The proposed acquisition of Old Town Fuel and Fiber is good news for the mill’s workers and a community that has been reeling from the mill’s previous closures and downsizing. The operation was last sold six years ago, and production has idled as ownership has changed.
As time passes, Maine’s mills employ fewer and fewer people, leaving many skilled workers without jobs and local young people looking farther afield for employment prospects.
For some, a move to another community — or state — is the best option. Paper mills in other states have reached out to officials in Bucksport seeking to hire workers who will soon be out of a job when the Verso mill closes there. Out-of-state companies have also advertised for mill workers in the Bangor Daily News.
The downside, however, is that if a large number of workers leave Bucksport or another of Maine’s struggling mill towns, that area’s workforce is diminished, making it harder to attract employers. It’s an inevitable downward spiral.
The Associated Press recently looked at this phenomenon in Danville, Illinois. The community, about 50 miles west of Indianapolis, was once home to major industrial operations, including General Motors and General Electric. As those jobs left, so did the town’s residents.
“While Wall Street traders and software CEOs soared to enormous affluence, waves of people fell out of the middle class as manufacturing’s share of the economy shrank,” the AP wrote of the country’s growing wealth gap. “Following the downside arc of the wealth gap was inevitable for many who stayed in stricken factory towns. For others, though, escaping meant separating their own fate from that of their hometowns.”
Ten years after graduation, about half the members of the Danville, Illinois high school class of 2004 are doing well financially. Many moved away to places with jobs, like Colorado and South Carolina.
This highlights the conundrum of educating young people as the solution to lingering workforce shortage problems. Young people who are well educated are more likely to leave states with few job prospects.
The trend of more-educated people moving and less-educated staying began to emerge several years ago, the AP reported. “A Census Bureau study found that more than half of highly educated workers who moved between 2005 and 2010 left their counties. By contrast, 70 percent of people without high school diplomas who moved did so within the same county,” the news service said.
Bangor City Councilor Ben Sprague saw a more dramatic exodus of classmates from the Bangor High School class of 2002. He was one of 26 to win the Superintendent’s Academic Excellence Award that year. He is the only one of the 26 who is now living in Bangor. Only three live in Maine.
“If we don’t reverse this trend of people leaving and not coming back, we’ll be in a demographic winter … if we’re not there already,” Sprague said last year.
According to former state economist Charles Colgan, Maine is already there. Keeping young people in state is not enough, he warned at a forum last year. To prosper, Maine needs to attract 60,000 new residents in the next 20 years, he said.
“People assume that if we could just keep our young people here, it would solve the problem,” said Colgan. “There are not half enough of them because not enough young people are born here. We have to get people from other places to move here. We’ve got to get more people in.”
New residents are moving to Maine, but in small numbers, and they are settling in southern Maine counties.
Statewide, Maine lost population between 2012 and 2013, according to estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau last December. And, in 2013, deaths exceeded births in the state for the first time in recent history.
No one pretends that some of the solutions — to draw more residents, keep residents here, grow the number of racial and ethnic minorities, increase workforce participation among the state’s existing population, and boost entrepreneurial support — will be easy. The state’s political culture and structure are not conducive to developing and sticking with plans that must last longer than a generation or even a two-year election cycle.
But as Maine’s economy continues to change, especially in towns heavily reliant on a single industry, such planning and follow-through are long overdue.
