Pepin Lumber Inc.

American Forest Management, and H.C. Haynes. The company has also worked on Wagner and Seven Islands lands, though less frequently, as well as for other landowners. They cut a lot of wood, trucking 90-100 loads to mills in an average week, or around 140,000 tons a year. You can’t get that kind of production year after year without running an efficient, professional company, and Pepin Lumber clearly is one. In an industry where employee turnover is high, Pepin Lumber has highly skilled workers including many long-term, veteran employees. Maurice concluded long ago that the higher cost of running newer equipment is worth it to achieve greater efficiency, reliability, and employee happiness. That all translates to better production, so Pepin’s trucks and logging equipment is high quality, much of it state-ofthe-art.

Business is good right now, wood is moving and there is no lack of work. Even chips, which for many

Pepin Continued from Page 11 16 loggers in Maine are no longer worth trucking, are a market Pepin Lumber can take advantage of due to proximity to mills like ReEnergy Stratton, Maurice said. There are plenty of challenges, just as there are for loggers throughout the region. As veteran workers age it is hard to attract replacements. One of Pepin’s delimber operators is 73 years old - he retired and before long he decided to come back to the woods. Watching him work it’s hard to imagine how anyone could be a better operator, but he won’t work forever and that skill is something that took decades to achieve. Getting new operators is hard, especially in a remote place like Coburn Gore. More than half the workers are bonded workers from Quebec.

“If we didn’t have the bonded workers we wouldn’t be able to operate,” Mylene said. “That’s our biggest issue. A lot of younger workers, when they find out where we are actually located they lose interest, Coburn Gore is an unorganized territory so amenities such as cell phone signal, grocery store, restaurant are not available. However, we offer lodging at our garage located in Stratton which offers everything but if the worker is not from the area, he will rarely stay, being away from their family can be hard on the worker.” underway on both sides of Route 27 south of town. The sun was out, but the roads remained icy and snow in the woods was already getting deep. The logging crews had been working for hours, and the radio crackled steadily with

The scale of operations is a challenge to manage now that the company is large. So is the cost.

“My fuel bill is twenty to thirty thousand dollars,” Maurice said. “A week.”

With multiple crews and jobs and facilities, Pepin Lumber isn’t a business you can see in just one place, you have to travel. On a recent late November morning, Maurice and Mylene left the Pepin Lumber office in Coburn Gore to do that, visiting company operations truck drivers and machine operators checking in, both in French and English.

The first leg of the day’s trip was into the woods north of 27, winding on a road through mountains topped with wind turbines to sites where Pepin crews were busy cutting, processing, and trucking wood.

At the highest point, a feller buncher was grinding up a slope laying down trees. Below, delimbers were at work processing wood, including near a power line - a hazard operators were keeping a careful eye on as they worked. The road to the highest yard was too icy for trucks so Maurice had directed the crews to bundle the logs and use the grapple skidders to get them to a lower landing where they were being piled, slashed or loaded.

On the radio but more often in person, Maurice checked in with each employee he passed, listening, making decisions, giving instructions, moving on. One delimber operator was busy repairing the head on a machine and he stopped to talk. He talked to drivers as trucks were loaded and headed out for Route 27. This process of overseeing operations spread across many miles makes for a fairly typical day for her father, Mylene said, though to see as many employees and machines gathered in one area as they were at this site was unusual and often it would have taken more time and miles to see so much of the day’s operations before noon.

Traveling further to the northeast, Maurice visited his son, Cedric and another worker, who were busy with an excavator building a wooden bridge over a small stream to extend a logging road toward one of the nearby ranges in preparation for logging this winter once the ground freezes completely. With much of the bridge already in place the job was more than half done and would likely be complete by the end of the day. For Pepin Lumber, building and maintaining roads and logging bridges is routine and necessary to keep operations rolling in the remote areas where the company harvests.

Cedric oversees this as well as most moving of equipment, dealing with employees, plowing, and more. He does a bit of everything, Mylene said, while her brother

Carl operates a truck with a self-loading crane and her brother Alex operates the company’s cut to length harvester. Her mother, Julie, has been critical to the company from the very beginning, running the office and keeping the paperwork in order and supporting her husband every step of the way.

Leaving the bridge, Maurice stopped to check out the shiny new black Kenworth truck - the company’s newest - that had hauled the excavator to the spot on a low bed. Pepin Lumber tends to use the older trucks mainly in the woods and the newest for the runs to the mills.

