When completed, a new wood products plant at the Columbia Falls Industrial Park north of town will be the largest cross-laminated timber plant in the world, Sen. Jon Tester learned during a meeting with city officials and business leaders at Freedom Bank on March 20.

SmartLam general manager Casey Malmquist said he’s in talks with the industrial park’s new Canadian owners about plans for construction of a new manufacturing plant to produce the giant wood panels.

“We plan to quadruple our capacity, which will make us the largest CLT plant in the world,” Malmquist told Tester.

SmartLam’s panels are made with low-grade dimensional lumber from F.H. Stoltze Land & Lumber Co. that are sawn into smaller pieces and finger-jointed and planed into a 2-inch product that is then cross-laminated into large, heavy and very strong panels.

Currently the panels are being used in the oil industry for drilling rig platforms, bridges and roadways, but SmartLam wants to start producing panels for building construction, which is common in Europe.

Malmquist enumerated the environmental benefits of replacing concrete and steel with renewable and sustainable wood products.

“There still needs to be a cultural change,” he said. “People still think cutting down a tree is wrong.”

According to Columbia Falls city manager Susan Nicosia, the new owners of the industrial park have expressed interest in hooking up to city water and sewer, being annexed into the city and establishing an industrial tax-increment financing district for the immediate area.

As the taxable value of property within a TIF district grows, the additional tax revenue is diverted to the TIF program for various infrastructure improvement and related uses. The city is in the process of establishing a TIF district along Nucleus Avenue and the U.S. 2 strip as a way to raise money for its new urban renewal plan.