Plum Creek Timber Co. announced Wednesday that it plans to restart production at its Evergreen sawmill, aiming for an April 1 opening.

The facility will begin operations with 30 employees working one shift.

“Thirty new jobs in the valley is great news,” said Tom Ray, Plum Creek’s vice president of Northwest Resources and Manufacturing. “These are good family wage jobs, running from $15.50 per hour to almost $28 per hour, depending on the position.”

Ray said that the jobs will range from basic labor up through skilled electricians, with the hiring process beginning in the next few weeks. Interested people can inquire about the jobs through the Plum Creek website or LC Staffing.

Plum Creek also has added approximately 60 full-time permanent jobs in the last year in Northwest Montana, mostly at the plywood plant in Evergreen and medium density fiberboard plant in Columbia Falls.

A lack of demand for stud lumber products led to the closure of the Evergreen facility in June 2009. When the mill closed, there were 66 positions lost, since the mill had been running with two shifts.

Some of the employees who lost their jobs in 2009 were shifted to other Plum Creek facilities, Ray said, and he expects some to return to Evergreen, while former employees also may be rehired.

Since the closure, the company has continued to monitor market conditions and maintain equipment within the mill. Taking care of minor and major maintenance issues has helped create the right conditions for restarting the mill, Ray said, though construction growth is the biggest driver.

“We’ve seen a gradual rebound in housing starts, with lumber prices increasing over the last two years,” Ray said. “It’s really a national market for us, in some cases a global market. We have products that end up in Mexico and Canada and even Pakistan.”

Plum Creek had a dramatic turnaround in profit from its Flathead Valley manufacturing facilities in 2010 after being hit a few years earlier by one of the worst housing markets in U.S. history. After suffering a $23 million loss in 2009, the operating profit from Plum Creek’s Evergreen and Columbia Falls plants, plus a small facility in Meridian, Idaho, was $24 million in 2010.

Plum Creek is one of the largest landowners in the country, with approximately 6.4 million acres nationwide, and the largest private landowner in Montana, with 899,000 acres.

Visit www.plumcreek.com for more information.