL FIX
Sickler, the Jackson County sheriff, said law enforcement agencies are considering opening small incinerators of their own – with state help.
He said the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association and the Oregon Association Chiefs of Police are researching the feasibility of putting four to five incinerators at state police offices or various sheriff’s offices that nearby agencies could also use
It would cost about $200,000 apiece to buy and install the incinerators, he said. The associations contacted the state Department of Environmental Quality but were told to return when they have specific plans, he said.
They’re looking to emulate the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation , which has its dangerous drugs task force running incinerators in four cities — Knoxville , Nashville , Jackson and Chattanooga . Police agencies schedule drop-offs.
Under the Tennessee model, police agencies must submit forms indicating the types of drugs, approximate weights and total number they seek to destroy, bring the drugs to the incinerator and remain until released by an incinerator operator.
In fiscal 2023-24, police agencies in Tennessee disposed of more than 8,700 pounds of drug evidence between the four incinerators, said Josh DeVine, a spokesperson for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which is an independent state agency.
Since the incinerators opened in 2016, more than 20,000 pounds of evidence has been destroyed, he said.
The Tennessee bureau bought the incinerators with federal grants and received approval from the state’s Department of Environment and Conservation . The cost to the bureau was less than $20,000, largely for maintenance and gas, DeVine said.
“We do not charge state and local law enforcement agencies to incinerate and provide this as a service supported by our grant programs,” he said. “We consider it a huge success for the state.”
Sickler said the next step in Oregon needs to happen while lawmakers continue to meet, in case they need to change state law or help with funding.
“For six months, we’re going to be OK,” he said, storing the unneeded drug evidence and other contraband.
“But we need to get in front of this while we have the Legislature in session,” he said. “You have these dangerous drugs, like fentanyl, just sitting around. It’s not healthy. You don’t want your employees to have that risk much longer.”
— Maxine Bernstein covers federal court and criminal justice. Reach her at 503-221-8212, mbernstein@oregonian.com, follow her on X @maxoregonian, or on LinkedIn.
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