Northern California Tries to Wean Itself Off Logging : Commerce: Recession and environmental limits have rural areas scrambling to find jobs for displaced workers.
Here in the land of towering redwoods and burly loggers, a dainty industry is taking root next to the sawmills that once dominated the landscape.
On the outskirts of this liberal college town on the Humboldt County coast, a fledgling culinary center is nurturing a dozen tiny gourmet food businesses that make tofu, garlic mayonnaise and champagne mustard.
“We’re trying to incubate a micro-industry,” said Cindy Copple, an economic development official attempting to create jobs to help wean Arcata off the troubled timber industry.
For generations, timber has been an economic mainstay of Arcata and much of California’s thinly populated northern reaches. But the recession and logging limits designed to save endangered birds have communities in the economically depressed hinterlands scrambling to find work for displaced loggers and millworkers as well as ex-urbanites drawn by the area’s rugged beauty and low-key lifestyle.
In a desperate effort to diversify, back-road communities are building business parks and opening small business “incubators.” Former loggers are growing herbs and gathering pine cones for interior decorators. In one timber-studded county, a maximum security prison has become the economic savior and even created some growing pains.
But, despite the long-term promise of some new ventures, residents rue the trade-off of high-paying natural resources jobs for what are mostly low-wage service positions. Meanwhile, efforts to recruit light manufacturing have stumbled because of the poor economy, California’s tarnished business image and the region’s limited political clout.
As the hard times drone on, the north country mood is turning increasingly glum.
“There’s a chance a lot of this area will turn into an Appalachia,” said Dan Tomascheski, vice president of resources for Sierra Pacific Industries, a Redding timber company.
Parts of it appear to be well on the way. With soaring double-digit unemployment, low personal incomes and crowded welfare rolls, the region is the forgotten Northern California, a way station for tourists and drivers on their way to Oregon.
Prospects seem slim for timber workers, commercial fishing crews and others whose livelihoods have depended for years on the area’s natural resources and who are ill-equipped to tackle other jobs.
Moreover, retirees who migrate to these woodsy outposts often oppose efforts aimed at economic development, which they equate with traffic, congestion and crime. (One irony is that what is perhaps the region’s most lucrative crop--marijuana--is illegal.)
Regional officials fear that there will be little improvement without help from Sacramento. “But with less than 3% of the population, we don’t have enough in the way of influence,” said John G. Sanzone, an economic development specialist at Cal State Chico.
Yet on a micro level, some of the region’s towns and counties are trying to branch out, with mixed results:
* Last July, the Arcata Economic Development Corp. opened Foodworks Culinary Center to house cash-starved businesses making pasta, baklava, jalapeno cream cheese and other specialty foods.
* In Trinity County--a haven for rugged individualists that was the sole California county carried by presidential candidate Ross Perot--erstwhile loggers have taken to growing herbs and gathering pine cones and moss-covered sticks to sell to interior decorators.
* In the Shasta County town of Anderson, hit this month by another in a string of regional sawmill closures, a factory outlet mall has created jobs and drawn tourists.
* In the state’s northernmost coastal county, Del Norte, the 3-year-old Pelican Bay State Prison has supplanted timber and fishing as the primary job provider.
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City officials in Arcata, about 300 miles north of San Francisco, recognized that they needed to develop small businesses rather than count on a big, new industry to replace timber and fishing, which has suffered from the long-running drought.
Adapting an idea used in Eastern towns troubled by plant closures, Copple, executive director of the Arcata Economic Development Corp., put together $1.4 million in grants and other funds to build a 20,000-square-foot facility.
Foodworks has drawn interest from economic development officials in nearby counties and even Japan. Yet it aims to create only 34 jobs during the next two years, a small number in light of the recent pulp mill closure in nearby Eureka that cost 262 employees their jobs.
The 12 Foodworks companies use spaces--some tiny, some spacious--with custom kitchens. They share office and warehouse facilities and employ 27 people, including the owners.
Each business has a three-year lease starting at less than half the market rate, with an option to renew for three more years. Most distribute locally or regionally, but the hope is that they will expand their territories.
One of the owners is Tom Pagano, whose Tomaso’s Specialty Sauces has earned him the title of “the Paul Newman of the North Coast.” Sporting a red San Francisco 49ers cap, Pagano, 44, spent one recent afternoon in his cramped kitchen applying labels to jars of marinara sauce.
Without Foodworks, Pagano said, it would have been tough to get his 1-year-old venture off the ground.
“Five to 10 years from now, I think (Foodworks) is going to be a very successful industry (helping) to take the place of the major industries that seem to be hurting right now,” he said.
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Inland from Arcata on winding California 299 sits Weaverville, a historic Gold Rush town that came late to the timber business but now depends on it. Weaverville would be lucky to have a Foodworks.
