Stoltze land manager sees opportunities for C. Falls

As the timber and aluminum industries go, the old saying goes, so goes Columbia Falls.

But is that really true any more?

With the growth of technology, service and second-tier manufacturing in the city, Paul McKenzie thinks not.

“We’ve got to maintain what we already are very good at — our primary industries — and the people who are good at doing that,” said McKenzie, the city’s new Chamber of Commerce president said.

But the city also is beginning to tap its potential for developing new enterprises.

“We are uniquely situated,” McKenzie said. “Columbia Falls is the only city in the valley with the capacity to expand the businesses that are here.”

Rail access along the BNSF line that cuts through the north side of the city helps set the stage for economic growth, he pointed out. A wide buffer between the railway and residential neighborhoods to the north makes it possible to develop a light-industrial corridor. Both Plum Creek Timber and F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Co. lie along that rail line, a convenient connector between suppliers and potential value-added lumber product companies.

Creative thinking and savvy marketing will go a long way toward setting the stage for that development.

“We’ve got two resources that I see in Columbia Falls,” he said. “We’ve got our human resources and we’ve got our natural resources.”

As Chamber president, his priority will be on rebuilding volunteerism in Columbia Falls — letting people know that even though their financial resources may be shrinking, they still can give their time to help improve their town.

As lands and resource manager for Stoltze, McKenzie is intimately familiar with the vagaries of the lumber business.

And since moving to town in 1998, he’s seen how Columbia Falls’ fortunes can be tied to its two primary industries — but also how those fortunes are bolstered by the gradual broadening of its economic base.

One Whitefish company is considering Columbia Falls for its pre-built wall panel plant, he said. Another wood-flooring company has been working with the Flathead Port Authority for some time as it investigates opening a plant in town.

But it’s not just the city’s fiscal picture that concerns McKenzie.

He’s watched the migration from Whitefish with its higher housing costs to Columbia Falls with its more-affordable homes, broad access to recreation and newly developing jobs.

“I look at Columbia Falls as a place you can live and work,” he said.

And more are doing both in the same place, he noted, as telecommuters use expanding technology platforms to connect directly from their homes.

The city’s immediate access to Glacier Park International Airport is a huge tool in recruiting new businesses where travel is critical.

The Chamber’s working relationship with Flathead Valley Community College in training a work force for new and existing jobs is crucial, too. Through his five years on the Chamber board McKenzie has been part of developing that relationship.

“Job retention is without a doubt our most important (task),” he said. “We can’t get back those CFAC jobs, but we can try to save the jobs we have now.”

He praised the emphasis on networking through monthly Business After Hours, Brown Bag business-information noon meetings and Chamber luncheons.

“Networking is the biggest thing we can do,” he said.

Forging a solid working relationship between the long-established Chamber and the relatively new First Best Place Task Force is a high priority for McKenzie.

Communication between the groups will be key, he said. Attending each others’ board meetings could be a good start. Recognizing each others’ strengths will help.

“They’re better at pulling off events,” he said. “We’re better at organizing support and networking.”

When it comes to his own neck of the woods — the timber industry — he’s hoping to help people make the link between their recreational opportunities and the business of forest management.

“A lot of people know so little about the primary industries all around them,” he said.

They see the log trucks driving down the highway but don’t connect their lives to those drivers’ work. Many set up a cultural divide between forest management and recreational use, “but it’s both. We’ve got to re-educate folks that humans get a lot out of the forest, but we have to put something back into it in terms of management,” to sustain those recreational opportunities.

Jobs in the woods are getting harder to sustain, though.

Closure of Smurfit-Stone Container’s Frenchtown mill “was certainly a blow, but not an unexpected blow,” he said. “We’ve been operating for 25 years wondering when it would go away.”

In the short-term, ongoing work on some timber sales that produce non-saw material just comes to a halt, he said.

Some chip material goes to the Johnson Brothers operation at Olney, on the former American Timber site, but there’s only so much capacity. It means some Department of Natural Resources and Conservation jump-start grants have fizzled.

Six or eight months ago, he said, residuals such as sawdust, chips and bark that used to go into Smurfit-Stone’s cardboard started going to Plum Creek Timber instead. It helped soften the blow for crews in Northwest Montana’s woods.

Next up is the process of working out where to send small-diameter lumber. It needs to be thinned out, both to maintain forest health and to reduce fuel loading, but Smurfit-Stone’s demise took out a big customer. Small trees still can be used in such arenas as Stoltze’s developing co-generation plans, or chipped into wood-stove pellets.

McKenzie isn’t one to despair.

“I hope the signs that 2010 will improve will come through,” he said.

“This industry always is boom and bust. There’s no reason it won’t come back, but the longest-term challenge will continue to be timber supply,” he said. “It’s so hard to attract new businesses that need wood, but we need diversity.”

The Columbia Falls Chamber needs to strike a balance among its primary industries, its position as the Gateway to Glacier National Park, its tourist trade, its intellectual capital and its manufacturing.

“We really can have it all in one town,” he said. “There’s no reason they can’t (co-exist); they’re additive to each other.”

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