Pepin Continued from Page 136

Traveling back south and west with trips up side roads to visit additional sites in the area where Pepin Lumber had wood yards or operations underway eventually brought Maurice and Mylene back to Rt. 27 in the early afternoon, where Pepin trucks were headed for the Sappi mill in Skowhegan on this day. Pepin trucks wood to mills in both Quebec and Maine, though the majority ends up in Maine.

A short distance away, a road on the south side of the highway led to another Pepin crew logging on Penobscot land in the Alder Township parcel, with a grapple rumbling through the trees feeding wood to a delimber while further on a slasher was cutting and sorting logs as a Pepin truck rolled up to begin loading. Maurice stopped to talk with the operators and the driver, then it was back on the road to return to Route 27.

Now midafternoon and with the light beginning to fade it was time for a quick trip back to Coburn Gore for fuel before heading down Big Island Road to woods just beyond a pond. There, a short distance up a skid trail, Alex Pepin was working alone in Pepin Lumber’s only processor - a Tigercat 822D with a Logmax head. Pepin Lumber added this cut-to-length capability in 2017 as more landowners began to request it, and Alex was cutting not far from the pond where the machine is a good fit for selective harvesting and low impact logging.

After checking in with Alex, Maurice and Mylene headed back at sunset to the office where Julie Pepin was still hard at work.

With so many members of the Pepin family so involved and committed to its success, it is hard to imagine Pepin Lumber won’t still be logging in the mountains of Maine for years and generations to come. Maurice is now logging on lands he cut years ago when he first started in the woods, and the family hopes to keep that tradition going.

That future is one reason Pepin Lumber Inc. joined the Professional Logging Contractors (PLC) of Maine. The company is a valued member that has supported PLC’s efforts to fight for the logging industry in Maine.

This past summer, Pepin Lumber stepped up to support the PLC’s third Mechanized Logging Operations Program (MLOP) class in a big way, donating classroom and apartment space in their Stratton garage for students and instructors to use, donating the services of their mechanic there and the facilities and tools to keep the class’s equipment operating, and visiting the site to offer technical assistance and to set up yards, sort wood, and get the wood hauled efficiently, PLC Safety and Training

Coordinator Donald Burr, said.

“They showed great patience with our wood piles,” Donald said. “The Pepins were great to work with and this cooperation between a logging contractor and a college program is unique and was a huge shot in the arm to the students in the class.”

Fifteen students started that class in the summer of 2019, and all 15 graduated. On the day Maurice and

Mylene toured Pepin Lumber’s operations in November, one of those graduates, Payton Ross, was at the first job site running a delimber, part of the logging industry’s future now thanks to Pepin Lumber.

That future will be challenging, and some of those challenges will be steep, but Pepin Lumber is used to that, and they’ll still be there, logging in the hills and mountains of Maine.

Doran Continued from Page 9 hoping that a few less cuts would stop the bleeding. These are the small cuts that I referenced earlier.

One clear example of this would be how and why information was shared by the Maine Forest Service with outside organizations during active investigations of contractors between 2011 and 2018. This information was then used as leverage against contractors without their knowledge by wood buyers and was ultimately used against them without due process of law.

I discovered this in the summer of 2018 when one of our members was being used as an example of poor workmanship during a meeting of the Maine Sustainable Forestry Initiative’s Standards Implementation Committee (SFI SIC). It turns out that the Forest Service was sharing information from investigations with the SFI SIC. The member had no knowledge that they were under investigation by the Forest Service nor that their job site was being used as fodder for a public discussion. It quickly became apparent that this was not the first time that this had occurred and that the Forest Service had a long track record of doing this going back several years.

At that point in time, when the Forest Service was confronted by this discovery, we were told that this was standard procedure and that they had been doing it for years because they felt that this was a way that they could change behavior. Astounded by the fact that a public agency was not only violating the rights of the business by sharing information with an outside organization but was using it as a leverage strategy to change behavior, I decided that we needed to push back and ensure that this never happened again. The state police would never share information from an active investigation with an outside organization, nor should the Maine Forest Service.

After a discussion with the Attorney General’s office about this action and the submission of a bill to the legislature to make this type of behavior illegal, we believe that this practice will not occur again.

