Annapolis showdown
ing demand. The same forces had closed other blue-collar job centers around Cumberland — the Celanese textile plant in 1983 and the Kelly-Springfield tire factory in 1987.
As the population thinned and tax revenue waned, the number of public high schools in Allegany County shrank from seven to three.
Mill workers say pressure to cut pollution began in the 1950s, when a wastewater treatment plant opened just downriver from the mill. By the 1970s, a 600-foot smokestack rose from the mill to lift emissions high above the valley. Those and other investments likely improved the fortunes of the once-bare mountain opposite the river from the mill. The peak once called “Baldy” is now covered in thick forest.
Verso, the mill’s current owner, says former and current management has invested more than $200 million since the 1950s in protecting the environment. That includes the installation of a succession of recovery boilers, which burn black liquor and capture chemicals that can be reused to make more paper.
In a 1975 ad in the Cumberland Sunday Times, the mill touted a state-of-the-art boiler installed three years earlier, said to be the tallest building between Baltimore and Pittsburgh. It said the $10 million machine was part of a “progressive and costly effort” to invest some $37 million in pollution controls over the previous two decades — an amount worth at least $168 million today.
The efforts helped restore the local environment. Today, groups of anglers catch trout downriver of the mill, and a bald eagle roosts near its lumber yard — wildlife that Harvey would never have expected to see when he started working at the mill in the 1980s.
“I believe they have grown into being very good stewards of the environment,” Harvey says.
But the outlay also made it more difficult for the mill to compete, especially as paper mills began appearing around the Pacific Rim in the 1980s.
It was also the time when readership of printed magazines and newspapers began to decline. The combination of pressures wracked the Luke mill as it forced the closure of other paper mills across the country.
Dozens of mills have closed since 2000, and more than 200,000 jobs have disappeared. The industry now employs about 370,000 people.
Luke’s paper-making machines were closed down one by one. From as many as seven that ran through World War II, only two remain. (With new technology, they make the mill more efficient and productive than it has ever been.)
The oldest paper machines, which press and heat wood pulp until it rolls out in massive rolls, were rendered obsolete and sold to Pakistan.
With each contraction, mill workers grew more anxious.
Gary Custer worked as an engineer and manager at the mill for some 25 years before leaving in 2014. “Every move that happens, the whole work force feels that and starts to wonder what’s going on,” he says.
The turmoil is felt in Luke, where a town of more than a thousand people in 1930 has dwindled to 63, according to the census. For generations, steam from the mill heated Luke’s homes for no more than $20 a month. But that heating supply was cut off in 2010.
New worries spring up every time the mill is sold to a new owner. In the past dozen years, it has passed from the Luke family business through two separate corporations to Verso.
Neighbors say they used to be so close with mill managers, they would know when and why the mill might temporarily suspend production. Now, they say, with Verso’s corporate offices in Ohio, they find out only when the valley goes dark, and traffic disappears.
Harvey, president of United Steelworkers Local 676, had never been to Annapolis when he and a dozen of his fellow mill workers loaded up in two vans on a chilly morning in March 2013 for the three-and-ahalf-hour trek from Luke to the capital.
They were nervous. The territory was unfamiliar, and the outcome uncertain. Environmentalists were urging the state to stop sending ratepayer money to paper mills. The steelworkers union and mill management had been working with lawmakers and the administration of Gov. Martin O’Malley on a compromise. The deal would maintain the subsidies — and the jobs they support — for the Luke mill only, not paper mills outside Maryland.
But the deal fell apart. The Luke mill and its workers rejected it, saying that because the money was vital to the whole paper industry, they decided it wasn’t fair to accept special treatment.
Now, Harvey and his comrades were in Annapolis to fight for the subsidy. The union and mill management thought workers’ voices could be most powerful against their opposition.
