CALAIS — The Georgia-Pacific Corp. of Woodland treated the Calais Area Chamber of Commerce Wednesday night to a turkey dinner, words of praise and a promise that the dinner could become an annual event. More than 75 people enjoyed the dinner at the American Legion Hall.

Gordon Manuel, G-P’s manager of public relations, said the company now was the largest forest products company in the world. “What is more important to us and the senior managers’ goal is not to be just the biggest, but to be the best.”

Manuel said that another of the company’s goals was to communicate “with people who are very important to us, and those are the people such as yourself here in Maine where we have operations … that is the reason for our getting together tonight.”

Manuel introduced the Woodland senior management team that included: Roger Brear, manager of the Woodland’s Pulp and Paper Operation, Gary Martell; Woodland controller of Pulp and Paper Operation; Mary Alyce Guy, director of Human Resources; Richard A. Sirken, group manager of G-P’s woodlands; Rodney Fitch, group manager of procurement for G-P’s North Division; Mike Smith, manager of the Woodland Chip-N-Saw Mill; Laura Hailey, public relations consultant; and Annette Haskell, public relations department, Maine operation. Brear, who has managed the local mill for about three months, said, “The mill is operating well. We have had three or four excellent months at the mill, but we are under a very tight cost constraint at the moment because of the pulp market.”

According to Brear, foreign competition has had a significant impact on the market. “Pricing has come down dramatically since the first of the year and … our inventories are building. We finished this month with about 30,000 tons of inventory scattered between here and England,” he said.

Brear reviewed the areas of improvement at the mill. “Since 1986, Georgia-Pacific has spent in excess of $11 million at the mill on environmental improvements. In the area of safety, certainly our employees are key to us, and although our safety performance has improved, we are not where we would like to be. We would like to make the mill injury free,” he said.

Sirken said he was responsible for G-P’s timberlands. “We have about 825,000 acres, almost evenly split between New Brunswick and Maine,” he said.

Sirken said that wood on the land was used to feed the mills. “Off of the 825,000 acres, we cut about 450,000 cords each year. That makes up about 50 percent of what we use in our mills. We also have some wood we sell to other mills. We sell our white pine to a number of different sawmills across the state. G-P considers its timberlands an asset to the company. Through careful management we have been able to do that for the 30 years G-P has owned it,” he said.

Although clear-cutting was an issue in the state, Sirken said, “of the 20,000 to 25,000 acres that we harvest each year, we only are involved in between 400 to 500 acres of clear-cutting. In part that is due to the type of trees and the type of market we have. For the most part, we produce hardwood for the craft mills, and to encourage hardwoods to grow, we are more deeply involved in partial cutting. Where we do find ourselves in clear-cutting, it is because that stand, that particular area will only respond to that kind of harvesting. With some species like spruce, if you partially cut, the trees you leave behind will fall over. So we try to prescribe the type of cut that we are involved in to what the land is able to produce,” he said.

Fitch said his job was to procure wood for the plants. Wood not procured from G-P lands, he said, comes from private and commercial land owners. “We generate work for around 600 people per year. In turn they invest about $25 million in equipment to produce this wood. This generates a lot of revenue and taxes for the area,” he said.

Fitch said that he also procures the wood for the company’s newly purchased Millinocket mill. “We have 265 operating days per year for moving wood to our numerous mills, which are three pulp mills, one stud mill, one OSB plant, one spruce and fir sawmill, one pine sawmill and one log debarker. People who work for me have the responsibility every morning when they go to work of delivering 3,400 cords of wood to these mills, ” he said.

Smith said his plant is a small operation that employs 76 employees. “The mill was built in 1974 with a capacity of 50 million board-feet of lumber. Since then we have increased our capacity to 63 million board-feet of lumber,” he said.

Smith said he learned recently that G-P has a five-year plan for improvements at the sawmill to increase its capacity. ” We are a small operation, but we are proud and pleased to be a part of Georgia-Pacific,” he said.