East Millinocket Planning Board OKs proposed sawmill

EAST MILLINOCKET – A Medway native hopes to return to the region to open a small sawmill and sales building in the town-owned industrial park this spring, officials said Tuesday.

The sawmill that Shawn McLaughlin received permission Monday night from the planning board to build will employ up to three people. It will be located, if negotiations with the town conclude successfully, in Katahdin Regional Industrial Park Lots 18 and 19 off Route 157, said Mark Scally, chairman of the Board of Selectmen.

“It’s probably going to be a small operation,” Scally said Tuesday. “It will employ three people to start with provisions to hire up to five to seven people in total after a year, if all goes well.”

The selectmen are due to begin negotiations with McLaughlin over the lot’s price within a month. They should conclude quickly, Scally said.

The board might stipulate that McLaughlin build the sawmill first, Scally said.

Selectmen are somewhat leery of allowing a sawmill into the park. Porter’s Woodworking Co. moved into a 15,000-square-foot building at the park, formerly known as the shell building, in August, but other sawmill efforts there have been unsuccessful, Scally said.

“The whole point of the industrial park,” Scally said, “is to create jobs” – not to burden the town with businesses that fail to launch.

McLaughlin could not be reached for comment Tuesday. Scally and the town’s administrative assistant, Shirley Tapley, said they believe McLaughlin lives in New Jersey.

McLaughlin selected the two lots, which total 9 acres, after Bruce McLean, executive director of the Millinocket Area Growth and Investment Council, showed him several prospective locations in the Katahdin region, McLean said.

“He’s been looking real hard for a way to come home, and now he’s found it,” McLean said Tuesday. “We’ve probably been working on something for about a year. It’s just a matter of timing when it all came together.”

McLean said McLaughlin was drawn to the lots adjoining Route 157, which will put his business in ready view of all traffic along that road, a main artery through East Millinocket, Medway and Millinocket. MAGIC is a quasi-public economic development agency serving those towns.

McLean has hopes that McLaughlin will flourish selling finished wood to secondary wood-product manufacturers, such as furniture makers, in the Katahdin region.

McLean and McLaughlin will be checking with the state Department of Transportation to see whether McLaughlin can add an access road to the two lots McLaughlin intends to buy. The lots adjoin the Katahdin Area Training and Education Center on the end of the park farthest from the park’s U-shaped access road.

The park has 22 lots, access to an adjoining rail line, and is less than 10 miles from Millinocket’s municipal airport and Interstate 95.

Besides the education center, the park is home to several businesses, including Porter’s and Clean Wood Heat LLC, a startup manufacturer that employs 14 people who make and sell its 90,000 Btu Black Bear outdoor wood-fired boiler from its offices at the park.