200 jobs gone with Weyerhaeuser mill closure

In 1945, D.C. Dunham started a mill in Columbia Falls and called it Plum Creek. Seventy-one years later Weyerhaeuser closed it and its neighboring plywood plant down for good. The announcement, coupled with the closure of Weyerhaeuser’s Columbia Falls administrative offices means the loss of 200 jobs.

Or, as the company put it when it announced it had merged with Plum Creek four months ago, “synergy.”

“For some time now our operations in Montana have been running below capacity as a result of an ongoing shortage of logs in the region,” said Doyle R. Simons, president and chief executive officer of Weyerhaeuser in a prepared release last week. “These closures will allow us to align the available log supply with our manufacturing capacity, including adding shifts at our Kalispell facilities. These moves will improve the operating performance of our remaining mills and best position these mills for long-term success.”

Two shifts are being added to Weyerhaeuser’s Evergreen operations, said Tom Ray, Weyerhaeuser’s Montana resources team leader. The plywood plant will bump up from two to three shifts and a second shift will be added to the Evergreen sawmill.

The additional shifts in Evergreen will provide about 130 jobs, absorbing some of the job loss from the Columbia Falls mills, which employed 230 people.

Workers said the move didn’t make sense to them and they openly wondered how long the jobs in Evergreen would last. Speaking privately, one senior plant worker noted the Columbia Falls plywood plant and lumber mill directly fed the Medium Density Fiberboard plant, providing it with the waste material used to make MDF.

With sawmills in Evergreen, the product will now have to be shipped by truck. The worker also noted that Evergreen will run separate boilers and will have other apparent inefficiencies.

In short, he wasn’t sure how long the Evergreen facilities would last, either.

“I’m kind of dumbfounded. Kind of in shock. Big old lump in my stomach,” the worker said. “Plum Creek always strove to keep us running.”

The final closure will come in late August or early September. The Cedar Palace will close by the end of the year.

Generations have worked at the mill. Father’s of fathers helped build it when Dunham came here years ago.

One worker noted that Weyerhaeuser is simply a land company. They noted that when the merger was announced, the company immediately spun off several paper pulp mills. A comparatively small plant like the Columbia Falls operation was nothing to the giant, the worker said.

“It’s all about real estate,” one worker said. “They don’t care about the mills.”

After the mill closures and office moves, Weyerhaeuser expects to employ about 550 people in Montana. Ray said the cuts would make the manufacturing base here stronger.

Weyerhaeuser owns 13 million acres, most of it in the U.S. When it merged with Plum Creek in February, it took over about 770,000 acres of Plum Creek Montana lands, most of which is west of Kalispell.

The merger was a $8.44 billion deal.

The announcement was already having a ripple effect. At Monday’s Columbia Falls school board meeting, Superintendent Steve Bradshaw said the school was moving cautiously on its plans to fix a leaking roof at the junior high. The roof is expected to cost as much as $400,000 after the 15-year warranty ran out.

But just designing a new roof would cost about $35,000, he said. Now, the school will look to patch the roof. The impact from the mill closures comes not only from lost tax revenue, but could also come from lower enrollment at the schools. Both will likely have a severe impact on school revenue in the coming years.

Politicians weighed in on the announcement.

Gov. Steve Bullock issued a press statement late Wednesday, saying Weyerhaeuser’s announcement “is yet another extremely disappointing example of the federal government’s failure to do its job.”

Gov. Steve Bullock said directed state Labor and Industry Commissioner Pam Bucy to immediately engage its rapid response team through the state’s Dislocated Worker Program. Rapid response is a required activity through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act designed to assist workers who are facing loss of employment to obtain re-employment as soon as possible.

U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., also weighed in on the mill closures, calling it “devastating” news to the Columbia Falls community.

“This underscores the importance to urgently pass forest reform legislation to get Montana’s abundance of logs to our mills and keep good-paying jobs in our state,” Daines said in a press release. “I will not sit idly by and watch Montana jobs disappear and families suffer as a result of frivolous lawsuits by fringe environmentalists and excessive regulations.”

U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., called the layoffs “a major blow to folks in Columbia Falls and across the Flathead Valley” and pledged to push for more job opportunities and increased timber harvests in the Flathead.

One idea to increase yields on national forest lands is to use an emergency funding mechanism to pay for wildfire costs. Then forests would have staff to work on timber projects.

Ray said the company hadn’t determined whether it would sell the mill property and the Cedar Palace.