At a Senate hearing on a bill to take away the subsidies, Harvey sat and waited for his turn to speak. He watched as Tidwell, of the climate action network, held up a vial of thick black liquor. Tidwell argued that the bill to cut off the subsidy to the paper mill was a rare “nobrainer” that should pass the General Assembly easily.
A coalition of environmental groups urged lawmakers on with a slogan: “End the gimmicks. End the loopholes.” Administration officials suggested that the paper industry didn’t need the subsidies because it would burn black liquor even without the extra money.
“They have been doing this for decades,” said Kevin Lucas, then director of energy market strategies for the Maryland Energy Administration. “They will continue to do it as standard operating procedure, independent of whether we are paying them.”
State Sen. Rob Garagiola, the bill’s sponsor, stressed that the state Renewable Portfolio Standard should channel ratepayer money only to new and clean energy technologies. “The RPS was not intended to be the crutch to keep a business open,” the Montgomery County Democrat said.
The mill workers sat in the back of the hearing room. They wore matching T-shirts urging legislators to reject Senate Bill 684.
Richard Watro, then the Luke mill’s manager, responded by expressing frustration at hearing the mill called “old” and “dirty” when he had seen hundreds of millions of dollars invested into new technology over three decades.
Jim Strong, the steelworkers’ Maryland director, said the legislation threatened thousands of jobs in the paper business. “Once you lose an industry to another country, that industry doesn’t come back,” he said.
Harvey was the last person to testify. His nerves were frayed. He practically shouted into the microphone. “I’m the guy who burns the black liquor,” he announced. He pleaded for lawmakers to spare his members another setback. The union had already fought through the foreign competition, the corporate mergers, the contract negotiations.
“The last thing I want to do,” he said, “is go to my 617 union members and tell them, ‘By the way, you’re the next victim.’”
The group left for the long drive home not knowing whether to be satisfied or relieved.
Within weeks, lawmakers came up with an offer similar to a proposal they’d floated before the hearing: The paper mills would lose the subsidies, but the governor would grant the Luke mill cash from state coffers each year to offset the loss. It was a win for environmentalists and for the workers of Western Maryland, or so it seemed.
The mill balked again. They couldn’t be sure future governors would honor the deal. And they rejected the special treatment.
The attempts at compromise by the Democratic governor and environmental allies in the General Assembly had failed. And the legislation was defeated. replanting, the cycle could be made carbon-neutral. The paper mill seized on it like a shield.
Last year, the mill’s workers made their case in the form of a four-and-a-half minute video they delivered to Annapolis. To the soundtrack of a strumming banjo, lawmakers saw views of the lush forests and bubbling Potomac, all alongside the steaming smokestacks.
Harry Stafford, a safety advocate at the mill, explains that the mill raised him and put his three daughters through college.
“If this mill wasn’t here, there would be a giant void,” he says in the video. “Everything about it touches an awful lot of people.”
The momentum shifted. Lawmakers said they had revived the issue at the behest of environmentalists, but they no longer believed that a bill ending the black liquor subsidy could pass.
Del. Jeff Waldstreicher offered several bills over the years that would have ended the paper mills’ subsidies. It became obvious to the Montgomery County Democrat that the issue was stoking a conflict between key Democratic constituencies: environmentalists and labor. Dividing them would never allow enough votes to pass a black liquor measure.
“Bills are about counting to a certain number in committee,” Waldstreicher says. “A frontal assault on this issue will not be successful.”
And so environmentalists have largely given up the fight in Maryland. They have chosen to focus instead on expanding the state’s renewable energy supply to cover half or even all of Maryland’s energy needs, up from the current 25 percent goal for 2020.
Groups including the Maryland Clean Energy Jobs Initiative and the Maryland League of Conservation Voters are campaigning to take the “renewable” label away from household trash, but not black liquor.
Years after comparing black liquor to pink slime, Tidwell says, there is reluctance to antagonize the Luke mill any further.
“The General Assembly came very close to closing the black liquor loophole in 2013,” he says. But he doesn’t think that could happen today — there is no longer the political will.