Another mill closes – Future Sierra economics: Diversify or die

Count Cecil Wetsel among the best of the good guys in California forestry. Also count him among the victims of change.

Sacramento Bee Editorial Staff

(Thanks to Amy Horne for passing this along.- Russ)

Wetsel adopted a strategy of sustainable logging on 18,000 acres of El Dorado and Amador counties, but that wasn’t good enough. Nor was providing health care and $20-an-hour wages in a rural community where good-paying jobs are scarce. Nor being recognized repeatedly by his peers for his resource stewardship. What Wetsel needed to stay in business was an economic world that no longer exists, nor is likely to return to the region any time soon.

So the Wetsel-Oviatt Lumber Co. is about to close. It’s another in a series of mill closures and sad moments for a timber industry that had showcased Wetsel as a friendly family face to logging.

For rural economies, and particularly El Dorado and Amador, the closure reinforces the need for leaders to ponder their communities’ economic futures. Are they adapting their economies to changing circumstances? A recent report by the Sierra Business Council, an group that views economic development and environmental protection of the mountain range as going hand in hand, sees the closing of a mill like Wetsel-Oviatt’s as part of a trend. The council sees a diminished role for timber harvesting in the Sierra economy for all the reasons that closed this mill — increasing global competition from timber countries such as New Zealand and Canada combined with increasing costs at home, from workers’ compensation insurance to timber harvest fees.

So what is to take timber’s place? The healthiest economies have been the ones that have rolled with the change rather than fought it, ones like Nevada County. It preserved its charm, starting preservation efforts nearly a half-century ago, which has helped attract both tourists and new residents with business ideas. "The community is the product," says the county’s economic development chief. New technology has its role as well, particularly high-speed Internet connections. This form of fiber, not the kind in trees, is how a once dying timber town in Idaho, Sand Point, converted itself into a center of high-tech commerce, attracting catalog clothiers, salad dressing manufacturers, motion detector companies and the entrepreneurial minds behind them.

In the Sierra, the unresolved problem is that the logging needed the most — the removal of small trees and brush — isn’t the kind that keeps a mill in business. Closures like these need to open locaal minds and explore new possibilities.

The Sacramento Bee

http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/7315749p-8260133c.html