Four years ago, the sawmill in Fredonia, Ariz., laid off 90 workers.
Who did the locals blame? Environmentalists.In 1992, the mill closed temporarily for a lack of trees. Why weren't there enough trees? Environmentalists, said mill officials.
This month, the Fredonia mill sawed its last log and will close permanently in March.
Guess who's to blame.
Environmentalists, said Ted Atherly, manager of the Fredonia mill, which is owned by Phoenix-based Kaibab Forest Products.
"The (U.S.) Forest Service has not put any timber sales up. The environmentalists won't let them. Therefore, the raw material is just not available to run this (Fredonia mill)," Atherly said.
But environmentalists say they are weary of being the perennial scapegoats for the demise of southern Utah's timber economy. They blame the mill's downfall on a greedy timber industry, which has been supported for too many years by an irresponsible U.S. Forest Service.
"It's ingenuous for the big timber companies to say environmentalists are destroying the communities because it just isn't so," said George Nickas, assistant coordinator for the Utah Wilderness Association.
In a recent interview, Jim Matson, Kaibab vice president, hesitated to place all the blame on environmental activism but said the controversy over the Endangered Species Act's protection of the northern goshawk and Mexican spotted owl have played a major role in the decision to close the Fredonia mill.
Matson said environmentalists have used the act to force the timber companies out of the Kaibab National Forest in northern Arizona. The Fredonia mill depended almost entirely on that forest.
Sierra Club activist Sharon Galbraith, of Flagstaff, Ariz., doesn't agree with Matson's argument about the Endangered Species Act.
There's only one spotted owl territory on the Kaibab forest and the restrictions for the goshawk actually allow more timber cutting, she said.
On a recent field trip to the Fredonia mill, Galbraith said Matson assured her that the mill could continue taking trees of smaller diameter. Larger-diameter trees are becoming increasingly scarce on the Kaibab National Forest, which was logged heavily by the railroad in the last century.
"I'm not sure what the financial reasons are for closing the mill," Galbraith said. "The mill just is a wood hog and it can't be financially run on small volumes that are coming off the forests from now on."
She also accused the Forest Service of violating its own 10-year plan by harvesting more timber in the first five years of the plan than was projected for 10 or 15 years.
"If the industry and Forest Service hadn't been so greedy, there would still be some sales left to keep the mill open," Galbraith said. "There's not enough timber to make more than one or two sales a year. (Kaibab mills) are used to six or seven a year."
Though the Fredonia mill is laying off some 200 workers, some new jobs will be created at Kaibab's Panguitch, Garfield County, mill, which is being expanded with equipment from Fredonia.
The trick now, said Nickas, is for the Forest Service to allow a sustainable number of small sales to support that mill as well as a mill in Escalante owned by a different company. Because of the size of the Dixie and the history of large timber sales, "We don't have the kind of a forest resource to sustain big mills anymore," he said.
While some small towns around Fredonia may suffer in the short term as a result of the sawmill closure, there may be a long-term silver lining to the story if the firm can retrain its labor force and attract new, technology-based industry.
Dire predictions for the Northwest's economy, which suffered huge cutbacks in federal timber sales, failed to materialize. In fact, many Northwest communities once dependent on timber have boomed, according to a New York Times article this past October.
High-tech industries such as Sony and Hewlett-Packard have moved in or expanded to take advantage of the pristine countryside. While 15,000 jobs have been lost in the timber industry, about 20,000 have been gained in high technology. Oregon's unemployment rate last year was at 5 percent - the lowest in decades.
Jeff Wilson, a laid-off mill worker from Mapleton, Ore., who is retraining to become a community service worker, told the Times, "I was brain-dead at the mill, never thought I'd do anything else. Now, it's like the world has opened up."
*****
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
U.S. cutting back timber sales
The 200 southern Utah residents who lost their jobs as a result of the Fredonia, Ariz., sawmill closure are not alone.
Nearly 48,000 timber-industry workers have lost their jobs in the United States since 1989, when a record 226,000 people worked in the industry, according to the Western Wood Products Association.
Butch Bernhardt, the association's spokesman, said the lost jobs are a direct result of cutbacks in timber sales from federal lands.
The Clinton administration's 1996 budget calls for total federal timber sales to be 3.7 billion board feet - 60 percent less than five years ago.
The United States, which consumes about 47 billion board feet per year, will have to import more Canadian timber to make up for the loss of timber from U.S. federal lands, Bernhardt said.