Local Controversies: 100-Year Old Papermill vs. Modern Environmental Protection

Our town — and most of its population — has a love-hate relationship with the local papermill which also happens to be the largest employer in town.

In some ways, people feel rather protective towards the papermill because it has been the largest employer since 1928, and sometimes occasionally the only significant source of jobs during economic downturns.

View of the paper mill, taken from a downtown pier

The city is also in a somewhat "codependent" relationship with the papermill because the city's supply of water for households is significantly dependent on the paper mill's 60-inch water pipeline that brings in vast amounts of water for paper pulp production, from about 30 miles away.

Unfortunately, this codependency has also led to the fact that the papermill is one of the most egregious environmental violators in the paper pulp industry. Or, at least, it would be easy to draw that conclusion.

But even if you throw motivation aside, the simple facts are the local papermill has been fined and found in violation of environmental regulations more times than you can imagine, most recently being fined $700,000+ for spillage into an ecologically sensitive local bay.

For most of us, the impact of the paper mill is experienced on a regular basis as the stench of decaying paper pulp — a rotten-egg-sulfur type smell — which seems to accumulate in virtually ever topographical hollow in our area, particularly on really still days when there is no wind to scatter it about. That, of course, is particularly prominent in areas located close to the paper mill, with a few residential neighborhoods being thick in the stench 150+ days every year.

Most people — especially those who've been here a long time — end up shrugging and saying "well, we just have to put up with it because they employ 300 people" and thus significantly help prop up the somewhat fragile local economy.

On the opposite side of the table many people argue that the largest employers in the local economy are actually tourism and hospitality, as well as healthcare which each employ well over 1000 people, and the nasty smell has a directly negative impact on visitors because they arrive and go "what the hell is that nasty smell" and cut their visits short.

Of course, there's no empirical evidence to really back up the latter assertion, but the smell certainly is nasty!

But currently the battle is on to at the very least make the papermill become environmentally compliant even though the city (due to aforementioned dependency on the papermill's water pipeline) it's pretty hesitant to take any measures that seem too drastic.

But part of the problem is that much of the infrastructure within and surrounding the papermill — including the 60inch pipeline and a number of the aerating ponds used to clean the wastewater from paper pulp production — are at the end (or past the end) of their naturally useful life and the paper corporation management is doing its best to not really go to the expense of upgrading their systems... according to many, on account of the fact that they can "get away with it."

What's more, the papermill is part of a much larger industrial holding company that oversees close to a trillion dollars in assets and they are turning a blind eye, most recently turning that blind eye to a proposed $3,000,000 infrastructure improvement, citing that it was "not relevant," in spite of the fact that $3,000,000 is basically a drop in the bucket in their greater budget.

Meanwhile a local concerned citizens group (currently numbering about 1300 people strong) has been trying to contact both the papermill and the holding company to at least have a dialogue about possible improvements and bringing the papermill into alignment with environmental regulations rather than just resorting to outright lawsuits, but no calls or correspondence have been answered.

So now are many of us are just popping popcorn and watching what's going on and hoping that some kind of equitable outcome will result from all this.

Stay tuned, as the story unfolds...!

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