October 3, 2005

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

A Different Mill Closing Story

Commodity plywood production stopped today at the Bonner mill outside of Missoula, laying off 120 workers. When that huge, sprawling plywood mill was constructed in the mid-1970s, it was the largest plywood plant in the country, producing twice as much sheathing as its closest competitor. It operated around the clock, filling trainload after trainload with plywood to be shipped around the world. 550 people worked in the plywood plant while another 450 worked in the adjacent lumber mill. With the latest layoffs, employment will have fallen to a third of the thousand workers employed there in the mid-1970s.

This latest mass layoff at a wood products mill was not cast in political terms. No one was claiming that the plywood operation was shutting down because the mill could not gain access to federal timber. Nor were there hysterical cries that another small lumber town was being decimated by heartless environmentalists.

The explanation offered for the abandonment of the commodity plywood operation was straightforward: competition from new products, in particular oriented strand board. Beginning in the second half of the 20^th century, plywood began to displace the use of one-inch boards for sheathing walls, roofs, and floors. That, of course was not good for lumber mills producing those shiplap sheathing materials. Peeling laminates of wood from logs on a lath to make plywood used more of the log with less waste and produced a stronger, cheaper material that was easier to install.

Oriented strand board “chips” the entire log, orients the long chips in a common direction, and then presses laminates of resin and chips with different orientation into a four-by-eight panel. Still more of the log is used, more of the process is automated, and the cost of the material is lower. In some parts of the country, oriented strand board has completely replaced the use of plywood. That, of course, is not good for plywood producers.

Technological change and intense nation- and world-wide competition can have disruptive local impacts while improving the utilization of our forest materials and holding down the cost of housing.

Despite the fact that the Stimson mill, the only large business in Bonner, has now laid off two-thirds of its peak workforce, almost no one is predicting doom and gloom for the area economy. That is not surprising since school enrollments are rising, not falling, a new bank has opened and is prospering, and new small businesses are cropping up.

How can a small mill town lose two-thirds of its mill workforce and not go into terminal decline? Easily, when that small town is integrated into a much larger regional economy that is expanding. Most small towns are not economies onto themselves. They are satellites of the larger economy. Most of those living in the Bonner area, for instance, do not work in Bonner. Most of those who worked at the Bonner mill did not live in Bonner. Both those who live in Bonner and those who work in Bonner do very little shopping in Bonner since it is too small to have much of a commercial infrastructure.

We are a mobile lot whose pursuit of both more open space and lower land and housing costs leads us to live in one place and then commute to work and shopping. That is what makes worrying about the “economies” of small towns so misleading. The Bonner area, like Lolo and the rest of the northern Bitterroot Valley, and the other river valleys east, west, and north of Missoula have become bedroom communities for the greater Missoula metropolitan economy. Their futures are tied to that of the larger regional economy, not to the economic activities that happen to take place within each tiny community.

There remains an economic mystery for those who remember being repeatedly told that over half of all economic activity in the greater Missoula economy was tied to the forest products industry. How can the greater Missoula economy that services a lot of Western Montana be expanding if employment in the forest products industry is contracting? The only answer to that question is that the description of the Western Montana economy as almost exclusively forest products based was simply in error.

Our economy is more complex than that primitive export-base view of the world. Forest products will continue to play a vital role, even an expanded role if we can stop fighting over how to manage our forestlands. But our region continues to draw people and economic activity because of its attractive social and natural landscape features. The Bonner area is a good example of what is to come.

The Milltown dam at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers is about to be removed along with the millions of tons of toxic material that accumulated behind it from more than a century of copper mining and smelting in the Butte-Anaconda areas. That toxic site is to be replaced with riverine natural area that will provide world class recreation opportunities along with parks, trails, and wildlife habitat.

A toxic liability associated with the industrial excesses of the past will be replaced by restoring one of the greater Missoula area’s premier natural assets, its rivers. We are beginning to see the whole forest and not just the commercially valuable trees and to recognize the difference between a natural river and an industrial sewer. And that is where our economic future lies.