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Show Construction Set For March Utah Forest Products Will Open New Escalante Sawmill ESCALANTE With the Dixie National Forest award of the Roundy Timber Sale contract to the Escalante-based Utah Forest Products, Prod-ucts, the promise of a dozen jobs on the major construction phase of the company's new sawmill by March has former mill workers in Escalante excited and hopeful for the first time in many months. Stephen Steed, former manager of the Escalante sawmill that closed down last year, and his unnamed partners, owners of Utah Forest Products, have leased 13 acres from Tamarix Ranch (Steed family property) five miles southeast of Escalante. The proerty is about 1.5 miles off the highway with good county road access and was recently rezoned from agricultural to heavy industrial. Steed, a veteran of the industry whose late father taught him the ropes, said they have had to scale down their thinking from the traditional tradi-tional perspective. Looking at the trends with forests all over the nation, na-tion, they have had to consider what timber they could realistically expect ex-pect to be available. With more environmental changes and more cutbacks anticipated, they knew they would never again see "business as usual" as they have known it in the past, but they believed be-lieved that with good management and sensible planning, a smaller scale production could be successful and provide some important job security se-curity for local workers. Their small mill concept consequently conse-quently has production drastically reduced, with production ideas tailored tai-lored to specific market demands and they are trying to find varied uses for aspen, fir and spruce Steed said that they are still in the financing process. Since the timber sale has been awarded to them, they will submit loan applications, appli-cations, along with timber contract and Forest Service agreements to the bank for processing. They expect ex-pect to have financing completed by March 1. Steed said that a few preliminary pre-liminary plans are underway, but major construction, with about a dozen people, will begin in March. He said he expects the mill to be on-line by mid-July or August and anticipates that most of the construction con-struction crew will stay on to work at the mill. Steed sees the mill as a small, year-round operation and he hopes to increase the number of employees employ-ees with each phase of operation. He said they have had outstanding encouragement from the community commu-nity and from the county. He is grateful to have good lines of communication with environmental interests, political groups and government gov-ernment agencies and he hopes to keep the dialogue going |
