Snag in mill sale tests Lincoln residents’ resolve

LINCOLN – Duane Dill of Lincoln was interviewing for a job he has had for 15 years at Lincoln Pulp and Paper when word broke Thursday that the mill might not reopen.

Hoping to keep his job as head shipper in the tissue mill, Dill met with First Paper Holding officials while over lunch at Wing Wah’s Chinese restaurant his friends discussed the latest in a series of disappointments involving the mill’s sale.

“It sounds better this time around than it did last time,” Dill said. “Governor John said that he wants to open.”

Gov. John Baldacci met Thursday with representatives from First Paper Holding and the Finance Authority of Maine in an effort to complete the sale, halted after First Paper refused to accept the conditions of a $7.7 million FAME-approved loan.

Among the conditions is a requirement that the company’s partners be personally liable for a $1 million loan from FAME.

“I hope it does go through, because I’m sick of living on unemployment,” Priscilla Clark of Lincoln said at the restaurant, adding that her husband, James Clark, hopes to go back to work after 27 years at the mill. “He’s got seven years to work [before retirement], so what’s he going to do?”

Dill stopped by the restaurant after his interview at the mill – with news that he expected to return to work on May 24 – only to learn that the sale of the mill had hit a snag. While Dill remains optimistic that 360 jobs will soon return to Lincoln, others in town have all but given up on the mill after enduring a roller coaster ride of promises and disappointments.

“We were hoping it was just a bad rumor,” said Lucy Trott, whose husband worked at the mill in the early 1980s before hurting his back on the job. “You get your hopes up and things are looking really, really good, and then they hit you with this.”

Staffing the counter on a slow day at Smart’s True Value Hardware downtown, Trott said many millworkers, including her brother-in-law, have retired or found other work rather than hang their hopes on the mill’s reopening.

“I think a lot of people have moved on,” she said. “At this point, how can you get excited?”

Too much work has been put into bringing the mill back to give up now, Town Manager Glenn Aho said at the town office.

“They’ve come too far to let this fall apart at this point,” he said. “I can’t believe it would fall apart in the eleventh hour.”

Tim Shaw, pastor of the Community Evangel Temple, hadn’t heard the latest news about the mill, but expected most of his parishioners already are numbed by the on-again, off-again negotiations.

“They’re not surprised now by more bad news,” Shaw said in his church office. “These times test people … test their foundation.”

Whether Lincoln Pulp and Paper is resurrected or joins Maine’s growing graveyard of defunct mills, the economic crisis it sparked in Lincoln has brought the community closer together, Shaw said. The pastor administers a fuel assistance fund for unemployed millworkers, though many have found it difficult to accept help, he said.

“I think at first it was really hard. At first you had a lot of wives calling – guys wouldn’t call,” he said. “It was very emotional for them because they’d never been in this situation before.”

Ten families have joined the church since the mill’s closure in January, and many have found hope in looking beyond Lincoln Pulp and Paper for a future, Shaw said.

“I think the town itself is going to be stronger in the long run. It’s never going to be like it used to be, but I don’t think that’s necessarily bad,” he said.