On July 13, 2026 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signed and fully executed a Prospective Purchaser Agreement (PPA) with the Portland Botanical Gardens for a potential acquisition of the McCormick & Baxter Superfund site in North Portland.
The PPA is in the form of an administrative settlement, and as of August 1st, 2026, is posted at the Federal Register. The EPA’s webpage for the McCormick & Baxter Superfund site provides extensive background information on the site cleanup, remediation and ongoing maintenance and monitoring, as well as details of the recently signed PPA.
The PPA follows two years of due diligence and outreach by the Portland Botanical Gardens. The project received overwhelming public support during a sixty-day formal comment period during a separate PPA process with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), which was finalized and approved May 16, 2026. The DEQ PPA describes the specific conditions and requirements to acquire the site and develop it into botanical gardens, in addition to providing certain liability protections to the nonprofit organization.
The EPA PPA centers on adherence to existing EPA requirements around operations, maintenance and reporting, and echoes many of the provisions in the DEQ PPA. The EPA PPA also specifies a settlement payment of $1,195,000 – the same amount as for the DEQ PPA – and provides liability protections for the botanical gardens.
A thirty day public comment period extends through August 31, 2026. You may submit public comments through the EPA, and you can also download and review the full prospective purchaser agreement here.