Plum Creek to shut down small Evergreen mill

Market decline leads to layoffs of 24 workers

A day after Plum Creek announced 24 workers will be laid off when its finger-joint stud manufacturing plant in Evergreen suspends operations on Sept. 30, those workers started getting some help finding work.

Plum Creek announced Tuesday evening that it will shut down manufacturing for the rest of the year, affecting 16 production workers and eight supervisors and maintenance workers.

On Wednesday, human resource officers and the local job service held two sessions with workers to explain the severance package and retraining options, including the U.S. Department of Labor's Trade Adjustment Assistance program.

"They're layoffs, which is the same as a termination," Lumber Product Line Manager Ken Judge said Wednesday morning. "We don't know when the plant will be opened again."

He said workers affected by the layoffs had been with Plum Creek up to four years.

"We will do whatever we can to help them," Judge said.

Laid-off workers can apply for open Plum Creek positions in the Flathead Valley, and will be given priority in future applications. If they do not win other Plum Creek jobs, they will receive the severance package.

Office staffers, who support both the finger-joint and the solid stud plants off West Reserve Drive, will not lose their jobs.

The small mill, which shares the Evergreen site with Plum Creek's much larger plywood plant, remanufactures off-grade lumber into studs by cutting and joining them end-to-end. Judge said the Evergreen plant is the only finger-joint stud plant in the Plum Creek system and virtually all of its products are shipped to Texas.

The studs are used almost exclusively in new home construction. Demand dropped sharply with the national housing downturn, choking off the market for the Evergreen plant's product.

"Historically we've run that plant at three shifts," he said. "On January 1 we downsized to two shifts. And very shortly after that, within a month, we brought it down to one shift."

They tried to work at that level, but "market conditions kept getting worse," Judge said. "Market prices dropped and demand dropped."

He declined to say how much demand dropped, and did not know immediately what the cost savings will be from the closure. But the outlook is better for the other two Evergreen plants.

"I think the solid stud plant will be able to keep running," he said.

About 60 people work in the sawmill, Judge said.

"Market prices are depressed and don't currently cover the costs of production," Hank Ricklefs said in a press release on Tuesday. He is Plum Creek's vice president for Northern Resources and Manufacturing.

"We reduced shifts in January, hoping to avoid a production stop, but unfortunately the market has not changed. We will re-evaluate the FJ Reman [finger-joint remanufactured] business throughout 2009 to determine if we can resume production at this facility."

Judge said Plum Creek officials "won't look at it until after the first of the year."

Market priceS for the finished studs, cost of the raw materials and cost of manufacturing, all determined by current production levels, "have to be high enough to reopen and make [the plant] profitable enough to pay its own way," Judge said.

The job cuts at the finger-joint plant take effect one day after the layoff of 35 workers from Plum Creek's medium-density fiberboard plant in Columbia Falls.

Plum Creek is going from four rotating shifts to three at the fiberboard plant and trimming 19 percent of the plant's 185 production employees.

When those layoffs were announced on Sept. 11, workers were encouraged to apply for specific openings at Plum Creek's other facilities in Evergreen and Columbia Falls.

"We do have openings" on the Evergreen campus, Judge said Wednesday. "I understand they are in the plywood plant."

Plum Creek also has cut back work schedules at some of its other lumber mills in Northwest Montana.

"There's mills all over the place cutting out production because they can't make it," Judge said of the industry in general. "It's strictly an economic reason to be shutting this plant down."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com