Plywood mill closure will end long history

Roberta Perez, a worker at the Yakima Resources plywood mill, spent Thursday morning drinking coffee and celebrating her 19th anniversary at the mill.

But a half-hour later, the 50-year-old Perez found out the mill was shutting down in 60 days.

The celebration was over.

And her worries began.

The owners of Yakima Resources announced that its plywood mill, the only operating plant in the 103-year-old mill complex, will shut down Aug. 5, leaving 225 workers jobless.

Officials from Frontier Resources, its parent company in Eugene, Ore., said in a news release that the mill could no longer keep up with increased competition from cheaper wood products, imported plywood and the problem of scarce timber.

Several calls to Frontier Resources were not returned Thursday.

The closure marks the end of a Yakima landmark that began in 1903 as Cascade Lumber Co.

"It's very, very hard to think about Yakima not having a mill there. It's been over 100 years," said Mike Pieti, who once worked at the sawmill and still has relatives who are employed at the plywood mill. He is now the executive secretary and treasurer of Portland-based Western Council of Industrial Workers, which represents the plywood mill workers.

"An awful lot of family and friends have worked there. It's hard to contemplate the city without it, but we have no control of what employers want to do."

The plywood mill has been temporarily shut down for the past two weeks due to a market turndown, union officials said.

On Thursday, the company wrote the union that it would officially inform all employees of the closure when they return to work Monday.

"This is to advise you that adverse economic conditions make it necessary for the company to close its entire plywood facility," the letter states.

When Frontier Resources purchased the 240-acre Yakima mill complex from Boise in 2004, officials declared they were in Yakima for the long haul.

But a year later, Frontier announced it would shut down its sawmill, citing its inability to compete in the timber industry. The closure cost 116 sawmill workers their jobs.

Rumors were circulating about the plywood mill's closure, but most workers did not expect the closure to come so soon, said Sherry Scott, area representative for the Western Council of Industrial Workers.

"We thought they would run a little longer, but given their history we're not surprised," Scott said. "Soon as the market turns down, they close."

It's no secret that operations at the former Boise mill have been marginal because of a decline in timber supply in the Northwest and a lack of investment in new technology.

In announcing plans to sell the mills three years ago, Boise officials characterized the mill as "challenged." Indeed, as far back as 1998, the company labeled the plywood mill obsolete and planned to close it. But after a fire destroyed one of its more modern mills in Oregon, the Yakima plant was kept open.

Washington once led the nation in plywood produced from softwood. Plywood is the original engineered-wood product, made of solid sheets of wood veneer.

But the industry has shrunk in the face of competition from newer products, such as oriented strand board imported from Canada and, in the past four years, Brazil.

OSB is made of wood strands bonded together under heat and pressure in cross-laminated layers. It is less labor-intensive to produce than plywood and uses smaller diameter logs from tree farms, not old-growth forests.

Recently, the hot home-building market had given plywood something of a new lease on life. But that was only a short-term reprieve, one that's ending now as the housing market cools, said Jack Merry, spokesman for the APA-Engineered Wood Association, formerly the American Plywood Association, based in Tacoma.

"Shorter term, the moderation of the housing market means demand for plywood is tapering off. Longer term, there's been a rapid attrition of western plywood mills," Merry said.

Yakima Resources will soon join dozens of other Western plywood mills that have already closed, and some of its workers will be out of a job for the first time in many years, even decades.

Tim Nadeau, a 40-year-old forklift operator from Selah, will be unemployed for the first time since he began at the plywood plant 16 years ago.

On Thursday, he pondered how he'll support his wife and two children, without the mill. The $16-per-hour job also provided generous health insurance and retirement benefits.

"That's going to be tough to match," he said. "It's one of the better paying jobs in Yakima."

Indeed, employees such as Nadeau and others in the community may wonder if the end of the old mill will also lead to another end: the end of high-paying jobs for the working class.

"The big question is whether they can find jobs that pay the same that they're making now," said Don Meseck, a state Employment Security economist. "That's probably going to be difficult."

Though wood product manufacturing isn't the largest industry in Yakima, it certainly can be considered one of the backbones of the region's economy.

According to 2004 state Employment Security figures, lumber and wood manufacturing pay better than most jobs. Annual pay for wood-production jobs averaged $31,968 compared to $26,500 for other jobs in the region.

Meseck said that while other industrial areas are experiencing growth, manufacturing jobs saw a downtown in the last decade. There were 9,000 jobs in 2005, compared to 10,500 a decade earlier, a 14 percent decrease.

Part of that trend can be attributed to the declining wood-products industry, he said.

"The trend is for slow, steady decline in employment in that industry," he said. "Those jobs are gone and they're probably not coming back."

That leaves local officials with the challenge of replacing high-paying jobs that have been in the Valley for several generations.

"I hope with some job training assistance, they'll be able to stay locally and stand on their feet in a similarly paid position," said Dave McFadden, president of New Vision, the region's economic development arm. "Unfortunately, there are few opportunities."

Several employment assistance agencies are ready to take on that task.

The agencies are well acquainted with the situation. Layman Lumber Co. announced in April it was closing its lumber mill, a 50-year-old fixture in Naches that once had about 70 workers. A year earlier, Yakima Resources laid off its Yakima sawmill workers. Many of them are in training for new professions.

"It's just common sense that this industry, at least for now, is in decline," said Patrick Baldoz, director of the Southcentral Workforce Council. "When you have that happen, there are not too many places people can go directly with their skills because they're specific."

Baldoz said the council will try to apply for state reserve funds designated for unexpected events, such as a massive layoff.

The funds would be used to aid workers in training in other fields, assistance in filling out unemployment insurance forms and anything to help workers deal with the transition.

"It's never a good time to get laid off, but in regards of the labor market, we believe we're in a good position to get them directly into jobs or training for those high-demand jobs," Baldoz said.

Meanwhile, union officials will meet with employees when they return to work Monday and explain their options.

Several workers, including Perez, who celebrated her anniversary Thursday, are already considering their options.

"All day long I've been thinking, 'What am I going to do?'" she said.

She'll have 60 days to try to figure that out.

* Leah Beth Ward and Erin Snelgrove contributed to this story.

* Mai Hoang can be reached at 577-7685 or mhoang@yakimaherald.com.