Next year the Port Townsend Paper mill will celebrate a century on our skyline. The closer you get to the buildings, the more that age shows. Walking by, you can see whole sections that have been let go, with windows broken out and ferns growing in the gutters. It’s hard to know what to think about the place. What’s even harder to perceive are the motivations of the people in charge, or who those people even are.
Make no mistake, the facility is a vital piece of community infrastructure. It provides 300 dignified jobs, many of them union, and pays pensions throughout the area. It makes products every single one of us uses. It’s a vital wood-chip market that allows Peninsula sawmills to be profitable and forest thinning to generate some income. It’s a voracious cardboard recycling beast. The steam plume serves as a weather vane as we head out on the water. Besides decades of underinvestment, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the mill itself.
What worries me is how the mill is being run by its parent company, Atlas Holdings. Atlas is the latest in a series of hands-on private equity funds that have fundamentally changed the relationship between the mill and our community. Since Atlas took over, the results have been mixed. Some sense improvement, but Atlas has had their fair share of sludge spills, safety incidents, fires, a new level of stench, and six-figure fines from the Department of Ecology, all of which have been well documented in these pages and other...
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