me the raised ceilings, revealing giant, early 20th century beams and a hidden skylight; explained how the poolroom had been expanded to its former size as “The Passion Pit,” a rowdy dance floor that my father remembers from the ’70s; and swept his arms wide to reveal the ’30s era mural depicting moose and moun-
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plummeted from nearly 75 percent of personal income in the late 1970s to 55 percent. Logging and millwork had come back to the county in the ’40s but after four decades the industry was starting to decline again. That same year, Dennis and Ann Pence founded a small mail-order company called Coldwater Creek, offering Northwest-inspired clothing, jewelry and gifts. The couple, amenity migrants from New York who had landed in Sandpoint for their new start, launched the business from their apartment. In 1991, the company reported $1.6 million in profits. Two years after that, Coldwater converted a 14,000-square-foot covered bridge in downtown Sandpoint into its first retail store. The company went public in 1997, raising $37.5 million in its initial offering. By then, there were more than 1,000 employees on Coldwater’s payroll and the company reported net sales of $143 million. At the same time, lumber mills across the county were folding up. In 1996, a year before Coldwater’s IPO, Louisiana-Pacific closed its 25-acre operation in north Sandpoint. “There has been a mill at that site for at least 40 years,” Ann Kritzeck, then-director of Sandpoint’s economic development agency, told the Spokesman-Review. “It’s part of our history. If we lose it, it’s going to signal an end to the timber industry here as we know it.” My father was among the workers at the L-P mill in Sandpoint, and worked at another nearby mill that closed not long before. My friends’ fathers, too, had worked at a series of mills, from Priest River to Chilco, bouncing from closure to closure. Neon green signs started popping up on fence posts and stuck in the back windows of pickup trucks: “This family supported by timber dollars.” It was a declaration sometimes of pride, often of anger—at the North American Free Trade Agreement, for opening the United States market to cheaper Canadian lumber; at the U.S. Forest Service, for cutting off timber sales; at the mills themselves, for not being invincible; at the economy in general; and at the influx of urban refugees, specifically from California, who in some vague sense felt like the advance scouts of a future that didn’t include us. “I came in ’92, and I remember all the little signs, ‘This family supported by a logger,’ or ‘This family supports logging,’ and I think that may have been more devastating on a different level” said Carol Kunzman, current mayor of Ponderay, a small town north of Sandpoint. “It was a lot of, ‘My grandpa was a logger, my daddy was a logger.’ ... I think that was really devastating.” According to the 2002 Bonner County Comprehensive Plan, 400 lumber and wood products jobs were permanently lost in the county from July 1993-July 1999. That would be a big number for a rural economy to grapple with anytime, but what people in Bonner County remember as the demise of the timber industry in ’90s was stretched out over 18 years or more—the most recent mill closure came in 2008, when J.D. Lumber closed its operation in Priest River, eliminatAS
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Only 10 years after it started in the apartment of Dennis and Ann Pence, Coldwater Creek leased 14,000 square feet of the Cedar Street Bridge.
tains that had
Job Loss by Labor Force Percentage Bonner County employed labor force: 17,541 (March 2014)
Jobs lost in Coldwater Creek closure: 340 Percentage of Bonner County labor force: 1.9 · · · Ada County employed labor force: 198,700 (March 2014)
Coldwater Creek-equivalent job loss: 3,775 · · · Coldwater Creek-equivalent employers by labor force percentage: Independent School District Boise City: 3,800-3,899 Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center: 3,400-3,499 · · · *Idaho Department of Labor *Boise Valley Economic Partnership, Top Employers in Boise City-Nampa MSA, October 2012-September 2013 Average
been uncovered in the renovation. The idea, my friend said, was to return the 219 to its original glory—a saloon in appearance as it had been when it served the working men of my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations: miners, loggers, fishermen, sawmill workers. Back then, Sandpoint was still a fairly wild, uncouth place. In the 1880s it had been known by some as “Hangtown,” and as recorded by an early visitor, W.A. Baillie-Grohman, was generally regarded as a “wretched hole, one of the ‘tough’ towns in the tough territory of Idaho.” My grandmother, whose family moved to Sandpoint in 1924, remembered her mother herding the children from boardwalk to boardwalk in order to avoid the “whiskey dens” and brothels that lined First Avenue. The 219 opened in 1936, just as Sandpoint and Bonner County were suffering the worst of the Great Depression. The giant Humbird Lumber Co.—which operated a lakeshore mill just a few blocks from where the Niner would open on First Avenue, as well as mills in nearby Kootenai and Newport, Wash.—began a process of disintegration in 1931, putting more than 1,000 men out of work before the end of the decade. It was the single greatest economic calamity to befall Bonner County—so much so that as a kid growing up there in the 1980s, when the mills were again closing down around us, Humbird evoked a kind of existential dread. It would not be the last, setting into motion a cycle of boom and bust that would stretch from the New Deal to Yes We Can.
MULTIPLICATION TABLES In 1984, unemployment in Bonner County was 9.7 percent and earned income had
12 | MAY 14–20, 2014 | BOISEweekly
ing 200 jobs and nearly cratering the city. With the case of Coldwater Creek, about 340 jobs are being lost over the course of a summer, amounting to the sudden removal of about 1.9 percent of the countywide employed labor force. That might not sound like much, but consider what losing about 2 percent of the jobs in Ada County would look like: with an employed labor force of 198,700, a Coldwater Creek-equivalent bankruptcy in Idaho’s most populous county would mean the loss of about 3,775 jobs—put another way, imagine the closure of both Albertson’s Inc. and Wells Fargo, or Hewlett-Packard and a complete layoff of all Ada County employees, or Walmart and McDonald’s pulling out of Ada County at the same time. According to 2012-2013 employment figures from the Boise Valley Economic Partnership, Ada County could lose Idaho Power, Fred Meyer and the United States Postal Service, and the job loss would be almost exactly equivalent to the employment percentage impact suffered in Bonner County with the closure of Coldwater Creek. But these weren’t just any jobs. In a county where 2008-2012 median household income was pegged at $41,379, and 16.3 percent of the population—which was about 40,000 in 2013—live below the poverty line, Coldwater jobs were often the best jobs. According to Sandpoint Planning and Community Development Director Jeremy Grimm, 168 jobs at Coldwater’s headquarters paid between $50,000-$150,000 a year. Forty-three jobs earned $150,000 a year or more. “Do the quick math: that’s $20 million. Twenty-million dollars of income taken out of our economy. That’s the bigger concern,” he said. And it extends even beyond the impacts to local businesses. “Up until this announcement, our school district was predicting for next year relatively flat enrollment,” said Lisa Hals, chief financial and operations officer for the Lake Pend Oreille School District. From 2007-2010, the district had the most rapidly declining enrollment in the state: very bad news when 65 percent of school funding comes from average daily attendance. If 75 students leave the district with their families in the wake of Coldwater’s closure, LPOSD will be OK, Hals said. “I’ve made my prediction that we’re not going to exceed 3 percent. No more than 2 percent, and I’m comfortable with that,” she said. Any more than that level of student departure, though, and funding will start to be clearly affected. According to state law, if a district loses more than 3 percent of its average daily attendance from one year to the next, it is protected from funding loss for one year—after that, the cuts set in. School officials don’t have a clear idea of how many students are connected to Coldwater jobs, but Hals said the company’s human resources team is pulling together that data. “If there is a rapid exodus over one summer… on so many communal levels it’s a tremendous loss,” she said. Ken Bocksch, Bonner County chief deputy assessor and a former Coldwater Creek employee, agreed that the multiplier effects B O I S E WE E KLY. C O M