BANGOR – It’s the end of the year. Are any more manufacturers leaving the area?

That seems to be the question on everyone’s mind as the Bangor region approaches the historically familiar seasonal period of shutdowns – temporary or not – and skeleton crews.

It’s easy for people to be on edge after what happened last year. The former Great Northern Paper Inc., once the state’s major employer, was shut down for what was supposed to be two weeks. Now, 12 months later, the bankrupt company is under new ownership and only 300 of the 1,130 people who were laid off have been re-employed.

In recent weeks, two area companies, Old Town Canoe in Old Town and ZF Lemforder in Brewer, seem to have become the answer to the question, what company is leaving next?

But they’re not going anywhere – and they would like the rumors to stop, according to spokeswomen for both companies this week.

Ruth Lane, human resources manager for Lemforder, said Tuesday it is unfair to her company’s employees and their families to have to enter the holiday season worried about whether a job layoff is imminent.

“I don’t want this kind of stuff to go around,” Lane said. “We’re very open with our employees and about the competitiveness of the industry. We are not struggling here in Brewer. We are doing fine.”

Like Lane, Cynthia Georgeson of Johnson Outdoors, Old Town Canoe’s parent company, wants to know how unfounded rumors get started about a company’s future demise. And like Lane, she would like to know the source of the rumor so she can talk about the company’s operations one-on-one.

For Old Town Canoe, the rumor circulating throughout the community was that Wisconsin-based Johnson Outdoors was moving Old Town’s operations to Mexico. For Lemforder, the rumor was that the company was struggling, and job layoffs and shift changes were planned.

Old Town Canoe will be operating with a skeleton crew later this month, Georgeson said, but that is nothing new. It happens every year, she said. The company also is evaluating its manufacturing processes and shifting jobs, but no layoffs are planned.

Georgeson said the rumor might have started because a new manager was hired from a production company that was moving its operations to Mexico. Anxious employees may have thought the manager was brought on board to move Old Town’s operations across the border, she said, and he has not been given that assignment.

It seems any company that is in manufacturing could become a target of a shutdown rumor these days. People are worried.

In the case of Lemforder, though, the fact that the company is a manufacturer, and the fact that the automotive industry is experiencing one of its five-year cyclical slumps, don’t add up to job losses in Brewer.

Lane said she believes people are speculating on “what could happen.”

“Every five years, everything in this business changes,” Lane said. “But there’s nothing [going on] that has any shifts in our numbers of people. I’d love to say that we’re having some big expansion going on, but we’re not.”

In the last couple of years, Maine has lost more than 12,000 manufacturing jobs, mostly in shoe, textile, paper and lumber production. The losses have been offset by an increase in service-related jobs, the fastest-growing sector in the state’s economy.

Manufacturing is an industry that is vital to the state’s economy, and it is evolving into something that one day will have a different look than it does now, according to Laurie Lachance, the state’s economist. Traditional manufacturers may come and go, in part because of what’s viewed as an unfriendly state business environment or in part because of a lack of investment by companies in modernizing their equipment.

But manufacturing remains vital to the state’s economy, and whatever the issues, they need to be addressed, Lachance said during a recent business breakfast. The typical manufacturing job pays about 60 percent more than a nonmanufacturing one, and tends to provide up to three times more benefits.

“It’s been a tough time recently,” said Lachance. “One out of every five dollars of Maine’s economy is tied to manufacturing. It remains critically important to the wealth of this state.”

Jack Cashman, commissioner of the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development, who spoke at the same breakfast, echoed Lachance’s comments.

“If Maine is going to progress, we’ve got to have a manufacturing base,” Cashman said. Most of the investment in manufacturing in Maine lately has come from Canadian companies, he said, noting that biotechnology, paper and energy are attractive sectors to those companies.

While long-term neighborhood companies such as Old Town Canoe and ZF Lemforder try to hold their own during tough economic times, Mainers need to realize that manufacturing soon will have a new look, whether it is biotechnology or precision manufacturing, according to the National Association of Manufacturer’s Manufacturing Institute.

“Ten years from now, there will be manufacturing in Maine,” William Canis, the institute’s executive director, said at the Maine State Chamber of Commerce’s recent annual dinner. “It may be strong. It may be weak. It depends on the decisions you make today.”

And today, Old Town Canoe and ZF Lemforder have decided to stay put.

“We’re doing very well here in Brewer,” Lemforder’s Lane said.