Crown Bets On Cutting Edge Mill Upgraded Mill Is More Efficient, But Operates With Fewer Workers

Steve Bender started working at the Bonners Ferry sawmill more than 30 years ago, pulling lumber off the “green chain” and stacking it by size.

The job - one of the most physically demanding at the mill - will be eliminated when Crown Pacific opens its new $17.2 million sawmill this summer. A machine will do the work.

The new mill, a two-story steel structure, bears little resemblance to the plant where Bender started his career.

“It’s about 100 percent different,” said Bender, now Crown Pacific’s plant manager here.

Crown Pacific started tearing down its 35-year-old sawmill two years ago to make way for a modern facility. The new mill is slated to open in mid-August, employing 85 people.

“It’s a huge investment in a small community of 2,300,” said Darrell Kerby, president of the Bonners Ferry City Council.

“We look at the decision of Crown Pacific to invest $17 million in a new milling operation as a positive economic sign,” he added. “The norm has been the closure and dismantling of mills across the Northwest.”

However, “it’s replacing an old mill that employed more people,” noted Boundary County Commissioner Merle Dinning. This Crown Pacific mill employed 110 workers when it closed in 1996.

The mill had become too expensive to operate in a competitive market, said Rick Forgaard, Crown Pacific’s area manager.

With a glut of lumber on the U.S. market, and low prices, Crown Pacific needed to trim costs and increase output to keep the Bonners Ferry operation viable, he said.

The new mill will produce more than 100 million board feet of lumber per year - enough to build about 5,000 three-bedroom homes, and twice what the old mill produced.

The hum of generators and the smell of welding wafted through the new mill’s shell this week, as contractors hustled around the construction site. Dominating the scene was the mill’s new equipment line - powerful saws, edgers and trimmers to turn logs into lumber.

“We’re not pioneering anything new, but we’re right on the edge,” Forgaard said of the equipment.

Electronic scanners will measure logs as they come into the plant, determining how to cut each for maximum production. Computers will determine whether to slice logs into two-by-eights, two-by-sixes or two-by-fours, depending on current market prices.

Previously, workers sized up each log, estimating how to produce the most boards. “It was a guess,” Bender said.

The new saws will also follow the curves of a log, creating flat boards from bowed trees. And they will utilize more of each log, producing boards from trunks as small as 4 inches in diameter.

With the new efficiencies, Crown Pacific expects to get 25-30 percent more lumber from the same volume of logs.

“We’ll squeeze a little more blood out of the turnip, so to speak,” said Chuck Roady, Crown Pacific’s acquisition manager.

The mill overhaul will not include new kilns or planers, which have been upgraded in the last 10 years. Those operations continued to employ about 60 workers until last week, when 22 were laid off due to low lumber prices. Most of those workers will be rehired when the new sawmill opens, Forgaard said.

Crown Pacific also is building a stud mill in Port Angeles to process trees from Olympic Peninsula timber.

Mills are constantly updating equipment to stay competitive, said Stefany Bales, spokeswoman for the Intermountain Forest Industry Association. But Crown Pacific is the only Northwest company she knows of with new mills under construction.

“You have to admire their courage, and their commitment to Bonners Ferry,” said Joe Hinson, a consultant with Northwest Natural Resources in Boise.

The amount of timber from federal lands has fallen sharply in the last decade, increasing competition for remaining logs. That’s made many companies cautious about expanding, Hinson said.

Crown Pacific will supply the Bonners Ferry mill with a combination of logs from public and private lands, and its own 206,000 acres of company land in North Idaho, Northeast Washington and Northwest Montana, Roady said.

Crown Pacific also operates mills in Coeur d’Alene and Colburn.