Fairlee
Instead, the 70-year-old company announced Thursday that it will purchase a pine board business in nearby Bath, N.H., avoiding the intricacies of a multimillion-dollar reconstruction of the mill, which burned about 13 months ago.
“The complexity of building a very large sawmill complex was outweighed by the opportunity that we had at H.G. Wood,” the company that Britton has agreed to buy, Moses said. “H.G. really offers an opportunity for Britton Lumber to immediately be back in the production of pine boards.”
Moses said he hoped pine board production would recommence for Britton within “a month or less.”
He also emphasized on Thursday that state and town officials had been “100 percent” behind him in his efforts to rebuild the sawmill.
“They tried their best to help us with any program that was available to us,” he said. “I’m grateful for all their work, but we just couldn’t overcome all of the other challenges.”
The old mill was located in a flood plain near the Connecticut River, and rebuilding would have required Moses to spend some money waterproofing the structure and elevating its base. Nevertheless, Moses said, regulatory restrictions were not the reason he chose to move his pine board business elsewhere.
“The rebuilding in the flood zone really was an insurance issue, at the end of the day,” he said. “We could have rebuilt in the exact same site where the sawmill was before; we would have had to make sure that we complied with flood regulations, which we would have been delighted to do, but the insurance part of that was very, very complicated.”
After several meetings with state and local officials over the past year, it appeared that regulatory hurdles for the project would have been low, parties on all sides said Thursday.
Chris Brimmer, Fairlee’s zoning administrator, said the district the old mill stood in had been zoned for industrial use; the town code, in fact, specifically mentions a “sawmill” as an allowable use, he said.
“He faced really no hurdles on the local level whatsoever,” Brimmer said of Moses, “so if there was a regulatory issue it would have been strictly with the state, and flood-plain levels down on the site.”
Peter Kopsco, permit specialist at the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, said his sense was that it was “very possible” the project could have gone forward without much difficulty with Act 250, the statewide land-use law governing large developments. He and other state officials who met with Britton added, however, that they had never reviewed a formal application.
“We were all on board with helping them as far as we could, with the understanding that there were a lot of jobs on the line,” Kopsco said. “It’s an unfortunate thing.”
H.G. Wood, the business Moses is buying, is situated on Route 302 in the Grafton County town of Bath, about 32 miles north of the Britton Lumber site in Fairlee.
H.G. Wood’s owner also recently sold his retail lumber business in Concord, according to the company’s chief operating officer, Bob Burns. Given that transaction, it made sense to pair H.G. Wood with another distributor, Burns said.
“We’re happy about it because it gives us access to more sales,” Burns said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “(Moses) is happy about it because it gives him access to high-quality pine boards. So we’re getting together.”
Moses said the price of the H.G. Wood sale “cannot be disclosed,” but allowed that the size of the company’s manufacturing facility is about 85 percent of what Britton Lumber had.
H.G. has a “full facility,” Moses said, including a sawmill, kilns, a planer mill and office storage.
“It replaces our entire manufacturing facility,” he said, and “we will be transferring some of our folks up to Bath.”
The burned-out sawmill employed about 20 people, and around the time of the disaster, half of them lost their jobs, Moses said. The other half were moved within the company, he said, and now, once the dust has settled on the H.G. deal, Britton anticipates another five layoffs.
Moses hastened to add, however, that his wholesale business, which is headquartered on the same site in Fairlee, will remain there and is expanding.
In fact, he said, Britton is looking for truck drivers.
“I’m hopeful this will just be a small step backward,” he said, “and we’ll be hiring and re-hiring people in the future.”
Frank J. Barrett Jr., vice chairman of the Fairlee Selectboard, predicted the move would have little effect on the town.
Barrett and Moses are neighbors; the selectman lives in a converted railway station near the Britton site, and early Thursday morning was one of the lumber company owner’s first calls to share the news.
“We had a very nice conversation,” Barrett said, “and I told him I wasn’t totally surprised,” given the difficulties with insurance involved in building on flood plains.
Although Britton is one of Fairlee’s largest taxpayers, Barrett said, the town’s economy would not see much of a dip.
“Obviously, our grand list felt the impact to a certain degree — a very small degree,” he said, but “it hasn’t been a factor for a considerable period of time, and in the meantime our grand list has grown in other areas.”
“Overall,” Barrett said, “Britton Lumber is among the four biggest taxpayers in Fairlee, and the fact that they are still committed to remaining in Fairlee — I think that’s the most important thing.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.