A Death In The Family: Small Towns Face Life Without Mills

Many Priest River residents talk about the closing of two Louisiana-Pacific Corp. mills here the way families recall the death of a relative after an extended illness. Two years later, they still grieve the loss.

“What made it the hardest was that it just lingered on,” said Kay Small, coordinator for the North Idaho chapter of Intermountain Woodnet, a resource network for small wood products firms. “There was a skeleton staff in the office for about a year, so we didn’t know what was going to happen over there.”

Mike Boeck, Priest River division manager for Idaho Forest Industries and past chamber of commerce president, remembers L-P as a good corporate citizen.

“Whenever there was a need, they stepped up,” Boeck said. “Losing them has been a significant blow to the community.

He added: “The financial impacts are hard to quantify, but when you talk to businesses in the area, they’ve sure noticed it.”

Randy Bailey said he can help quantify the effects of a large mill closure on a small town like Priest River, population 1,560. Bailey managed L-P’s finger-joint stud manufacturing plant when the company closed that plant and its adjacent sawmill early in 1996.

“We had 35 employees and an annual payroll of $1 million at the finger-jointed stud plant,” Bailey said. “The sawmill had about double the number of employees, so you could just about double the impact. It was probably $2.5 million that used to spiral through the local community.”

A fifth-generation timber worker, Bailey is now a salesman for Snowpeak Forest Products, a Coeur d’Alene lumber wholesaler. He said roughly half of his former employees at the stud plant moved to other mills in the region, including six who transferred to the L-P sawmill at Chilco. “The other half got out of the timber industry,” Bailey said.

“Louisiana-Pacific was among the leaders in the industry in Bonner and Boundary counties,” said Shawn Keough, who manages a timber information program for the Sandpoint Chamber. “They’re still a strong player, but there’s been a tremendous impact because of the mills that have closed.

“The bad news is that those jobs are gone and they’re not coming back,” said Keough, who also serves as District 1 state senator. “The good news is that the planer mill is still here in Sandpoint, and, through reorganization, it looks like L-P is in a position to ride into the next century.”

Maybe so, said Bailey, but he will be surprised if it happens under the L-P logo.

“It’s ironic that the top officials used to predict that we’d ‘out-compete’ the competition and be around when the others were gone,” Bailey said. “I think the best-case scenario is that they’ll continue to downsize and be absorbed by some other operator.”

Bailey noted that the finger-joint stud plant was turning an annual net profit of $1.5 million for the three years before it was shut down. He blames Environmental Protection Agency fines, litigation surrounding L-P siding and lawsuits from shareholders against the company for losses that forced the cutbacks, consolidations and mill closures.

“Some people call it reorganization; some people call it re-engineering,” Bailey said. “I call it going downhill. My personal opinion is that the company began to self-destruct from the top down.”

, DataTimes