Millinocket faces uncertain future GNP mill downsizing causes economic fears

MILLINOCKET – A day after Great Northern Paper Inc. announced it will shut down two paper machines in the Millinocket mill and eliminating 200 jobs, many residents of this northern Penobscot County town wondered about their future.

Tables at the Appalachian Trail Cafe at lunch time were not full Wednesday afternoon, but waitresses say they haven’t been full since this spring when the company began temporarily shutting down two of the four paper machines at the mill.

“If not for the out-of-staters, it would be dead,” said Margaret Goode, a waitress.

Debra Valley, another waitress, said she is afraid the restaurant may have a hard time keeping regular hours this winter. “It’s very scary,” she said.

Valley said her husband, Stephen, has worked in security at Great Northern for five years. He is in the Air Force Reserves and after Sept. 11 he was called into active service. Valley is concerned about whether her husband will have a job when he returns. She doesn’t know how she will be able to afford sending her 19-year-old son to college for a second year, should her husband lose his job.

A GNP worker who asked not to be identified said he will be losing his job at the Millinocket paper mill for the second time in seven years.

The worker was laid off several years ago and hired back a year later. “It was the best thing they could have done for me. It got me out of the rut,” he said.

He went to work driving a tractor-trailer then and says that is what he will do now. “You have to do what you’ve got to do to make a living,” he said. “No one is going to take care of me. I’ll take care of myself.”

He has a son in his second year of college and another son who will graduate from high school next year. “There is more work than what is in Millinocket,” he said. The worker has no immediate plans to leave Millinocket, but says he will travel to work if he has to. “I’ll stay as long as I can,” he said.

George Martin at the State Farm Insurance Office on Penobscot Avenue remembers the days when there were 11 paper machines running at the paper mill and the company employed 4,000 people in Millinocket and East Millinocket. After this week’s announcement, there are two machines running in Millinocket and the company will employ approximately 1,100 workers in the two towns.

Martin said the situation has been the same since 1985. He compared it to a boxer who keeps getting knocked down and gets up and gets knocked back down again. “You just have to wonder when the big KO is coming,” he said.

He has noticed a difference in his business during the last eight years. When the economy is doing fine, he said, people buy homes, camps and new vehicles more often. “People are not buying like they used to,” he said. Martin considers himself lucky that his business has remained level.

Martin said one home built several years ago by a former mill manager at a cost of about $390,000 recently sold for $202,000.

Not every business is suffering, though. At K & M Motors, Paul Moir said he sold three used cars Wednesday. “I feel bad for the people who will be laid off,” he said.

Moir said he will remain optimistic and hopes the future will be stable. “I’m just going to keep doing business,” he said.

Meanwhile, Sen. Michael H. Michaud, D-East Millinocket, said he is concerned that without changes to NAFTA and other federal policies, the paper industry could end up like the shoe and textile industries. “If congress doesn’t wake up soon, I think we are definitely heading in that direction,” he said Wednesday. “The whole import situation is killing us and unless we do something in Washington, it is definitely going to keep going on a downhill slant.”

Michaud, who is running for Congress, said he met with officials of the forest products industry several months ago in Washington on the issue of foreign imports. He said he encouraged those officials to work with the national unions regarding changes in federal policies that are harming United States industries.

“The biggest problem we face are the imports from overseas to this country,” he said. “The problem is with NAFTA and the strong U.S. dollar.”