MILLINOCKET, Maine — For the first time in Millinocket’s history, “the town is outside the shadow” of the paper mill, local businessman Tom Shafer said Thursday.
Shafer was one of several business leaders who talked about the town’s future just months after the remnants of Great Northern Paper Co. were auctioned for scrap and with the company’s tax bills still unpaid.
“We’re just starting to figure out we might be better off,” Shafer, who co-owns Maine Heritage Timber, said at a meeting of many of the area’s large business operators and a neighborhood development consulting firm from Virginia that is offering pro bono work assessing the town’s economic assets and helping to develop its goals for the future.
CZB Associates of Alexandria offered up its services after Charles Buki, the firm’s leader, read a New York Times story about Millinocket in August that focused on the closure and demolition of the GNP mill and how it hurt the town.
“There is no perfect path out of this,” Buki said during Thursday’s gathering at the town hall. “What I need to figure out is how we can work with you guys to improve things.”
One of the business leaders said the financial hole the town is now in was partially created by their own hands.
“We had it all and we were complacent,” said Steve Pound, who is the associate director of workforce development for Cianbro Corp., and owns two homes in town. “We did not diversify.”
Buki arrived Wednesday and met with the town council, community development and local service groups and then small business owners. He spent Thursday morning with the town’s larger employers — Millinocket Regional Hospital, the Pelletiers of logging and restaurant fame, Central Maine & Quebec Railway, engineering and timber firms — and then spent the afternoon going over the area’s natural resources and recreation areas, and getting a tour of the vicinity.
“The whole story here is a good story,” Buki told the group of business leaders. “I have the sense that the community doesn’t know what you know.”
All the businessmen and women in the room said they have accepted that the mill is not returning and have started to make decisions based on those facts.
“It’s time we pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and … start to focus on what we can do now,” Bob Peterson, chief executive officer for Millinocket Regional Hospital, said. “Our New England resilience is starting to sparkle.”
Thursday night Buki was expected go before council. He will issue his final recommendations in the near future, Town Manager Peggy Daigle said during Thursday’s lunch break. She said he asks the hard questions and sometimes it’s hard to hear the answers.
“It’s tough love. It’s stuff that needs to be said,” the town manager said. “It’s about the community taking another step and it just doesn’t fall on the town council’s shoulders. It’s a community’s obligation to figure out what to do.”
The business owners talked about assets, the biggest being Baxter State Park just a few miles away, and barriers, which include access and parking at Baxter, an older population with fixed incomes, around 350 homes in disrepair, transportation costs, work going to Canada and the disappearance of half of the town’s tax revenues.
Some suggested forgetting about industry and investing in a tourism trade and taking steps to attract young couples to the area.
“They come here for the quality of life,” Pound said. “We need to sell it.”
Others in the group talked about retaining the mill’s workforce, offering community college courses that are geared toward what is needed by the existing businesses in town, such as welding and timber work.
Some partnerships already exist, Daigle said, mentioning that Maine Heritage Timber is using the woodworking area at the high school to change the timbers they salvage from the lake into bar tops and other interior design products.
CZB advertises itself as an urban planning and neighborhood development consulting firm. It offers neighborhood revitalization strategies, affordable housing analysis, housing policy development, economic development strategies, and community visioning and engagement services, according to its website, Czb.org.
Town councilors initially reacted with skepticism about CZB’s plan when they first addressed it during their September meeting, about 2½ weeks before Great Northern Paper Co.’s East Millinocket paper mill filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Millinocket’s paper mill closed in 2008 and the town has collected only part of $1.18 million in overdue taxes from Great Northern, which still owns the mill site and is still the town’s largest single taxpayer.
“I think you have a different kind of [barrier],” Buki said of life after the mill. “I think there is a percentage of the community that is really scared and have gotten in the habit of being really scared.”
Local people are worried about conspiracy and change after years of revolving mill owners promising much and delivering little, Eldon Doody, of Mid South Engineering, said.
Another barrier is that town leaders have spent the revenues they received over the last century from the mill and did not set any aside for a rainy day.
“There isn’t any re-investment habits,” Buki said. “And when you get frightened and withhold investment capacity — it’s a bit of a paralysis.”
While Millinocket’s population declined from about 7,000 in 1990 to 4,500 in 2010, and the Katahdin region’s unemployment rate typically runs double the state average, one new business in town offers a sign of hope.
A new bakery opened in downtown Millinocket three months ago, and owner Dan Reed said he moved to town for a life with a slower pace knowing millworkers would not be there to support his endeavor.
“It was a willful decision,” said the gray-haired baker who has roots in the area through his grandfather and who has spent time at a camp in town every year of his life. “After living in Portland for 30 years, I’m now just 5 minutes from the woods.”
BDN reporter Nick Sambides contributed to this story.