news story / By Heidi Walters

Pass Me a Tissue

Freshwater Tissue banking on tan oak and a PR power-broker

(Oct. 15, 2009)  Ask anyone these days what they think will become of our dear old white lady of the spit — the comatose pulp mill on the Samoa Peninsula — and it’s likely they’ll say “parts.”

Not surprisingly, that infuriates Bob Simpson, one of the guys who bought the mill from Evergreen Pulp — formerly associated with the big paper manufacturing company Lee and Man — last February.

The pulp mill. Photo by Heidi Walters

GALLERY >

The mill had closed in October 2008, casting 215 workers adrift, and Simpson’s new outfit, Freshwater Tissue Co., planned to convert the beast into a green toilet paper mill (as in environmentally friendly) that would also produce electricity. They were going to hire a bunch of people back.

But the plan’s hit some major snags. Like, procuring the $409 million needed to get the ball rolling — and perhaps more importantly, securing a reliable source of wood chips to make the pulp. And Simpson even talked about these troubles in a news story in the Times-Standard last month, which began on a dire note: “The Samoa pulp mill may be taking its last gasps, likely to be sold off in parts as the latest bid to restart the plant is wilting.”

“They just wrote us off as dead,” he said.

True, Simpson said, he has sold off some old bearings and some scrap that was junking up the mill. But he has not given up. He continues to spend $100,000 a month to maintain the mill. And since February, Freshwater’s been seeking to stick a straw into that big pool of federal stimulus billions that’s being squirted here and there for others to enjoy. But they’re getting nowhere. So Simpson’s pumping up the PR volume by hiring an old friend and a nationally connected public relations expert from Washington, Dale Didion of The Didion Group.

Didion once served as a U.S. Treasury diplomat in Saudi Arabia, and worked on budget and policy in the executive Office of the President. He’s worked for major PR firms, but now has his own, smaller company. But Didion’s clients impress: The Nature Conservancy, Monsanto, AT&T, Warner Brothers, U.C. Santa Cruz, Loyola University and more. Most pertinent to this tale, he has long worked with Louisiana-Pacific — the company that Simpson worked for in the 1990s, and where the two men met. It was Didion who helped spread the word about L-P’s software innovation, Terra Vision, which allowed the public to examine the company’s timber harvest operations via geographic overlays and which was rolled out in a big Smithsonian to-do, and again when L-P’s mill went chlorine-free.

Didion also did work for Timbron, a company Simpson founded, but no longer is with, that recycles foam packaging from computers. Didion’s also on the Save the Redwoods League’s Board of Councillors and, said Simpson, he helped National Geographic with its recent redwood media extravaganza.

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