Rexius stays put.

Byline: JOE HARWOOD The Register-Guard

REXIUS FOREST By-Products Inc. has scrapped plans to put an $8 million headquarters and manufacturing facility on 60 acres near the Eugene Airport, and will instead build new offices at its longtime Bailey Hill Road complex.

The Eugene company more than two years ago announced that it wanted to build a new home for itself on the property at Awbrey Lane and Highway 99. The project was to include a packaging plant, a manufacturing shop and an office building.

But a prolonged land use approval dispute, the region's economic downturn and the sale of part of Rexius' mulch blower truck manufacturing operation to the Finn Corp. of Ohio led the company to pull the plug on the Awbrey plan.

"In our economic wisdom, it frankly became uncertain whether Awbrey Lane was a wise move," said company Vice President Rusty Rexius. "We came to the decision that it just didn't make sense anymore."

The decision to stay put squelches any chance that the Rexius site at Bailey Hill Road will be upgraded to a higher or more attractive use.

The prospect of Rexius moving and putting the Bailey Hill land up for sale had sparked the interest of some developers, who figured they could find new uses for the propery. On the south bank of Amazon Creek, the property is flanked by warehouse-style businesses and residential subdivisions.

Rexius, easily identified by its huge mounds of mulch and wood waste, makes mulch, potting soils and soil amendments for sale in Oregon, Washington and Northern California. It also makes and sells erosion control equipment and owns a landscape firm. The privately held company employs about 250 workers, including about 30 in Portland.

Rexius has put the property near the airport up for sale. The company paid $850,000 for that land in 1998.

Facelift at Bailey Hill

To accommodate expansion at its main site, the company this week expects to submit plans to add 20,000 square feet of space to its truck shop at 1275 Bailey Hill Road, across the street from the Rexius yard debris recycling center.

The $4 million project will include a two-story, 14,000-square-foot office building and about 6,000 square feet of extra shop space, Rexius said. The shop space will be used to build blower trucks for sale worldwide, plus erosion control equipment.

Other work includes extensively relandscaping around the property and planting native vegetation along Amazon Creek.

Rexius said the company hopes to start work in June and finish by the end of the year. The work will include an exterior remodel on the existing 8,000-square-foot shop.

"The expansion is primarily to house all of our administrative services," Rexius said. "We will be bringing together the Grant's and Rexius operations under one roof."

Rexius in October 2000 acquired Grant's Landscape Services Inc. Since then, Grant's has remained headquartered in Springfield. Once the addition is complete, Grant's will move to the new office.

The company's administrative office and retail sales lot at 750 Chambers St. will also move to the Bailey Hill location. Rexius said that lot and building are owned by a member of the family, and he is uncertain what will be done with them after the move.

"There's been a long debate about that move," he said. "The lot itself is not real suitable for this kind of activity."

In a related development, the company recently bought 10 vacant acres immediately south of its recycling yard that it plans to use as a buffer zone between the composting and soil processing operations and homes along Plumtree Drive.

"Our primary reason for buying it was to provide a large buffer between us and our neighbors to mitigate whatever concerns are out there," Rexius said.

The firm owns 5 acres on the east side of Bailey Hill where the addition will be built, and about 35 acres on the west side of the road. Rexius said the current project doesn't call for an expansion of its composting and production yard on the west side of Bailey Hill.

Unlike the cumbersome, 2 1/2 -year process the company went through to obtain approval to build at Awbrey Lane, adding office and shop space at the Bailey Hill complex is an outright permitted use under Eugene's code for light to medium industrial land.

Land use spat at Awbrey

The property near the airport is zoned for special heavy industry. Under Eugene's code, to use the land for composting and for stockpiling forest-related products, Rexius had to obtain a conditional use permit. The conditional use permitting process required Rexius to show that its business would have "minimal impact on the livability" of abutting properties.

Most of the area surrounding the Awbrey Lane property is sparsely inhabited, except for a cluster of rural residential-zoned homesteads on the north side of Awbrey near the proposed main entrance to Rexius.

Two neighbors, the Richards and Bodenroeder families, expressed concern that truck traffic, particularly at night, would be disruptive.

To make sure operations would have a minimal impact on neighbors, a city hearings official ruled last year that Rexius trucks could not use the main entrance from 10 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.

The hearings official wrote in her decision that if the neighbors and Rexius could strike an alternative, mutually agreeable deal, the restrictions could be waived.

The time curbs posed a problem for the company because it often loads and sends out trucks at night for long trips. Rexius said the restrictions would have made operating out of the Awbrey Lane property "very difficult."

Rexius appealed the restrictions to the state Lane Use Board of Appeals and also sat down with the neighbors and a professional mediator to hammer out an agreement.

Last fall, Rexius and the neighbors struck a deal in which the company would build earthen berms with hedges in front of the two homes to buffer them from noise and headlights. Rexius also agreed that if the value of the two homes dropped within two years after the company started up the facility, it would pay the homeowners the difference.

In return, the city and the homeowners would not require Rexius to limit the hours that trucks could come and go from the new facility.

Rexius said measures the company would have had to take to minimize impacts on neighbors weren't much of a factor in the decision to cancel the project.

But Rexius remained uneasy about compatability between his business and the surrounding area. The company "had no way of knowing what would have come up once we were out there," he said.

Rexius declined to say how much his company spent on planning for the Awbrey site.

Rexius said he doesn't anticipate any outcry from Bailey Hill area neighbors over the $4 million expansion at Bailey Hill. "We are going to great efforts to make this a favorable and aesthetically pleasing site," he said. "Whether that is going to create problems for people, I guess we'll find out."

Contact Joe Harwood at 338-2364 or [e-mail].

CAPTION(S):

Rexius' huge mounds of mulch and wood waste will remain a fixture on Bailey Hill Road. The truck shop will expand and an office building will go up. Rexius Forest By-Products Inc., based in west Eugene, employs about 250 workers, including Kirk Linder.