Fort Kent lawmaker to meet with loggers Feedback sought on planned legislation

FORT KENT – Slightly more than a month after winning the District 151 seat in the Maine House of Representatives in November, Troy Jackson, a Fort Kent independent, was operating a mechanical delimber in the North Woods.

On Friday evening, however, the logger-turned-politician was expected to meet with dozens of fellow woods workers at a local restaurant to get feedback on legislation he plans to introduce this session. About 60 woods workers were expected to attend.

“I set this meeting up,” Jackson said Friday morning. “It is something I had wanted to do all along.”

While Jackson, who works part time in the woods when he can, said he expected the discussions to cover a range of topics, chief among them was certain to be the status of so-called independent contractors who work for the larger timber corporations.

The press was not invited to the meeting, but Rep. William Smith, D-Van Buren, also was expected to attend. Phone calls to Smith on Friday were not returned.

Jackson said he is ready to take on the big companies and said he knows too well the challenges facing independent woods workers – those who own, operate and maintain equipment at their own expense.

The machines they use can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase and thousands of dollars annually to keep running.

Under the current system, Jackson said, all expenses come out of the independent worker’s pocket – from machine maintenance to liability and workers’ compensation insurance – even though they work exclusively for one employer.

“If we could prove they are actually employees of these companies, there would be more laws to protect them and they could get some of these expenses paid,” he said. “It’s a lot of little things that end up costing a lot.”

Last month, Jackson submitted five bills for consideration in the next legislative session that are identical to five recommendations made a year ago by an ad hoc legislative committee that included forestry experts and timberland owners.

The report listed eight ideas to “keep more value-added wood processing in the state and to make logging a more respected and more attractive profession, thus benefiting the economy of rural Maine.”

Jackson, one of a core group of loggers who organized border blockades in the late 1990s to stop Canadians from going to work in Maine’s woods, participated in the committee’s meetings and the development of its recommendations, which were sent to the Legislature in December 2001.

Along with the loggers, truck drivers who haul those logs from the woods to the mills were expected to attend Friday’s meeting, Jackson said.

“These guys face challenges with the low rates they get and are often told to haul overloaded trucks,” he said.

“I want to listen to what the guys have to say tonight,” Jackson said. “I hope some additional legislation can come out of this but I want to see how they feel. I would hate to do anything that would hurt them more than help them.”

Jackson said he remembers the certain feeling of futility that came from his own meetings in the 1990s with politicians.

“A lot of times when these guys talk to people who say they are going to help them, well, they just don’t believe it,” he said.