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It's the latest blow in timber's long decline

Sam Wilson Daily Inter Lake | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 9 years, 3 months AGO
by Sam Wilson Daily Inter Lake
| June 22, 2016 8:05 PM

Weyerhaeuser’s announcement that it will close its lumber mill and plywood plant in Columbia Falls comes after decades of decline for Montana’s once-thriving timber industry.

While the mill closures will be the state’s first in seven years (Missoula’s Smurfitt-Stone Paper Corporation shut its doors in 2009), layoffs and temporary closures have become commonplace in an industry that once dominated Western Montana.

In the past 25 years, 28 mills have closed, leaving just 11 in operation statewide, according to Julia Altemus, executive director of the Montana Wood Products Association.

“They’re all running between 50 and 60 percent capacity — nobody is running more than that,” she said.

Tricon Timber in St. Regis announced last September it was laying off 93 employees, more than half of its work force. In natural resource-dependent Mineral County, which has for years been plagued by one of the highest unemployment levels in the state, that represented a loss of about 4 percent of its total job force.

Altemus said in the past year alone, the state lost about 270 timber jobs, including 75 positions at RY Timber in Townsend and 50 at Sun Mountain Lumber in Deer Lodge.

Factoring in the 200 Weyerhaeuser employees now facing unemployment this year, she said the state’s timber industry employs about 7,700 workers — down by about 4,000 since the early 1990s.

Calvin Sheahan, Tricon’s vice president of production, told the Daily Inter Lake last year that its layoffs were a direct response to the then-pending expiration of the softwood lumber agreement between the United States and Canada.

But Altemus said there are several factors that have conspired to drive the steady decline.

“It’s always about timber supply, that’s the main problem,” she said. “The other problems are that lumber prices are in the tank and stumpage prices are sky-high, so the three are a perfect storm to cause the mills to have to make different decisions.”

For Weyerhaeuser, the Seattle-based lumber giant that acquired Plum Creek earlier this year, supplying enough timber to keep the Columbia Falls plants running would have required shipping it in from coastal forests where it already operates mills.

“They’re having to bring in their supply from the West Coast, from Oregon, Washington, then up in Canada,” she said. “It doesn’t take long to realize that even though you operate in a pretty robust wood basket, if you have to bring in your raw fiber from three or four states away, or 500 miles away, that’s really hard on the bottom line.”


Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.

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