Crown Pacific To Close Mill At Albeni Falls 179 To Lose Jobs As Company Whittles Away 1993 Acquisitions

(From For the Record, Thursday, April 18, 1996:) JD Lumber operates a sawmill at Priest River. The company was inadvertently left out of an article in Tuesday’s newspaper about sawmills in the area.

Crown Pacific is closing its Albeni Falls sawmill in June because it is old and inefficient, eliminating 179 jobs, the company announced Tuesday.

This is the fourth North Idaho sawmill to close or go into hibernation in the last year. It means roughly 600 mill jobs have been eliminated since February 1995, said Kathryn Tacke of the Job Service.

Crown Pacific also is selling its Thompson Falls, Mont., sawmill to Riley Creek Lumber Co. in Laclede, Idaho. There is no word on the future of the Coeur d’Alene, Bonners Ferry, and Colburn, Idaho mills - all that remain of the seven-mill empire that Crown Pacific amassed in 1993 when it purchased DAW Forest Products and W-I Forest Products.

“We don’t have any information on anything else,” said Marian Massey, a Crown Pacific spokesman. The Coeur d’Alene mill alone employs 187 people, she said.

The Albeni Falls sawmill is too antiquated to retool, Massey said. “Making it efficient would require substantial investment.

“If you make it more efficient, that efficiency would demand more timber than is available,” Massey said.

Some of the Albeni Falls workers will be allowed to transfer to other mills, although an exact figure is not available.

Massey disputed rumors that the company is scrambling to keep enough cash coming in. First quarter 1996 profits - $12.4 million - are $900,000 higher than last year.

The Woodworkers union was surprised to learn about the mill’s death Tuesday afternoon, about the time the company announced the closure. “When they made up their mind they moved pretty fast on it,” said Fred Bair, president of Woodworkers Local Lodge, which has about 380 members in North Idaho.

“It will have a hell of an impact on Priest River and Newport,” Bair added. He didn’t exude lots of confidence about the future of other mills.

“In today’s economy, I don’t think anybody knows,” Bair said, pointing out that log prices are high and lumber and wood chip prices are low.

Tacke, of the Job Service, agrees the blow will be significant. “It’s always a challenge in areas like Priest River because there isn’t any large concentration of jobs they can transfer to,” Tacke said.

Retraining programs also aren’t readily available, forcing people to commute to learn a new set of skills, she said.

Priest River took some of the bigger hits in the late 1980s when other industries went sour. The included the closure of a Serac clothing plant and an almost complete closure of Advanced Input Devices, Tacke said.

That leaves the school district, the city of Priest River, and Hill’s Resort as some of the areas largest employers.

Crown Pacific first moved into the Inland Northwest in September 1993 and acquired the seven mills and 257,000 acres of private timberland. It openly acknowledged that it would be cutting trees faster than they grew to pay down company debt. But the company insisted overcutting wouldn’t be a long-term trend.

From the beginning, there were predictions that Crown Pacific would start closing mills. The company said it intended to keep all of the mills going.

Months later, the company shuttered its mills in Spokane and Superior, Mont., at a cost of more than 200 jobs. The company blamed log shortages.

Critics noted that Crown Pacific was exporting logs from its Western Washington lands at the same time it was complaining of supply problems.

The Crown Pacific closure leaves two other active mills near Priest River, owned by Idaho Forest Industries and Riley Creek Lumber.

Mill jobs are a significant cut above the average North Idaho employment. Lumber and wood products jobs pay an average of $30,000 a year in the Idaho Panhandle, Tacke said.

Other area workers earn an average of $19,000 a year.

, DataTimes