Businesses speak on mill closing

Danielle Switalski

Businesses in Sanders County are preparing themselves to feel the long term and short term affects of the closing of the linerboard plant in Frenchtown.

Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. announced the permanent closure of the mill effective on December 31, leaving over 400 people unemployed.

Businesses in Sanders County have mixed feelings about the repercussions the closure will have on their businesses.

Dan Claridge, owner of Thompson River Lumber located in Thompson Falls said the mill closure will inevitably hurt long term chip prices throughout the state of Montana. Thompson River Lumber will not be directly affected by the closure, as the business did not sell their chips to the Frenchtown Mill.

“When you lose something like this, it will hurt the timber industry. We’re surviving these times and we have really good employees so we’re trying to keep them,” said Claridge.

Regardless of the Frenchtown mill closing, Claridge had to rearrange some of the functioning of the business due to the poor economy. Thompson River Lumber had to start operating on fewer hours due to the current hardships facing the lumber market. One positive factor that has kept Thompson River Lumber afloat during the hard economic times is the fact that they make a variety of products and do business throughout the lower 48 states and overseas in Korea and Japan.

“We’ve had to slow down a lot and we’ve had to adjust our schedule,” said Claridge. “We hope to stay as long as we can and hope by the third quarters things will pick up with the lumber market and the housing market.”

Felicia Russell, owner of R & D Forest Products located in Noxon and is a small family owned lumber manufacturing plant, is preparing for the short-term effects the closure of the mill will have on the business.

The Frenchtown mill took all of the residual chips and hogged fuel from R & D Forest Products and now that the mill is shutting down Russell said they do not know what they are going to do with these residual materials as they have no place to store them.

“We’re going to look into other places that might be able to use it or use it ourselves,” said Russell.

The hogged fuel went into the burner at the mill in order to make electricity and run the plant. Since it is winter and business is slow for R & D Forest Products, Russell said they do not know what they are going to do with their access materials at this time.

“It will make it difficult to try to do anything knowing we will have to pile it up some where, if we could come up with a burner we would use it to dry material for our wood pellets,” said Russell. “It’s not going to be good.”

Trout Creek Truss Inc., also located in Noxon, makes pre-fabricated post-frame panels for pole building systems.

Owner James Wengerd said he does not know if the mill closing will necessarily affect their business, except possibly indirectly and in the long run.

“Whenever something closes down sure it will affect us,” added Wengerd.