BUCKSPORT, Maine — The workers shuffled across the road about 5 a.m. Thursday, lugging lunchboxes and hard hats for the start of another shift at the Verso Paper mill. It was the morning after the unwelcome announcement that the mill will close in December, and the men and women headed into and leaving work looked like they carried a much bigger weight than usual on their shoulders. They were among the mill’s 570 workers who had just learned they will soon lose their jobs.
“There’s not many smiling faces inside,” said Roger Doyon of Winterport, who was heading home after finishing his shift making specialty paper on the No. 1 paper machine. “It’s pretty devastating, like losing a friend. A lifelong friend.”
The mill — a hulking industrial complex complete with flashing lights and clouds of steam — looms over the town, clearly visible from the graceful Penobscot Narrows Bridge, from Fort Knox State Historic Site just across the Penobscot River and the charming Bucksport waterfront. The paper mill, and its suddenly diminished future, dominated conversation Thursday in Bucksport just as it does the skyline of the town of about 5,000 people.
“It’s depressing,” Rod Chase of Bucksport said at the McDonald’s on Route 1 just after the sun came up. “I don’t think we realize how important it is to Bucksport. But we are going to find out. We all either have friends or family that work in the mill. Everybody’s affected.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Verso President and CEO Dave Paterson said the mill had not been profitable for a number of years. Opened in 1930 to make newsprint, the mill most recently has produced lightweight coated paper and speciality paper products, such as the sugar packets and prescription pads that Doyon makes on the No. 1 machine.
Board members cited decreased demand for paper and increased energy costs as major factors in their decision to close the mill. It would be the third mill on the Penobscot River to be shuttered in a year. The Great Northern Paper mill in East Millinocket filed for bankruptcy last week after laying off 212 employees in February. Old Town Fuel & Fiber shut down in August, leaving about 180 people without work. Altogether, the three closures mean a loss of about 1,000 paper mill jobs.
Verso company officials also said Wednesday that the decision to close the Bucksport mill has no effect on Verso’s mill in Jay or on the company’s planned acquisition of NewPage, which has a mill in Rumford. If completed, the merger would give the joint company 10 mills in the U.S., not counting Bucksport, and about 1,730 employees in Maine.
Doyon, the vice president of Steelworkers Local 261, said that when management asked employees to gather for an announcement Wednesday, he had a bad feeling. There were corporate human resource executives in the room, and he didn’t think they would have come all the way to Bucksport just to announce a curtailment or a temporary shutdown of one of the four paper machines.
“I asked a question yesterday, ‘Does this have to do with the acquisition?’ They said no. I don’t believe them for a minute,” Doyon said.
He said the mill made $120 million profit per year until 2000, when Champion sold it to International Paper.
“Then we never made any money. We have fewer people and make more paper now,” Doyon said. “What’s changed? The paper’s just as good.”
He said that his machine has more orders than workers can fill, leading to some 24-hour shifts. Then the 63-year-old, who has worked at the mill for 27 years and counting, called out to a friend who also was finishing his shift in the pre-dawn darkness.
“I told you I was going to retire before I was 65,” Doyon said.
“Looks like you’re going to make it,” his friend said, shaking his head. “A hard way to go.”
Hopes and fears
Another longtime millworker, Emery Deabay of Bucksport, said he was going in on his day off to see what he can do to help his co-workers. Deabay is the president of United Steelworkers Local 1188 and works at the gas-fired power plant at the site of the Verso mill. The company has indicated it will not close the power plant.
“Since yesterday when we got the announcement, we’ve been trying to figure out what we can do,” he said.
He said the primary thing he hopes they can do is find a buyer for the paper mill.
“The company told us yesterday that all options are open,” he said.
He said that the free trade agreements of the last couple of decades have put enormous pressure on American manufacturing, including the paper industry, as a lot of production has shipped overseas.
“I will say that free trade is probably the worst thing that’s happened to America,” Deabay said.
He and others in town said that the mill has been a great place to work over the decades. It has paid its employees a living wage, and the lines of newer-model pickup trucks parked across Route 15 from Verso are testament to that, he said. It also has been a tight-knit and caring workplace, Deabay said.
“It never was a bad day to come to work,” he said.
Over at the McDonald’s, men such as Norman Bowden, who worked for the mill for 40 years before retiring, agreed.
“It does become a part of you,” he said.
The coffee-drinking group of friends discussed their fears for the future of Bucksport. The closure will have a reverberating effect on the local and regional economy, they believe. In Bucksport, property taxes from the mill make up about 44 percent of the town’s approximate $12 million annual budget.
“Ghost town,” Larry Dakin of Verona Island said when asked what he thinks could happen to Bucksport.
But other residents and business owners pointed to examples of former manufacturing towns on the coast that have rebounded, and hoped the same could happen here.
“The mill has provided a lot of prosperity to the region for generations, and watching it close is really sad,” said Mark Eastman, a native of Bucksport who owns Ocean’s Edge Realty.
“Hopefully, Bucksport’s proximity to the coast will allow it to reinvent itself,” he added. “There are great models in Belfast and Rockland, former manufacturing towns that embraced food and art, and the tourist dollars associated with this new economy … as a local business owner, I’m confident we will emerge from this into a new and better place.”
‘We’ll get through it’
Derik Goodine, who has been on the job as Bucksport town manager for just three months, said Thursday morning that thanks to careful planning, the municipality does not need to panic about finances. The town has about $8 million set aside in an undesignated rainy day fund, intended for this eventuality. Town leaders had seen what happened to other mill towns in Maine after the mills closed and wanted to be better prepared.
“The town has prepared itself really well to soften the blow,” Goodine said.
Behind him, a framed aerial photograph of the paper mill hung on his office wall. But out his window, the view was different: the Penobscot River sparkled under a blue October sky, with Fort Knox and the new bridge making a scenic background for the waterfront.
“The mill’s a significant loss for the community,” he said. “But I don’t think we want to be defined by the mill, or the loss of the mill. It’s easy to be pessimistic at this time, but it’s better to be optimistic about the future.”
Goodine said that he and other municipal officials were scheduled to meet with Verso representatives later that morning, and officials from the Maine Department of Labor were meeting with workers Thursday in Bucksport.
Goodine has already heard from town managers around the state who have been through mill closures, or other losses of major employers. And because the state has a law intended to ease the pain for communities suffering “sudden and severe” property tax losses, he said he expects that Bucksport will get some relief when it’s time to figure the next budget for Regional School Unit 25. The community pays about $6.5 million, or the lion’s share of the four town school district’s budget.
Jim Boothby, superintendent of RSU 25, which serves about 1,100 K-12 students from Bucksport, Orland, Prospect and Verona Island, said that his top priority was becoming aware of the needs of family members affected by the closure. He said he met with his administrators at 6 a.m. Thursday to start figuring that out. Additionally, the district will institute a spending freeze for equipment other than “absolutely necessary” items.
“We don’t want to have knee-jerk reactions. We do want to take measured steps,” he said. “That process begins today. It doesn’t just impact Bucksport — it has a regional impact.”
But Boothby wanted to emphasize one thing.
“We’ll get through it,” he said.
Bucksport Town Councilor Byron Vinton also said that the community won’t do anything drastic as they cope with the sudden, unwelcome news, although he expects the councilors to hold an emergency meeting to get up to speed on all the news of the closure.
“There’s life in Bucksport other than the mill,” he said, gesturing to the river and the waterfront. “Things will be good. It’s happened, and we can’t undo it. Let’s take it as a chance to make a positive out of it and move forward.”