In our work with the Maine Forest Service, we are also speaking with them about making sure that everyone is treated fairly and with respect. One example of this is looking at statements or polices that the Forest Service has that single out activity that could be done by anyone (loggers, foresters, wood buyers, etc.) but focuses specifically on the contractor as the only liable party. What we need to say is that there are forest professionals that could include contractors, foresters, wood buyers, etc. that could behave unethically. It’s not just contractors that do bad work and therefore they shouldn’t be the only ones that are singled out.

At the end of the day it really comes down to mutual respect. Providing respect for the forest and earning that same level of respect in return. We believe we have that respect in the leadership of the Maine Forest Service now and that only good things lie ahead. The addition of Patty Cormier as the Director of the Forest Service has a been a breath of fresh air and we are very excited that Ms. Cormier has taken our issues to heart and is not only revamping the customer service mission of the Bureau but is also ensuring that all of their constituencies are treated equally.

As you know, much of my time is spent at the state legislature fighting back against harmful legislation, finding ways to use policy for cost savings (tax exemptions), using policy to create markets (wood energy) or looking for spare change in the couch cushions to help with logger training in high schools and for our community college program. In January of 2020, the Legislature comes back to town for the short session (January-April) and it is that time again to ensure that loggers and truckers are not harmed by the actions of our elected officials and

Doran Continued Page 18 perhaps are positively impacted.

Since athletics are a big part of my background, I tend to use basketball analogies to explain much of what we do at the legislature. That said, we are usually on the defensive end of policy discussions in Augusta, with more time spent defending ourselves against unnecessary laws and regulation rather than moving the ball down the court in a position to score. Everyone knows that the key to winning is outscoring your opponent so if you can’t score, you can’t win.

Over the last decade, we have accomplished a great deal in Augusta, which we should all be very proud of. Yet, at the same time, there have also been small tweaks made, predominately on the regulatory side in state agencies, and much of this occurred without our involvement or without our knowledge. The impacts are generally hidden and their impacts are not felt for years afterward.

Turning now to the year ahead, we will set our sights on Augusta as our friends in the Legislature return on January 8, 2020 for the short session, which is scheduled to be completed in April. For the most part, we do not have new issues to tackle, but a few carry over bills from 2019 that still require action. And while we need the attention and support of the Legislature, more importantly we also need the support of the Mills Administration to move them across the finish line.

All of these issues will help with the crisis that our contractors are facing with overall financial health as well as workforce supply. As noted in previous articles, not only will this industry require 3,000 new people in the next 10 years, we also need to change the narrative that this is not a good industry to work or operate in if you are the family member of a contractor or a new entrant looking for a viable long term career in rural Maine.

Specifically, we need assistance with:

1. Workforce Development (MLOP and CTE training) – In a supplemental budget, support increases in funding for equipment at Career and Technical High Schools (CTE). Support a $7.5 million request for workforce training funding at Maine’s Community Colleges to assist our Mechanized Logging Operations Program in 2020 and 2021

2. LD 1498/Canadian bridge advantage

Since 2003, a Canadian bridge weight advantage (Madawaska, Van Buren, Calais) has led to $108 million in lost economic opportunity for Maine’s loggers and truckers and 25 jobs/annually because of an unlevel playing field with Canadian contractors.

3. Master Logger and LD 1698 – A tax credit for increased manufacturing capacity should also provide recognition for logging companies that meet a 3rd party performance standard. If Maine takes the lead to recognize good work by contractors, others will follow.

We know that there will be issues that we will need to defend ourselves against during this short session, but we are very hopeful that the Governor and all members of the Legislature come together to help our family based businesses moves forward with the actions that they take in this short session.

Lastly, I want to touch on the tremendous generosity of our membership and supporting members over the past year with our Log A Load for Kids program.

At the end of 2018, we decided to expand our program in size and scope by providing resources to two hospitals instead of one and also by adding another golf tournament in southern Maine. While this endeavor was a bit risky because of the additional workload and because we were not sure how much more we could ask, the results show just how amazing our membership is. In 2019, we provided $137,000 to the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital in Portland (a new partner) and to Northern Light Eastern Maine Health in Bangor. This is a 45% increase over 2018 and continues to show that the when the logging community is faced with a new challenge, they will always rise to the challenge to meet it. I couldn’t be prouder of the commitment and dedication to this cause and the contributors who stepped up even more so in 2019 to ensure its success.

I hope the winter is productive for all of you and I look forward to celebrating 25 years of PLC success on May 8th in Bangor!!!

Dana