BUCKSPORT, Maine - In Bucksport today, workers at Verso Paper and area business owners and residents are struggling to understand what the immediate future will look like, when the local paper mill closes in December. Verso announced late Wednesday that it was shutting the plant down because it's no longer profitable.
Five-hundred-seventy workers at the mill will lose their jobs, and Bucksport, a town of 5,000, will lose nearly 50 percent of its tax base. The closure could also harm other nearby towns, where Verso employees live and do business.
Right before you enter Bucksport, just past the Penobscot Narrows Bridge and its commanding views of the town and the mill, sits the Rise and Shine. Katherine George has been opening her small, family-owned restaurant on Verona Island at 5:00 a.m., two mornings a week, as a favor to all those hungry mill workers coming off the night shift.
"That obviously will change now," she says. "We won't need to open as early. Nobody will be up at 5 anymore."
The Rise and Shine, George says, will survive. But it won't be the same. "We look forward to seeing them."
Maine's paper industry has been in decline for years. But 2014 has been an especially tough one. Mills have shutdown in East Millinocket, Old Town, and now Bucksport, putting roughly 1,000 people out of work. Stephen Bowden knows it's been getting harder and harder for paper mills to make money.
"You know, we shut down one line a few years ago - the number 2 line," he says. If anything, thought Bowden, that's what would happen again - shut down another paper line for awhile, until things get better. Bowden has worked at the Bucksport mill for 42 years. "It was a shock," he says.
Bowden, who was on his day off, is chatting with his buddy Bill Stubbs, through the open, passenger-side window of Stubbs pickup truck. Both men live in Bucksport. One of Stubbs's sons works at the mill.
"He was the one that called me yesterday, and he says, 'You want to hear a good one?' He's always kidding me a lot. He says, 'Guess what's gonna take place?' I said, 'Well, you're probably going to have some downtime.' Well, that's what we thought when they said they had a big meetin'."
Stephen Bowden is two years from retirement and says he will likely see what kind of severance package Verso offers and go from there. But Stubbs's son is only 45. " 'You know,' he says, 'I've got to get my resume out and start over again,' " Bowden says. "You know, he's a good worker."
The mill's closure leaves many of its 570 workers facing the prospect of a challenging period of retraining, so they're better able to compete for jobs in other, more prosperous industries, like health care, that are actually growing.
Andy Lacher says something needs to change in Bucksport too. Lacher, who owns the local book store, called BookStacks, says most of the people who work at the mill live somewhere else, "and shop somewhere else. And the guys that do live here shop somewhere else. We have a negative cash flow. Most of the money that's made in this town is spent somwhere else. And that's a fact."
Lacher says the closure of the mill could be an opportunity for another big employer to come in and attract people to the area. But Verso Paper accounts for nearly 50 percent of the town's tax base, and Lacher wonders what that will mean, come December. "That's what I worry about," he says, "because that could drive everybody out."
Other Maine towns with struggling paper mills have seen property taxes go up. Bill Stubbs say he expects to see lots of familiar faces in Bucksport in the coming months. "You're gonna see the politicians here," he says. "They're gonna come here to save us."
Stubbs says the Verso facility is in better shape than some mills around the state. He hopes that maybe a different owner could make a go of it in Bucksport. But he's also realistic. He says recent, politician-led efforts to save other mills haven't worked out so well.
