By Peninsula Daily News news services
SHELTON, Mason County — After nearly a century of operations, Simpson Lumber Co. is closing its mills in the Shelton area, resulting in the loss of about 270 jobs.
The closures are part of an asset sale agreement with Sierra Pacific Industries in Anderson, Calif.
The downtown Shelton mill and one in the Dayton area west of Shelton are set to close in the next 60 days.
Salaried and union employees will receive severance benefits, the company said.
Sierra Pacific said in a statement that it doesn’t intend to operate the Simpson mills.
Instead, Sierra said it will build a state-of-the-art mill and lumber-planing operation in Shelton, to open in 2017 and employ 150 to 200 persons.
Prior to that, the company added, jobs will be created to deconstruct the mills and build the new one.
Another closure
Tuesday’s announcement follows on the heels of Olympic Panel Products’ sale to a Springfield, Ore., company.
Olympic Panel of Shelton employs 238 — and those jobs will be lost in the next year, said Lynn Longan, executive director of the Mason County Economic Development Council.
“It’s going to be a big impact on the community,” she said. “We all have very, very heavy hearts right now.”
Longan said she will facilitate a local group of officials “to come together to try and do everything we can to minimize the impact to the community.”
Simpson says it will continue to operate Simpson Door Co., which employs 188 people in nearby McCleary.
It is also keeping its railroad properties, tracks, tidelands and other properties in the Shelton Harbor area, and it is considering how it might put those facilities to different use.
Sierra Pacific is a family-owned forest products company which has operated in Northern California since 1949 and in Washington state since 2001.
It owns 200,000 acres of timberland in Washington and has mills in Aberdeen, Centralia and Mount Vernon.
“We appreciate the opportunity to bring the next generation of lumber manufacturing to Shelton,” Sierra Pacific President George Emmerson said.
Simpson Chairman Colin Moseley said in a statement:
“The decision to sell was extremely difficult because Shelton has always been in the heart of our lumber manufacturing business, and we have enjoyed great support from the Shelton community.
“I am confident that officials at Sierra Pacific Industries will enjoy a similarly collaborative spirit in Shelton.”
In addition to severance pay, Simpson said it is trying to secure government economic aid or job retraining for the mills’ workers.
Mason County has already been struggling to emerge from the recession, and its 7.8 percent unemployment rate is higher than the statewide average of 5.7 percent, according to data from the Washington Employment Security Department.
“It was just kind of a kick in the head,” Tony Strunk, who has worked at Simpson for 33 years, told KOMO-TV News. “We were shocked, really, that it was going to go that way. We thought another company would come in and keep running it.”
“We have a lot of people that work there who come here every morning to eat and have lunch,” David Cedillo, who runs Ritz Burgers across from the mill, told KOMO.
Cedillo, who runs the business with his father, said more than half of their customers work at the mills.
“It’s weird to hear that they’re shutting down and all the jobs are lost,” said Cedillo, “It was surprising. I thought, ‘how is it going to affect us?’ And we might have to close.”
Based in Tacoma
With headquarters in Tacoma, privately owned Simpson Lumber announced last September that it had hired a financial adviser to investigate the possibility of selling the company.
“We could sell one mill, two mills or the entire company or none of the company,” said company spokeswoman Betsy Stauffer. “We’re trying to determine whether the mills are best kept under our ownership or someone else.”
In addition to its mills in the Northwest — in Tacoma, Longview and Shelton — the company has operations in Georgetown, S.C., and Meldrim, Ga.
The company in March 2014 announced the sale of its Tacoma kraft paper mill to RockTenn of Norcross, Ga., for $343 million.
Simpson has a long history in Washington, being founded in Matlock in 1890. Simpson constructed a network of rail lines to bring timber from the woods to its mills early in its
history.
Those timberlands are now owned by a separate company, Green Diamond Resources Co., with links to the same owners as Simpson. That timber-owning company was spun off from Simpson in 2006.
