Grown Pacific Sells Wholesale Divisions

Crown Pacific Partners, L.P., Portland, Or., has sold its wholesale operations and warned that it may file for Chapter I I bankruptcy protection depending on the success of ongoing negotiations with its lenders.

The warning came after the forest products firm announced its tenth consecutive quarterly loss.

Crown Pacific sold the assets of Cheshire Lumber/Sales, Albuquerque, N.M., to J.M. Thomas Forest Products, Ogden, Ut. J.M. Thomas also has a DC in Salt Lake City, Ut., and last month moved into a new l3acre facility in Boise. Id.

At the same time, Crown Pacific sold the assets of Crown Pacific Wholesale to Seneca Sawmill Co., Eugene, Or. The renamed Seneca Wholesale Co. operates as an independent division of Seneca Sawmill Co. Its primary focus will continue to be wholesale distribution. remanufacturing and wholesale direct sales.

The main wholesale office will remain at its Valley River location in Eugene and will continue to operate satellite offices in Cameron Park and

Tustin, Ca.; Glendale, Az., and Ogden, Ut. The wholesale company will be managed by Bob Brass, with Mike Thelen as sales manager.

Terri Adair and Mark Dippel will continue to manage Seneca's mill sales out of the mill offices in Eugene.

Unaffected are Crown Pacific's retail yards in Arizona and Nevada, its thousands of acres of timberland in the North Cascades, and its three mills in Washington and one in Oregon. Due to depressed lumber prices, the mills temporarily closed in late April. The Port Angeles, Wa., facility reopened two weeks later, the Marysville, Wa., mill three weeks later.

USFS Protects Lumber Firms,Workers Say

Five U.S. Forest Service workers are claiming that their timber theft unit was abolished to protect lumber companies from prosecution.

The whistleblowers will make their case this month before a federal administrative law judge at the Merit Systems Protection Board, charging that their 16-member division was disbanded in 1995 after they began investigating alleged Forest Service cover-ups of corporate timber theft.

They claim that companies were clear-cutting healthy, old-growth trees under the pretext of salvage programs that, in theory, were to thin out diseased or dead timber. The workers further allege that they were prevented from doing their job, ordered to relocate and sometimes harassed.

The Forest Service claims the unit was eliminated because it wasn't the most efficient way to protect trees from theft.

Right now, law enforcement officers attend timber harvest planning meetings and review contracts. Each year a few lumber companies are permanently barred from bidding on contracts because they violated harvest regulations.

"The big theft is occurring. not with a chain saw, but with a pencil," said Jim Keefer, a retired Forest