PORT ANGELES — Beset by market pressures and not enough logs, Green Creek Wood Products LLC will close the company, including its recently modernized Port Angeles sawmill, on Saturday.
The company is jointly owned by Green Crow Corp. of Port Angeles and Creekside Trading Corp. of Langley, B.C.
Green Creek will lay off 35 people, 27 of whom live on the North Olympic Peninsula, Green Crow President Randy Johnson said Thursday.
Seven Green Creek employees work at the company’s 10-dry-kiln Spanaway facility and its lumber sales office in Bellingham.
“This is just a terrible day for me, I’ve got to tell you,” Johnson said, adding that efforts are being made to find timber industry jobs elsewhere for the employees.
Johnson said the company has a monthly payroll at its Port Angeles mill of about $160,000, including benefits.
Typical wages range from $15 to $23 an hour.
“They are all specialty kinds of jobs,” Johnson said.
Green Crow also had to lay off an accountant who was a longtime employee, he added.
The facility on 21 acres at 436 Eclipse West Drive fell victim to competitive market pressures and a low availability of wood, which has been a problem for about four or five years, Johnson said.
The company’s 2014 total Port Angeles land value is assessed at $328,000, while the mill building and equipment are assessed at $1.5 million, according to the Clallam County Assessor’s Office.
It is the second sawmill to close its doors on the North Olympic Peninsula since July, when Interfor announced the end of its Beaver sawmill and Forks planer mill to consolidate operations at its Port Angeles plant.
The closure leaves the Port Angeles Interfor facility, Allen Logging mill on the south side of the Hoh River in Jefferson County and Port Angeles Hardwood mill as the only large commercial sawmills left in Clallam and Jefferson counties, Johnson said.
Green Creek specialized in processing larger logs, at least 16 inches in diameter, from trees 65 to 80 years old for wood beams, shipping 15 to 20 containers of product a year to a Japanese buyer.
On the North Olympic Peninsula, “nobody does bigger logs,” Johnson said of Green Creek.
“It just means the alternatives to processing those logs domestically in our area have diminished.”
Green Crow and Creekside purchased Green Creek out of bankruptcy in 2003 for about $400,000 and poured millions into upgrades, including a new debarker, Johnson said.
The improvements included adding a $2.5 million computerized headrig — the carriage and saw that cuts logs into slabs — that more than doubled the mill’s capacity.
Johnson said the supply of logs is low, though the trees are there.
They are just are not being sold by the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which Green Creek relies on for its timber supply, he said.
“The wood is theoretically out there,” Johnson said.
“There are 250 million board feet in arrears on DNR harvest levels,” he said.
“They are harvesting less than what they projected.
“The wood supply is not there on a consistent basis.”
Johnson added that the agency also has been held up by environmental lawsuits.
“I’m not blaming DNR totally,” he added.
According to Green Creek’s prepared statement on the closure, logs had to be purchased from more than 200 miles away “due to what we believe are constraints placed on DNR harvest levels.”
DNR spokesman Bob Redling said an agency official was unavailable Thursday to discuss in detail assertions that attribute some of the blame for the closure on the agency’s policies.
“The fundamental factor that DNR is not harvesting as much as it declared in its sustainable harvest is correct, and there are many reasons for that,” Redling said.
Green Crow, which has about 50 employees, is itself in good shape, Johnson said.
“We are still looking at acquiring and have acquired other timber lands, albeit a scaled-down version because of cash flow,” he said.
“Our hit is, if we had $5 million invested and we aren’t going to get much if anything back, we end up writing most of that off.”
Johnson did not know the fate of Green Creek’s Eclipse West Drive’s property or mill.
Selling the recently modernized equipment in the mill “is a potential and fairly likely alternative,” he said.
Creekside, which owns SilvaStar Forest Products LLC in Bellingham and Silverdale, is owned by Doug Martin.
Owning Green Creek “is just not profitable because of the logging costs,” Martin said Thursday.
“It just doesn’t have a long-term future.”
He blamed high demand from China for logs, unfulfilled promises of higher yields from DNR lands and a system in Canada in which smaller mills are subsidized.
“My minimum loss is a couple million bucks,” Martin said, adding that his companies have 80 to 100 employees.
“I will survive.
“It is what it is.”
________
Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
