AUGUSTA – Gov. John Baldacci on Monday night used a pen made of bird’s-eye maple harvested from the northern Maine woods by an Allagash logger to sign a bill that gives loggers and haulers negotiating rights to set work rates.

Baldacci waited until Rep. Troy Jackson, D-Fort Kent, could make it to the State House with the pen, given to him as a gift from his father-in-law, Louis Pelletier Jr., also a logger in northern Maine.

Pelletier, a partner in Allagash Wood Products at Allagash, made the pen.

Jackson, along with Rep. William Smith, D-Van Buren, chief sponsor of LD 1318, and Sen. John L. Martin, D-Eagle Lake, have been pushing for the bill for nearly two years. The bill received a new rush of urgency after forest workers went on strike against Irving Woodlands in January.

“This bill is historic for the logging industry,” Jackson said Tuesday afternoon. “This is a really, really big thing for these guys to be heard.

“I’m pretty proud of this pen right now,” he continued. “It means a lot to me, and I’m sure to the people back home, that it was used to sign the bill.”

The bill pitted loggers against wood products industry companies, which claim the bill goes against the free market system, that it could cost jobs, that it could increase the cost of wood fiber in Maine and produce uncertainties in the supply of fiber.

The bill failed to pass in 2003, but was given final passage by one vote in the Maine Senate on Wednesday, April 14. Loggers traveled to Augusta twice in the last month to lobby for the bill they claim is needed because they have a hard time making money with rates decided unilaterally by the state’s largest landowners.

In signing the bill, Baldacci set conditions for his action. The governor wants the scope of the legislation narrowed by a bill that will go to lawmakers as soon as next week.

Smith said Tuesday he could accept the changes negotiated with the governor as a condition for signing the measure.

“I think we can” live with the changes, Smith said, adding that the legislation will retain its basic purpose: to put loggers on more even negotiating ground with the wood purchasers.

The bill signed by Baldacci applies only to landowners that hold more than 400,000 acres in a defined market area. Only three companies meet that definition: Irving Woodlands, Plum Creek and Wagner Forest Management.

Under the revision being drafted Tuesday, a new formula would combine raw acreage with percentage of land ownership in a given market area. In effect, it would leave only Irving affected.

Irving does not support the change, a lobbyist for the company said.

“The question for the governor is, if it’s not a bad bill, why is he asking for changes before the ink is dry?” said Jim Mitchell.

Mitchell said the bill would increase costs for wood Irving processes, adding to the burden of doing business in an “intensely competitive world market. … It will have an impact, it will have consequences.”

Smith claims the bill gives loggers a more even negotiating footing with wood purchasers. He said Maine loggers make large investments in equipment, but are in a situation in which they can work for only one landowner.

Before this legislation, if two or more cutters or haulers got together to negotiate prices with a landowner, it was a violation of antitrust laws. The bill seeks to void that concern.

Martin has said the bill would allow woods workers the same benefits as a similar bill for potato growers when the Agricultural Bargaining Council was organized. That legislation, approved more than a decade ago, allowed potato growers to organize and negotiate with potato processors for prices.

Loggers who stayed off the job for three weeks in northern Maine in January claimed the legislation would give them a voice in landowner-dictated working contracts.

Jackson said that he knew Monday was the last day for the governor to make up his mind on the legislation and contacted Martin that night about the status of the bill. Martin told him that the governor was getting ready to sign it.

Jackson, who was driving through Bangor when he called Martin, asked that the governor wait for the pen.

Pelletier last year gave Smith a similar pen and pencil set for the work done to assist loggers.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.