Kalispell business felt effects from Owens & Hurst closure

By JOHN STANG

The Daily Inter Lake

The demise of Eureka's Owens & Hurst lumber mill helped send a Kalispell business packing to Oregon.

That translated to about 30 lost Kalispell jobs.

The decision to close Stillwater Forest Products came one month after Owens & Hurst announced January 2005 that it would shut down.

Owens & Hurst's closure was not the sole factor in Stillwater's decision, co-owner Chris Parmenter said.

Stillwater also struggled with taxes on imported Canadian scrap lumber and with some underground contamination seeping in from a neighboring site.

But Owens & Hurst was Stillwater's cheapest source of scrap lumber, a vital factor in the Kalispell mill's survival.

Parmenter's father and retired partner, Robert, founded Stillwater as a conventional lumber mill in 1985.

It grew to more than 100 employees in the 1990s before shrinking because of timber shortages.

Robert and Chris Parmenter figured that timber harvest would shift from federal to private lands, with the supply shrinking.

So they switched from being a conventional lumber mill to "finger-jointing" in the early 1990s. Finger-jointing takes wood boards that are in adequate condition but too short for commercial use, and then fuses and cuts them into boards of commercial lengths.

This is a low-margin business in which Stillwater had to import most of its scrap wood from western Washington and Oregon, northern British Columbia and as far away as Ontario.

Earlier this decade, it cost $30 to $35 to ship 1,000 board feet of scrap wood several hundred miles - and that rate increased to about $50 today.

Owens & Hurst's scraps provided about 10 percent of Stillwater's wood at a shipping cost of $8 per 1,000 board feet - a big help in keeping the Kalispell facility afloat.

Without Owens & Hurst, it made Chris Parmenter's decision easier to close Stillwater in early 2005.

He plans to reopen the finger-jointing plant in Albany, Oregon - closer to his biggest source of raw materials.

"Within a 50-mile radius, there're a billion board feet [harvested] a year," he said.