Instead, its outskirts sport a business park with a splendid view of the snowcapped Trinity Mountains but just one tenant--the county welfare office, one of the few booming aspects of Trinity County (population: 13,450). Efforts to attract companies have proven fruitless, and the facility has been roundly hooted.
Thanks to history buffs, hikers and other tourists, Weaverville, despite 15% unemployment, is more prosperous-looking than the distressed outposts that dot the mountain roads. But Weaverville--which like the rest of the cash-strapped county boasts of having no traffic lights--has nonetheless suffered on two counts: the drought, which has discouraged river tourism, and logging restrictions imposed by the U.S. Forest Service to save northern spotted owls.
The wet winter could do much toward reviving the rivers, but timber is still hurting. “With the spotted owl set-asides, our timber available for harvest has been reduced by about 70%,” said Pat Mortensen, a rancher and former county supervisor.
The town’s Employment Development Department office does a land-office business in unemployment benefit claims. One afternoon, Todd Hymas, a 28-year-old logger with three children, went in to apply.
The victim of a seasonal layoff, Hymas realizes only too well that his industry has changed. Over-harvesting has given timber companies a bad name, and environmentalists are winning key battles.
He sees himself as having few options, especially anything that would pay anywhere near the $38,000 a year he can make felling trees. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever done,” Hymas said. “I don’t read or write very well.” Besides, he added, logging “is a way of life.”
Two years ago, Mortensen began drumming up support for a program to encourage the growing of herbs for medicinal and culinary use and the gathering of pine cones to sell to interior decorators.
Funded in part by a Forest Service economic diversification grant, the program has attracted 95 families. One of those who piles pine cones into his pickup is Milt Mortensen, Pat’s husband and a former logger.
So far, the monetary returns from the Trinity Alps Botanicals project have been negligible. But hope keeps sprouting.
Mortensen notes that not everybody likes the idea. She should know. After she set up the program, irate residents recalled her from her supervisor’s post.
“Some elements of the timber industry have dug in their heels. It’s very shortsighted,” Mortensen said. “It’s difficult to get discussions (about an economic transition) going because of the antagonism.”
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Although far more diversified than tiny Weaverville, Redding, a regional hub in neighboring Shasta County on Interstate 5, is also in the doldrums, with unemployment at nearly 13%. Despite a surge in service industries, including the growth of two major regional hospitals, timber companies are still Redding’s key employers.
“We’ve got the same problem as the rest of the north, a lack of manufacturing,” said Jim Zauher, general manager of the Economic Development Corp. of Shasta County. Meanwhile, the county’s aggressive pursuit of light manufacturing companies has been stymied.
“There’s such a negative stigma attached to doing business in California that it’s thrown our whole marketing scheme out the window,” Zauher said.
In the past, the county had been able to lure small companies from big cities by promoting itself as “another California,” a lower-cost, less-congested alternative to moving out of state.
Now, he said, “we get a lot of ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ ”
South on Interstate 5, the blue-collar town of Anderson has been riding a roller coaster. In July, Roseburg Forest Products Co. gave notice that it planned to close its two Anderson sawmills. Then workers got a reprieve for an unfortunate reason: Harvesting of charred logs from a fire in August near the town of Round Mountain.
But on Jan. 15 the smaller mill closed, with a loss of 60 jobs. Should the other facility also close, the loss in total personal income in the area, including lost retail and other jobs, could be more than $60 million, said Jon S. Ebeling, a political science professor at Cal State Chico.
Nearby, a factory outlet mall that opened about 18 months ago draws plenty of tourists, but those retail jobs will not make up the difference.
“If we’re talking about trading off our manufacturing jobs for these retail clerk jobs, we’re obviously reducing our standard of living,” said William A. Murphy, Anderson’s city manager.
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When it comes to economic retooling, it is tough to top isolated Del Norte County in the state’s far northwest corner, where timber, locals say, is on its deathbed.
Three years ago, the maximumsecurity Pelican Bay State Prison opened in Crescent City to mixed reaction. Home to nearly 3,900 of California’s hard-core criminals, the prison is now the area’s biggest employer, with 1,336 workers that include many former loggers and fishermen. Unemployment in Del Norte (pronounced Nort ), which has run as high as 26%, now averages 14% to 15%. The prison has proven a salvation for some banks and other businesses, said Larry Bekkedahl, president of the Crescent City-Del Norte Chamber of Commerce.
Wal-Mart opened in Crescent City this month. A growing community of transplanted retirees and the stronger economic base have brought a new hospital and an influx of medical specialists.
But now residents worry about overcrowded schools and inadequate roads and services. “There’s an economy now that will sustain (better) types of jobs,” Bekkedahl said. “But there will be a lot of growing pains.”
Times researcher Norma Kaufman in San Francisco contributed to this story.
Next in Business: Arcata has something going for it that other far Northern California burgs do not: Humboldt State University and its entrepreneurs.
