One employee remains to close Kent Inc.

FORT KENT – At the end of the day today, only one employee will remain on the payroll at Kent Inc., a children’s apparel manufacturer that employed as many as 185 people one year ago.

Five employees were completing the inventory of raw materials and machinery Thursday. Four of them will finish their work today, and only plant manager Kevin Dubois will remain through Oct. 3 to ship the remaining orders.

Steven Pelletier, 43, of Fort Kent had worked at the plant since spring, and Robert Michaud, 49, of St. David had been employed there for three years. Both would be unemployed starting this Labor Day weekend.

The two men appeared somber as they completed their last task of weighing spools of thread used to make play and sleep wear for children.

“After tomorrow night, we’re unemployed,” Michaud said.

Kent Inc.’s motto, on a sign next to the front door of the now nearly empty plant, still proclaims the company was created in 1997 to “Keep Maine people working.”

“It’s a sad time,” said Dubois, 33, who worked for Kent Inc. for 51/2 years. “It’s really hard to see this go.

“A lot of people had been working here since the 1970s and 1980s,” he said. “Now most of them are out of work.”

Twenty-nine of Kent’s former employees have been hired by Creative Apparel Associates of Belfast. They are doing much of the same work they used to do, sewing, but now they make $550 Kevlar suits for the military.

Employees selected for the work took pay cuts to keep on working, according to Dubois. He said they all started at a basic rate as new employees with Creative Apparel.

Arlene Bourgoin, Dubois’ former assistant, is the plant director for Creative Apparel.

The majority of those working at Kent Inc. received their pink slips Aug. 1. Most of the remaining employees were done one week ago.

The children’s wear manufacturing plant, which had nearly 50 years of history in Fort Kent, has sent its remaining contracts to the Dominican Republic and China.

About 85 percent of the employees who were working for Dubois were women.

Dubois said a severance package was given to employees who had been with the company more than three years, amounting to one week’s pay for each year over three years. The maximum severance package was three weeks wages.

Kent Inc. is proceeding with plans to sell its equipment and machinery, along with the rights, to HealthTex Apparel licensing agreements, to Worsmer Corp. of Chicago during a Sept. 30 auction in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Bangor.

Wormser already is completing the last two installments of a six-installment order for children’s blanket sleepers from Costco Co. The other four installments were produced at the Fort Kent facility.

Fort Kent’s unemployment rate for May was 13.8 percent. That is expected to rise dramatically when figures come out for July and August.

Another big hit for the town will be property and personal property tax losses estimated at $25,000 and $30,000, according to Town Manager Don Guimond. That’s above and beyond the payroll loss the area will sustain.

The town has not given up. It is looking for money to purchase the 114,000-square-foot building. Town officials want to lease part of it to Creative Apparel, and they are working with two unnamed companies to move into the Route 1 plant.

Children’s wear manufacturing in Fort Kent was started by Lloyd and Bernadine Dunn in the early 1950s. Princess Kent, as the company was known for years, went through several owners until Gerber Childrenswear closed the plant in 1996.

Michael Gans, Kent Inc. president, and his associates reopened the plant in April 1997. It was nearly one year ago that Gans’ company announced severe money problems. The plant, he said, could close as early as November 2002.

NEWS reporter Deborah Turcotte contributed to this report.