Weyerhaeuser Co. v. Easter

894 P.2d 1290, 126 Wash. 2d 370, 1995 Wash. LEXIS 156
CourtWashington Supreme Court
DecidedMay 11, 1995
Docket62399-6
StatusPublished
Cited by13 cases

This text of 894 P.2d 1290 (Weyerhaeuser Co. v. Easter) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Washington Supreme Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Weyerhaeuser Co. v. Easter, 894 P.2d 1290, 126 Wash. 2d 370, 1995 Wash. LEXIS 156 (Wash. 1995).

Opinion

*373 Guy, J.

— To comply with state and federal environmental standards, Weyerhaeuser Company agreed to invest $8.7 million in pollution control equipment to reduce effluent from its pulp mill in Cosmopolis, Washington. Weyerhaeuser also voluntarily adopted a plan to remove asbestos and PCB’s from the plant, at a cost of $18.3 million and $2.5 million, respectively. At issue is whether these anticipated costs of pollution control reduced the market value of the pulp mill and, as a consequence, reduced Weyerhaeuser’s property taxes.

Facts

The Mill

Weyerhaeuser built the Cosmopolis mill in 1957 to produce dry pulp for paper products. In 1966 and again in 1971, the company expanded the capacity of the plant by adding new equipment. All capital investments after 1971 were to maintain production at the same capacity.

The mill uses an obsolete technology, the sulfite process, to produce high grade pulp. To transform wood chips into pulp, a mill must dissolve the lignin which binds wood fibers together, and the sulfite process uses an acidic solution of magnesium sulfite to digest the lignin. The byproducts of this chemical reaction require substantial treatment before the mill may safely discharge them.

Once the fibers separate, the mill washes the pulp and bleaches it with elemental chlorine, leaving potentially hazardous chlorinated organic compounds (AOX) as wastes. To prevent the production of AOX, in 1990 the mill began using oxygen rather than chlorine to bleach the pulp, a process called oxygen delignification.

Paper companies have largely abandoned sulfite mills in favor of a more efficient technology, the Kraft process. Introduced in the 1950’s, Kraft mills use a combination of heat, pressure, and sulfates to separate wood fibers. Although it produces a lower grade of paper by leaving a great deal of lignin in the pulp, the Kraft process yields much more pulp *374 from wood chips compared to the sulfite process. 1 Yield is critical to a plant’s profitability because wood chips are the single largest cost in making pulp (42 percent of total cost at Cosmopolis).

The Kraft process is much cleaner than its sulfite counterpart. Not only must sulfite mills neutralize their caustic byproducts, the waste treatment itself creates new, dangerous effluent. The sulfite process is inherently "dirtier”.

Sulfite mills have survived only because they manufacture high quality pulp for niche products. "These remaining markets, requiring high purity and tolerating low yield, are primarily in acetates for filters, fluff pulps for absorbent pads and toweling, color photographic stock and other high grade papers”. Clerk’s Papers, at 225. As Kraft plants become more efficient and effective, they make further encroachments on these residual markets.

Pollution Control

Because of the toxic byproducts of the sulfite process, Weyerhaeuser has installed various pollution control devices on the mill. During the late 1980’s, the State required Weyerhaeuser to make a substantial investment in new pollution control facilities.

The State Department of Ecology (DOE) ordered Weyerhaeuser to decrease the amount of fecal coliform in the mill’s effluent. Downstream from the mill is Grays Harbor and the second largest commercial oyster beds in the state. The oysters allegedly thrive on the coliform bacteria, but then test positively for fecal contamination, preventing their sale. With the DOE’s approval, the mill killed the coliform by treating effluent with sulfuric acid. This reduced the pH balance of the discharge to 3 — highly acidic.

Because the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prohibits the release of acidic effluent, in 1985 the DOE ordered the mill to neutralize the waste before releas *375 ing it. In 1988, the DOE and Weyerhaeuser agreed that Weyerhaeuser would build the necessary facilities to treat the wastes by no later than March 1, 1991. The expenditures for new pollution control facilities at issue resulted from that agreement.

Weyerhaeuser adopted a plan to spend $8.7 million to neutralize the effluent through oxygen delignification. Had Weyerhaeuser not taken this step, the DOE would have closed the mill by March 1, 1991. By January 1, 1990, the date of the assessment, Weyerhaeuser had $5.5 million worth of construction in progress on the project and a remaining obligation of $3.2 million. The mill completed the project before the March 1, 1991, deadline.

In addition to the treatment of effluent, Weyerhaeuser had two other cleanup projects in progress at the time of the assessment. First, the company committed to remove most of the asbestos in the plant at a cost of $18.3 million. Second, the company decided to remove transformers which contained PCB’s. The total cost of this removal over 5 years was estimated to be $2.5 to $3 million.

Neither of these two cleanups was required by law; Weyerhaeuser approved both projects as a perceived business necessity.

The Assessment and Subsequent Appeals

Grays Harbor County follows a 4-year cycle for tax valuation. The assessor’s value would establish the basis for Weyerhaeuser’s liability for property taxes during the next 4 years.

Appraisers have three general methods to estimate the value of property: comparable market sales, the cost approach, and the income approach. See Sahalee Country Club, Inc. v. Board of Tax Appeals, 108 Wn.2d 26, 33, 735 P.2d 1320 (1987). Because a market for used pulp mills does not exist, the assessor had no comparable sales with which to estimate the value of the mill. Instead, the assessor used an appraisal technique known as the cost approach or, more specifically, reproduction costs new less depreciation (RCNLD). The fundamental premise of RCNLD is substitution: a rational investor would not *376 pay more for a plant than the cost of constructing an exact replica.

To estimate the reproduction costs and depreciation of the Cosmopolis mill, the county assessor relied on the trended investment technique. This technique begins with the price of each of the plant’s components at the date of purchase, 1957 to the present, multiplies the price by one factor to calculate a current reproduction cost, and then multiples the reproduction cost by a second factor to calculate a depreciated cost. The historical costs of building the plant are trended up to current levels then trended down to a depreciated level, hence the name of the technique.

To aid assessors, the Department of Revenue publishes tables of reproduction and depreciation numbers, including a column for pulp and paper mills. The Grays Harbor assessor looked through Weyerhaeuser’s books, noted the age and historical costs of each of the mill’s assets, multiplied them by the appropriate reproduction and depreciation factors, totaled the amounts, and announced the RCNLD of the Cosmopolis plant: $58,597,765.

Weyerhaeuser contested the assessment and hired its own appraiser, Stephen Olson.

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Bluebook (online)
894 P.2d 1290, 126 Wash. 2d 370, 1995 Wash. LEXIS 156, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/weyerhaeuser-co-v-easter-wash-1995.