California Redwood Co., a subsidiary of Green Diamond Resource Co., has put its Korbel sawmill up for sale.
“In a recent meeting, company president Douglas Reed told employees it makes sense for the sawmill to be owned or managed by a company that has deep knowledge of Douglas-fir manufacturing and marketing for the California market,” says company spokesman Gary Rynearson.
Rynearson says Green Diamond will continue to focus on its core business, “growing and harvesting high quality redwood and Douglas-fir timber.”
In May, California Redwood Co. began exiting the redwood manufacturing and distribution business, with Reed saying in a news release at the time that the company had “not been able to achieve positive results for redwood lumber manufacturing and sales over the last several years.”
Parent Green Diamond began selling its redwood logs elsewhere, and the Korbel mill switched to just milling Douglas-fir lumber on a single-shift basis. California Redwood Co. also began selling off its remaining redwood lumber inventory, and its Brainard redwood remanufacturing facility along Humboldt Bay (between Arcata and Eureka) will close at the end of this month. The 76-acre Brainard site includes lumber drying yards, storage and manufacturing buildings and housed the company’s California corporate offices. Rynearson says the company is looking at different options for Brainard, including selling or leasing part or all of it.
Since May, 61 employees have been laid off as a result of these changes, says Rynearson — eight from CRC’s Humboldt operations, and the rest from its redwood remanufacturing facilities in Woodland and Ukiah. Twenty-four more employees will be laid off once the Brainard site closes, he says. And the Korbel sawmill employs 90 people now.
Rynearson says no price has been established for its Korbel site, but the company has taken some interested parties on tours.
George Schmidbauer, who owns a sawmill in Eureka, says he toured Korbel thinking he’d like to lease it and use the site for storing more logs — especially if he could get a long-term timber contract with Green Diamond. He wasn’t interested in the sawmill. But now he says he’s dropped the idea of a Korbel operation altogether.
“We’ve been going through everything, and we just decided it doesn’t make sense to us financially,” he says.
Schmidbauer says he heard that Sierra Pacific Industries also toured the site. Rynearson wouldn’t confirm or deny, saying it is inappropriate to disclose the name of any interested party.
Several calls and an email to Sierra Pacific Industries have not yielded a response yet.
Rynearson says that besides selling the Korbel mill, the company is looking at other options, including “curtailing operations on either a temporary or permanent basis.”
There’s a rumor that the mill would close in January if it hasn’t sold. But Rynearson says no timeline has been set for making such a decision.
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This article appears in Stand Down.
Well it states that it makes sense for a company that has knowledge in the California market to own the korbel facility. If this is the case then why is Simpson, it’s former name, putting is mills in Washington, south Carolina and Georgia up for sale also? And green diamond just purchased 600 acres of timberland in southern Washington. Sounds like they just want out of the lumber business altogether to me. But I’m just speculating. That same guy said in a different interview about 2 years ago that they, crc, had no intention of selling or closing that operation when crc sent out a 60 day notice to its employees, i was one of those former employees, back on January 23 2013. That Rynearson guy is full of it.
And that was 600, 000 acres in southern Oregon not Washington. My typo there
once again, the self justified actions of the few, have affected the lives of the many… Sad to say, that seems to be the reason most businesses are failing, yet they seem to blame it on the economy, rather than a lack of understanding the economy
Enough people have realized that Thompson’s Water Seal and redwood stain on second-growth sap-wood does not a Redwood deck make. They tried to convert cut-over redwood land to Doug fir but got forced to replant redwood starting back in the late seventies.Now they’re logging those hybridized ‘wonder trees’ and finding out that you can put any spin you want on it but second-growth redwood is shit wood, barely fit for utility fencing.
His comments on Doug fir confuse me. First he says that he believes the mill would be better run by a company with “deep knowledge of Douglas- fir manufacturing and marketing for the California market,” then he says they will continue to focus on their core business, “growing and harvesting high quality… Douglas-fir timber.”
Oh. I get it. They want to grow it here, clear cut it then ship the logs somewhere else to be ‘manufactured and marketed’. Way to rape the county and out-source the jobs, boys. Does anybody here know how to say fucked?
Sigh, perhaps it is time…still, this makes me sad. It’s another part of Humboldt (and my) history’s dying.
Sad – I grew up in Korbel and worked in the mill until 1977. My Dad worked there most of his life. Last of the company towns other than Scotia. The “saving” of the spotted owl devastated the lumber industry in Humboldt county back in the 70’s when the government confiscated millions of acres of private timberland. I have many fond childhood memories of this small town – and now my childhood is for sale!
What will the disposition Camp Bower be? I worked at Korbel as a millwright and married at Camp Bower in the ’70s … Simpson folks were good to work for at that time, they cared about their future …
I worked at the Korbel mill for a number of years. To me and virtually everyone else at the site, it was obvious that the mill had problems. It was also obvious that they were of the self-inflicted variety. That is to say, not “spotted owl” legislation, but severe, chronic, mismanagement. There was a concerted effort on the part of the higher-ups to get rid of anyone in middle management that didn’t fall in line, and then an effort to get rid of all the skilled positions such a sawyers, electricians and millwrights that made waves about silly things like “safety” and general “fairness”. We can all thank the Goodells. Don’t even know if they are still there, but whether or not they are, the damage they did was extensive and, apparently irreversible.