Ripple effect of IP closings still spreading

Max A. Bickford went into the woods to work when he was 19 years old and it shows.

The 42-year-old logger has the upper body strength of a much younger athlete. He carries his chain saw as if it weighs 5 pounds instead of almost 30. He jumps in and out of the tiny cab of his skidder and wades through deep snow, pulling heavy cables that he uses to pull the trees he has felled out of the woods.

Large stacks of hemlock, spruce, fir and hardwoods sit in his Clifton wood yard, waiting for the final journey to area mills. A month ago, Bickford, who lives in Otis, planned to sell the spruce to International Paper Co.’s stud mill in Costigan and the hemlock to its sawmill in Passadumkeag. That’s what he’d been doing his entire working life.

Bickford’s life abruptly changed Feb. 8 when IP announced it would shut down both sawmill operations. Two weeks later, officials at the Pleasant River Lumber Co. announced 30 workers, half the company’s work force, had been laid off because of the weak lumber market.

While politicians and union officials rallied around the more than 250 IP workers who will lose their jobs, Bickford went on doing what he’d done every day for more than 20 years – he went into the woods and cut down trees.

Bickford is not much of a news junkie. It was five days after IP’s devastating announcement that Bickford learned he had no place to sell the logs he’d harvested the week before. He was in the St. Pierre Saw Shop in Lincoln when he heard the bad news.

The logger is caught in the ripple effect of IP’s decision to shut down the facilities, and he is not alone. According to Dana Evans of the Maine Department of Labor, for every worker laid off by IP, 2.6 other workers across the state will lose their jobs too.

Bickford and others like him who are self-employed do not qualify for unemployment or the wide array of state and federal programs available to displaced workers. They can ask the Labor Department’s many Career Centers around the state for help in preparing resumes and looking for a job, but they will not qualify for retraining funds.

“I have thought about finding a different kind of work,” Bickford said. “All the paper that goes with woods work is just getting to be kind of a hassle. When I heard the mills were closing, I tried to get into welding classes at Eastern Maine Technical College, but they’re full up.”

Unlike many of his colleagues, Bickford owns his equipment free and clear. He does not have to worry about making monthly payments on his skidder. In fact, he has been trying to sell it through Uncle Henry’s, but there are no takers.

Sen. Ed Youngblood, R-Brewer, said recently that he has been getting a lot of calls from constituents like Bickford. A vice president at Bangor Savings Bank, he forecast that the ripple effect from the sawmills’ closing would extend 100 miles in every direction.

“I am not getting calls from millworkers,” he said. “It is people who have woods, trucking and skidder operations. They have been hurt already by dramatic fuel increases over the past year. Now, they must find a new mill to take their logs, and that could be four or five times farther away. They are not operating on big profit margins to begin with, so this may put them under.”

Youngblood added that the state needs to offer short-term capital loans to workers such as Bickford and other small-business owners such as Barbara Ireland. She and her husband mortgaged their home in 1992 to buy B&W Variety, a convenience store in Passadumkeag. In the first week after the mill closing was announced, her business decreased by two-thirds.

Those who depended on the two mills for their livelihood are not the only people who are beginning to feel the impact of the impending shutdowns, scheduled for mid-April. Demand at a church food cupboard in Howland has doubled in the past month.

“When we started the year, we were putting out eight to 10 boxes of food a week,” said the Rev. Bethann Black, pastor of the Howland United Methodist Church. “Now, we give out 20 to 25 boxes each week. We have discussed the need to increase our budget, get more donations and more volunteers now that the mills will be closing.”

Local officials met recently with labor officials to form community task forces to meet the needs of residents the department cannot. Initially, the town offices in Milford and Howland will help coordinate efforts by local churches, businesses, schools, businesses and community members.

A hairdresser, Crosby owns Shel’s Tangles & Tans in Passadumkeag. The week after the shutdowns were announced, she offered free haircuts to displaced workers who had lined up job interviews. By Friday, four people had taken Crosby up on her offer.

“It is time for the community to work together to help these families,” she wrote in a letter published in the Bangor Daily News. “I challenge area businesses to help in one small way. If we work together and give our kindness and support then somewhere, sometime, we will all receive back good things.”

That, according to Youngblood, is the only way to keep communities from drowning as the wake of IP’s decision continues to wash over people in Maine.