“Everybody's sitting tight, hoping the market picks up at some point,” Missoula Job Service director Wolfgang Ametsbichler said Friday. “It's not going to happen this winter. But they're hanging on by their teeth, hoping to make it to the spring when hopefully the economy turns around.”
Ametsbichler's staff just finished signing about $130,000 worth of tuition checks for displaced Stimson Lumber Co. workers to attend classes at the University of Montana's College of Technology. Workers in that program have up to two years of assistance in retraining or relocation. The question they face is: Wait for that hoped-for industry upswing, or pull the kids out of school and move where the economy seems hotter?
“This industry is vital to Montana, to tourism and the quality of life we all enjoy,” MAEDC director Dick King said. “Our main concern is emphasizing a sense of urgency.”
The Montana Wood Products Industry Initiative proposals range from small fixes to sweeping changes. For example, increasing the weight limit on log trucks from 27 tons to 29 tons would save a million gallons of diesel fuel a year, King said. And allowing log truckers the same fuel discounts as agricultural truckers would further lower costs.
The big goal would be getting the U.S. Forest Service to turn over management of
10 percent of its national forest lands to Montana state control. A change of that magnitude would require federal OKs at many levels. And it's already drawn opposition from groups outside the industry.
“That's just not going to work,” predicted Wilderness Society spokesman Bob Ekey. “But in the last year, I've seen more conservationists and timber industry people sitting down and trying to figure out how to do work together - trying to identify successful projects that include a commercial component.”
Much of that effort is shepherded by the Montana Forest Restoration Working Group. The assembly of conservationists, loggers, forest users and government officials came together last year to outline a “zone of agreement” for timber work that met multiple needs and desires.
The group's 13-point plan describes how restoration logging projects can be profitable, environmentally sensitive and beneficial to surrounding communities, all while avoiding lawsuits.
Gordy Sanders of Pyramid Mountain Lumber Co. in Seeley Lake is co-chairman of the working group with Ekey. He said it is preparing to announce several advances at its annual meeting later this month, including new regional groups in the Helena and Lincoln areas.
“One thing we should have learned by now is we can't do this by ourselves,” Sanders said. “We need other interests to see where the common ground is. There are benefits to having family-owned mills scattered around the landscape of rural Montana.”
Unlike Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, Sanders said Montana still has a fully integrated logging industry. There are people to cut the trees and get them to market, mills to saw lumber and turn chips into board or paper, and other facilities that turn the sawdust and slash into fuel. When any of those links break, the whole industry starts to topple.
“Once they go, then the suppliers, the parts stores and all the other services that all the operators depend on disappear, too,” Sanders said. “Now, when Utah loggers need parts, they look to Missoula or the Midwest or the Southeast, so you wind up mailing parts and losing operating time.”
On yet another plane, the Montana Community Development Corp. has published a policy paper with a much wider scope.
“This is not oriented toward crisis solutions or the next legislative session,” MCDC director Rosalie Cates explained. “It's more a way of thinking about positioning the timber industry for the future of Montana.”
It begins with the suggestion that a new timber business “will emerge as a result of proactive healthy forest management, not the other way around,” Cates said, adding that the rise of global competition and the decline of American timber supplies require a rethinking of how the U.S. timber industry grows.
MCDC recommendations include developing efficient ways to turn slash wood into fuel, developing Montana-specific wood products that can compete on the global market, and finding better ways to resolve federal land use disputes.
For example, one project MCDC has helped is a cargo box that can carry big loads of slash out of the forest. This “junky wood,” as Cates called it, can be burned as hog fuel in a manufacturing plant or turned into pellets for home-heating wood stoves. The trick is finding an economical way of collecting and delivering it.
“Montana steadily produces about 700 million board feet a year, off private and federal land,” Cates said. “That number is likely to stay flat or fall, but we're a wood basket. And the question is: What kind of industry are we going to build around it?”
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ABC wrote on Oct 6, 2008 10:04 AM:
" Vrede-Poetic analogy. However, it is immensely inaccurate. Wood has not been replaced by another materials. We still need 2 by 4s, plywood, etc. This article is full of great news. I am so grateful to hear that we are beginning to remember just how important natural resource industries are to our state and its citizens. "
Vrede wrote on Oct 5, 2008 7:21 AM: