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GEORGIA PACIFIC’S FORDYCE MILL LAYS OFF WORKFORCE

By Wes Clement/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Friday, October 23, 2009 11:35 PM CDT

About 360 employees of Georgia Pacific’s Fordyce mill will be without work temporarily.

GP announced Friday the mill’s workforce would be laid off for as long as six months because low home starts have decreased demand for plywood.

“It was no surprise,” Fordyce Mayor William Lyon said. “They began hauling logs off the log yard to Crossett and cutting up large logs to make paper instead of pulpwood. So we knew it was coming and have for several weeks.”

He said in addition to the 360 GP employees, at least 150 loggers in the area would also be out of work.

“That is a big hit for a little town, but we’ll survive it,” he said. “Until they start building some houses and start building again, there’s no way they should be able to open that business.”

The Bearden Lumber Company located in Bearden, 15 miles from Fordyce, reduced worker’s hours to one day per week recently, causing some Fordyce residents to lose income, Lyon said.

Julie Mills, executive vice-president of Arkansas Home Builders Association, said as a whole new home starts in Arkansas began to increase about two months ago and she expects the trend to continue. Arkansas, she said, has done relatively well compared to the nation as a whole.

“Are we going to recover from this thing quickly? No, we’re not,” Mills said, “but we are recovering. We are going into the new economy, so it is slow, but we are definitely picking up.”

She said U.S. Census Bureau building permit figures are a rough indicator of how the state has done compared to the rest of the nation, but that the figures cannot be used to accurately tell how many homes have been built.

“Those are low because there is no true number of building permits (new home starts), because if you live outside the city limits, you don’t have to have a building permit,” Mills said. “As you and I know, there is a lot of building going on outside the city limits.”

The Census Bureau reported 84 building permits in Jefferson County in 2006, 92 in the county during 2007 and 64 during 2008. The drop from 2006 to 2008 was about 24 percent.

The national number of housing units permitted during 2006 was 1,839,000 and the number was 905,000 for 2008, a drop of about 50 percent.

“Especially Michigan, Florida, Arizona, all of those guys got hit,” Mills said. “They didn’t get hit, they got hammered.”

Lyon thinks there is more hardship to come.

“Eighty percent of the economists tell us the recession is over, and I always wondered why I couldn’t pass economics in college,” Lyon said. “I don’t think it’s over for a long shot. I think we’re in for years of the same thing.”

He said people of the Fordyce area are somewhat resistant to the negative impacts of the mill’s layoffs.

“Fordyce is a unique town and all these counties around it,” Lyon said. “These people are self-sufficient. You don’t tell them what to do, you ask them.

“I think everybody will be all right, they’ll just have to tighten up.”

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