St. Maries Gets Back In Business

Nearly seven months after being leveled by the city’s worst fire in 20 years, three St. Maries businesses are celebrating their resurrection.

T.J. Moss and Co. Manufacturing, St. Maries Sausage Co. and St. Maries Boot Corral suffered an estimated $700,000 in damage. They were revived with low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration.

It’s a little bit of good news after a winter of fire and floods and other losses.

Initially it appeared the merchants wouldn’t qualify for any disaster money. But Ruth Rathbun, director of the Greater St. Joe Development Foundation, and U.S. Sen. Dirk Kempthorne, kept pushing.

There were two problems. SBA rules require a minimum of five burned businesses in order to qualify for aid. And the St. Maries operations didn’t have the minimum number of employees for the agency’s disaster relief rules.

Kempthorne took the case to Phil Lader, chief of SBA, and told him the 25 employees, in a town of 2,500, was akin to about 4,000 in a community like Spokane. “These are truly the mom and pop businesses of main street,” said Kempthorne, who was in St. Maries Friday for grand opening ceremonies at the businesses.

In their struggling timber town, the three lost businesses were part of a diversifying economy, the promise of the future, Kempthorne said. “They had lost a bunch of their diversity.”

Lader granted a waiver.

It has brought more than reconstruction. T.J. Moss, which manufacturers boot liners, had 10 employees before the blaze. Today it has 16.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo