BANGOR – An advertisement apparently posted on the Internet that states that equipment and machinery is for sale at Katahdin Paper’s still shutdown Millinocket mill sent a scare through the community Friday.

The mill, considered to be the lifeline of this northern Maine town, has been closed since its 700 workers were told in late December that the machines would be turned off temporarily.

Just the existence of the advertisement added fuel to an already existing rumor that the mill’s new owners, Brascan Corp. of Toronto, would never be reopening the facility.

The entire mill is not for sale, said Millinocket Town Manager Gene Conologue on Friday, and the rumor that the mill will never reopen is untrue.

But before that assurance was given, Conologue said he had to make a telephone call to the mill’s managers to find out for himself. A concerned resident had notified Conologue that an advertisement existed that listed the equipment and machinery sale, and the resident was left with the impression that the entire facility, which has been out of operation for seven months, was going out for bid.

“Its not the entire mill that’s for sale,” Conologue said. “It’s the surplus equipment that’s for sale.”

Where exactly the “for sale” advertisement is posted was not clear Friday afternoon, but a surplus equipment sale was confirmed by Katherine C. Vyse, senior vice president of investor relations and communications for Brascan Corp.

“You can put people’s minds to rest,” Vyse said. “We’re not selling the mill, just excess equipment.”

She said to put the sale into perspective, when Brascan purchased the mill, along with its sister in East Millinocket, in late April from bankrupt Great Northern Paper Inc., it acquired more than 100 trucks.

“We don’t need 100 trucks,” she said.

Just a rumor that the Millinocket mill could be for sale is enough to send hysteria through this community so dependent on it staying put. On Friday, the Maine Department of Labor released the unemployment rate for June, and the Millinocket-East Millinocket area’s rate still was above 30 percent, a position it has been in more most of the year.

Even Brascan’s reopening of the East Millinocket mill in mid-June, and the hiring of about 400 people, did not drop the area’s unemployment rate below 30 percent, which is the highest level any labor market in Maine has experienced in more than 12 years. Before the mills closed in late December, Calais had the distinction of the experiencing the state’s highest unemployment rate, at 19.5 percent in April 1994, according to labor department statistics.

Conologue said he is optimistic that Millinocket’s economy will turn around, and believes that the reopening of the East Millinocket mill has brought hope to an area that spent a long winter worried that it was about to become an “economic wasteland.”

“We’re a whole lot better off today than we were Jan. 10,” said Conologue, noting that Jan. 10 was one day after Great Northern filed for bankruptcy. “We’re starting to come up the other side of the slope.”

Conologue said Brascan had assured him that the Millinocket mill would reopen within a year and that the No. 11 machine and possibly the No. 10 machine would be used.

In Maine, the end of mud season and the return of seasonal jobs helped the state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate drop to 4.4 percent, down from 4.5 percent in May. The jobless rate is 2 percentage points below a national rate that was at a nine-year high of 6.4 percent in June, said Labor Commissioner Laura Fortman, in a statement.

The number of non-farm wage and salary jobs remained essentially even at 605,500.

“The Maine labor market was little changed between May and June,” Fortman said in a statement.

Only four labor markets had double-digit not-seasonally adjusted unemployment rates in June, down from 10 in April. Besides Millinocket-East Millinocket, the rate was 11.4 percent in Calais, 10 percent in Fort Kent, and 11.2 percent in Patten-Island Falls.

Statewide, the Labor Department tracks two unemployment rates, seasonal and not-seasonal. The seasonally adjusted rate, which is computed only for the entire state and not its labor market areas, is altered to take into account normal fluctuations in employment such as tourism-related jobs or schools being in or out of session.

The lowest not-seasonally-adjusted unemployment rates in June were in Boothbay Harbor, at 1.9 percent, and Stonington at 2.6 percent. Portland’s unemployment rate was 2.8 percent and Bangor’s was 2.9 percent in June.