By Jane Braxton Little
Bee correspondent
Published: Wednesday, Mar. 4, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 5B
QUINCY – Sierra Pacific Industries is closing its small-log mill in Quincy, eliminating about 150 jobs in this Plumas County town.
Officials of the Anderson-based timber company blamed the challenging lumber market as well as protracted litigation over timber harvests on nearby national forest lands.
"We are deeply saddened over this announcement, as many hard-working, dedicated employees who have been with the company for a long time will be unemployed," said Matt Taborski, Sierra Pacific's Quincy-area manager.
The shutdown, scheduled for May 4, is the first closure of a Sierra Pacific sawmill since 2004, when it permanently shuttered its facility in Susanville for a loss of about 150 jobs. Three years before that, the Loyalton sawmill in Sierra County closed, putting 180 employees out of work.
The Quincy facility is part of a two-mill complex, said Mark Pawlicki, a spokesman for the family-owned company. The closure affects the section that cuts small-diameter logs, he said.
The large-mill facility, which produces lumber for domestic consumption and an adjacent biomass electrical generation plant, will remain in operation, keeping about 160 workers employed, Pawlicki said.
Although Sierra Pacific owns about 1.9 million acres of timberland in California and Washington, the Quincy sawmill relies on national forest timber sales for its raw materials.
The company built the small-diameter sawmill in the 1990s when company officials believed the Quincy Library Group, a local community coalition, would influence federal legislation that would generate the sale of small-diameter logs from the Plumas, Lassen and Tahoe national forests.
The Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act passed in 1998, promoting a program of widespread forest thinning to reduce the threat of wildfires, but the promised volume of small-diameter logs has not materialized.
The program approved by Congress and now entering its 10th year has achieved less than 20 percent of its volume goals, Pawlicki said.
He blamed appeals and lawsuits brought by "environmental activists."
Nearly two-thirds of the current year's timber sale program is under a court injunction or withheld from sale pending the outcome of litigation, he said.
Craig Thomas, executive director of Sierra Forest Legacy who has been involved in several of these lawsuits, said it is the housing market, not litigation, that is harming the timber industry.
With no demand for homes, there is little demand for lumber, he said.
Company officials informed workers at the Quincy mill of the closure Friday. They will consider these employees for other potential opportunities within the company, Pawlicki said.
Comments posted to the Bee
Dear NorthCal,
I am qualified by virtue of my passion for forests, my education in forestry and possession of a license to practice forestry in California.
I also subscribe to the latest and foremost fire science and climate change researchers. So it appears to be a difference of values. I am willing to discuss further with you since my job is natural resource education.
I am also a life long Democrat so we may have a great deal in common.
In response to your question the answer is obviously no, of course. You're not making a parallel argument, though.
I invite you to have a dialogue with me. I'll post my email address if you are willing.
Reply to ycgolfer and Sierra Citizen: You must be on the payroll of the timber industry, in one capacity or another, or you would not regurgitate this company line. Your statements are completely out of step with the nation's foremost fire science and climate change researchers.
Let me ask you this: if the nations of the world finally agreed to world peace, should we keep the weapons industry fully employed, just to preserve the jobs?
Some things are more important than jobs, and I--like most Americans--hope for the day when we live sustainably within our means, and that everyone has good jobs that pay well and do not involved rapacious destruction of the environment.
so what are we left with? fires such as the moonlight fire which completely devastate hundreds of thousands of acres, killing who knows how many thousands of wild animals.
and now due to even further litigation the area is not being even slightly harvested or reseeded. so ten years from now there will be all that wood rotten on the ground, very new growth and the perfect scenario for another catastrophic fire.
I pride myself being an environmentalist, I graduated from UC Berkeley with an environmental science degree and dedicate my life to environmental protection. But it is the extreme environmentalists that not only give the real environmentalists a bad name, but do more harm to our environment than a lumber company ever could.
NorthCal I will personally take you into the Plumas National Forest and show you the devastation created by the lack of wildland fuel treatments. Why have there been no wildland fuel treatments on National Forest land?
1. the federal government doesn't give money to pay for the treatment
2. because the federal government doesn't give any money, our fabulous federal biologists and foresters must create plans that achieve the fuel reduction goals and pay for themselves
3. extreme environmental activists, such as the Sierra Forest Legacy, block these plans saying they are 'timber grabs' because not all the 'large' trees are left. but science has proven that Sierra Nevada forests are at tree densities unprecedented in history and literally are choking each other.
so rather than have our FEDERAL biologists and foresters carry out the plans that are good for our forests, our wildlife, our cultural values and the benefit of future generations.
NorthCal suggests SPI management goals are the same as a national forest. SPI’s goal is to maximize forest growth and give due consideration to water quality, wildlife habitat and other ecosystem services for which no one is willing to pay the landowner, yet.
The research article shared by NorCal relates to wildland fuel treatment. SPI has treated wildland fuels on some of its ownership, where it made sense to invest in fire resiliency of the existing stand.
On other portions of SPI’s ownership they have chosen to start over to cultivate faster growing trees of a desired species. Growing trees faster makes sense given increasing population and their insatiable appetite for wood. Wood won’t come from the national forests which are now defacto national parks without Congress having declared them as such.
I personally don't look at the SPI clearcuts as devastation. Those that I have looked at are fully stocked with seedlings and saplings that are sequestering carbon.
The reality is that the economy is the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
This story would have happened last summer but didn't because of the Moonlight fire that resulted in considerable salvaged timber from privately owned lands, mostly not SPI owned. By the way efforts by the Forest Service to salvage 10s of thousands of acres have been halted by the same activitists mentioned in the mill closure story.
Furthermore the Moonlight fire size may have been greatly reduced except that the cumulative impact of appeals and litigation by activists of which Mr. Thomas is most prominent caused a project designed for the area to be stalled.
SPI has closed 3 small log mills in the past 8 years, Loyalton (2001), Susanville (2004) and now Quincy, because of the appeals and litigation pursured by the John Muir Project and the Sierra Forest Legacy. Check the facts at http://qlg.org/pub/act/appeals.htm These mills were all created to take advantage of a small log supply that exists
This article doesn't even mention the fact that SPI has decimated their own property across the Sierra--having clearcut nearly 250,000 acres in the last decade alone.
Like most Americans, I wholeheartedly support conservation efforts to protect our national forests, which belong to all of us (both present and future generations). Our national forests are the last remaining refuge for wildlife and are home to hundreds of rare species of plants and animals, many of which do not live anywhere else on earth. These forests provide recreational opportunities and spiritual renewal for people, too, and they shelter our water supply.
Our forests also sequester enormous amounts of carbon, and their value is inestimable compared to the short term gain provided by allowing unsustainable levels of logging. SPI's logging methods result in creating worse fire hazards across the Sierra. Read the real science here: http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_other/rmrs_2008_reinhardt_e001.pdf