Stimson Mill Workers ask for help in keeping jobs in Libby

Flanked by particle boards adorned with Polaroids of mill workers and their kin, workers from the Stimson Mill in Libby made a final pitch to lawmakers to pass laws that would allow more cutting on federal forests and keep Libby’s mill in business.

By JENNIFER McKEE, IR

Representatives of the town and workers from the mill brought sheets of Stimson plywood to the Capitol Tuesday, each one covered with pictures of residents of Libby and Troy.
“This isn’t about Stimson lumber and it’s not about politics,” said Brent McCollum, a mill employee. “It’s about the last 320 family-paying jobs left in Libby.”

Stimson Lumber executives in June told officials at the Kootenai National Forest the company needed an extra 25 million board feet of timber from the forest every year or the 320-person mill would close.

The mill currently has a contract with Plum Creek Timber Co. for logs off Plum Creek’s privately-owned forest, McCollum said. But that contract expires in a year and a half.
The Kootenai National Forest already cuts about 65 million board feet of timber each year. Forest Supervisor Bob Castaneda said shortly after Stimson’s announcement that the company has not seemed very interested in the hundreds of timber sales the forest has offered in the last eight years. The Kootenai Forest has advertised 471 timber sales since 1994, adding up to 636 million board feet of wood. Stimson Lumber bid for only 31 of them.

Bob Brown, president of the local lumber union, said the town formed a task force of leaders and mill workers and took their case to the state’s congressional delegation. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., told the group during the summer to get with the Forest Service and local environmentalists, Brown said, and work up some kind of compromise on how much more timber removal everybody could live with.

“We have done that,” he said. “We submitted that plan to the delegates.”
The plan called for two things: upping the amount of logs cut on the Kootenai and creating a fund to pay the doctor bills of mill workers sickened with lung disease who are now filing worker’s compensation claims against Stimson.

So far, neither has showed up before Congress.

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