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OLD TOWN – Darlene Young has seen it all before.
The Alton woman started at what is now Georgia-Pacific Corp.’s big paper mill 28 years ago, shortly after high school.
“I think I’ve run every piece of equipment in there,” she said Tuesday in an interview at her home.
Young, 48, was working at the mill when a shutdown loomed three years ago, and she was at the mill when G-P announced March 16 it was closing the operation.
“When this happened three years ago, I was devastated,” she said. “But this time, I was more prepared.”
Sitting on her living room couch, Young said she has thought all along that some good is going to come out of G-P’s decision to close.
In March, the Atlanta-based papermaker said it would give the state 60 days to come up with a buyer – a deadline that passed Monday with no deal.
Despite that, state officials have said they expect to meet today with a potential buyer to discuss the parameters of a sale, said Jack Cashman, commissioner of the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development.
“We’re going to offer them a proposal that I think is very fair,” Cashman said Tuesday. “And there’s a way to move forward towards a sale even while the moving parts are nailed down. This is a doable thing. This is not mission impossible.”
Young is sympathetic.
“I’m ready to go back to work,” she said. “I’ve been very, very optimistic.”
Young’s husband, Ricky, worked at the mill for 10 years, but left a few years ago. Now he is self-employed.
With two grown sons, a child in high school, and a fourth in college, Young said, one way or another she has to go back to work.
She had the steady income and a job that provided health insurance for the family.
“I hope that I am one of them that gets called back, but if I don’t, then I’ve got some planning to do,” she said.
“That’s really basically where I’ve always worked,” Young said.
Young worked through G-P’s previous threat of closure in 2003, when a deal was reached by the state and G-P that kept the facility open.
After that 2003 threat, employees remained wary.
“When we went back [in 2003], we still had that cloud over our heads,” Young said. “We all were glad to go back and we gave 100 percent – 150 percent – but there still was that cloud.”
She was working in the mill’s converting section, transforming large rolls of paper product into what customers see on store shelves, when it was shut down in December.
After about 50 people were laid off, Young switched jobs and ran equipment to load paper product onto trucks.
At its closing in March, the mill employed about 400 people in a city with a population of about 8,300.
Since then, the city has cut the property’s valuation in half, to $65 million, and raised the city’s property tax rate. The mill constituted 34 percent of the city’s tax base.
Young said workers had suspected something was going to happen for about a month before G-P made its March announcement. To finally know what was really going on came almost as a relief to many, she said.
Although she said she realized that finding a buyer and completing a sale would take time, she hadn’t expected negotiations would extend beyond the 60 days that G-P had agreed to.
Young said she’s looking forward to going back to her job, but if she’s not offered work or a sale isn’t made, she said, she’s thinking about going back to school and finding a job in the medical field.
Workers have been receiving pay and benefits for the past two months, but under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, that period ended Monday.
WARN offers protection to workers, their families and communities by requiring employers to provide notice 60 days in advance of plant closings and mass layoffs.
“That mill was profitable,” Young said. “Whoever does take it over, we can make them money.”
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