LINCOLN – When Gov. John Baldacci praised Lincoln Tissue & Paper Co. workers Friday for sacrificing to help create the company’s success, union president Steve Corriveau knew exactly what Baldacci meant.

As part of efforts to get the defunct factory running again in 2004, workers lost holidays as unscheduled days off and double-time on Sundays and signed a six-year contract with no contract talks to reopen until 2010 .

The 257 union workers also agreed to take no vacation days during the mill’s first six months of operation, restarted the mill in record time and handled vastly increased workloads, the United Steelworkers Local 4-396 president said.

“The contract negotiation was really not a negotiation at all. It was them saying, ‘This is what we need to start the mill,'” Corriveau said Friday. “If they [Lincoln Paper’s owners] didn’t get these things, they would not have gotten the investors they needed to restart the mill.”

That’s partially why Baldacci shook Corriveau’s hand during a groundbreaking for a new tissue machine on company grounds Friday and several other politicians praised the workers’ skills.

With company co-owner Keith Van Scotter acting as emcee, the groundbreaking ceremony celebrated the beginning of the installation of a state-of-the-art $36 million tissue machine. The new machine is part of a plan to double the plant’s tissue-making capacity, add 40 new full-time jobs to the plant’s 354-member, $21 million payroll, and alleviate the 30-day work-order backlogs on the plant’s two 50-ton capacity tissue machines.

The Metso Paper Inc. machine represents the first massive upgrade to a state paper or tissue mill since 1990 – the last at a Skowhegan mill – and the first new tissue maker on the former Eastern Pulp and Paper Co. site since the 1970s. It will make 100 tons of high-end tissue per day.

Baldacci told the crowd of about 100 workers and politicians that the new machine at Lincoln Paper, the region’s largest employer, will create six new jobs in the community for every new job at the plant, about $75 million in total revenue to the region.

“It was you, the workers, who made this happen,” Baldacci said. “It was your quality of workmanship that made this possible.”

The construction work will start next week, when an estimated 100 workers will begin assembling the machine. Heavy equipment will start breaking ground the week after, with the new, 250-by-80-foot building scheduled to be completed by the end of February, said Bill Vallance, Lincoln Paper’s vice president of engineering and technology.

The tissue machine will be operational by late fall 2006.

Lincoln Paper & Tissue Co. co-owner John Wissman said he found it incredible to think how far the company has come since those early, tense days in 2004.

“Less than a year from now, we’ll have a ribbon-cutting and then we’ll really celebrate,” Wissman said.

Corriveau hoped so, too. He said he also hoped that their recent request for contract adjustments, which company officials are not obliged to honor, would lead to a better deal.

“I’m really proud of what we were able to accomplish here,” Corriveau said. “We did whatever it took to get the mill going again.”