Plant Closure Leaves North Country Towns in Crisis

The announced layoffs at the Ethan Allen plant is the latest in a series of heavy blows for Coos County.

Locals are calling the loss significant and fear the towns that depended upon the plant may not be able to survive much longer.

“It probably means disaster.”

Donna Caron is the town manager of Colebrook, New Hampshire, a town of 2300 that sits just south of the Beecher Falls Plant.

She says the plant’s closure may be the final blow to this North Country community.

“ You know, a lot of people, I’m afraid, are gonna lose their homes. There’s gonna be more domestics, because people get very upset when money is tight.”

And the hurt families feel will echo beyond those who lost work at the plan.

“So many of our businesses in Colebrook are hanging on by a thread and this is just gonna break them. Your locals are not going to be doing shopping or maintaining homes. They’re just gonna exist, and eventually that existence is going to run out.”

As the lay-offs show, manufacturing has become something of an endangered species here in the North Country.

“We lost Groveton Paperboard, which was 2006. We lost Wassau Papers and the Berlin Pulp Mill.

Peter Riviere is the executive director of the Coos Economic Development Corp.

““We lost Groveton Paperboard, which was 2006. We lost Wassau Papers and the Berlin Pulp Mill. So we’ve lost six or seven hundred gainfully employed people, and what it’s meant is that some of those families have just picked up stakes and moved out of the region.”

The state hopes to offer extended unemployment benefits to the area.
If the US Dept. of Labor approves it, former Ethan Allen employees can qualify under the trade adjustment act.

The act provides job re-training for employees whose jobs have been lost to foreign competition.

Michael Power is with New Hampshire Works, the State’s Job Training Agency.

“If the company qualifies under the trade adjustment act, workers will become available for expanded job training benefits that go far beyond what we offer now. Instead of a $4,000 package it goes up to about $14,000 and extends the period in which they’re eligible for by a great deal. So it’s really a much better package.”

But residents say even these benefits might not be enough.

“Even if you were to train someone or send them to school and pay for it, people are having a hard enough time as it is to find jobs.”

Melanie Mathieu is Colebrook, NH, tax clerk.

Her family has worked at the Ethan Allen plant for generations.

Her fiancée lost his job in March, and both her parents have until just the end of August.

“We know one person who’s either going to electrical school or to be a burner technician, that’s all well and good to know that, but to find work up here, that’s a different thing. There are six or seven other people who do the same exact job here more experienced who’ve been doing it longer. To me, the training is great, but can you find anything up here?”

Even with long-term assistance, Peter Riviere says the county is feeling the the ripple effects of growing unemployment.

Riviere: “You know all these people had pretty good health care plans, and those just withered. Already the Colebrook Hospital, the Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital, has the highest uninsured client population in the state.”

The Federal Government is building a prison in Berlin which will bring some jobs back to the area.

And the State continues its efforts to create jobs in the emerging renewable energy sector.

As Riviere points out, the area’s economy will have to be diversified.
But that transformation isn’t going to happen overnight.

“But the studies are going, the dialogues are going, the planning is going. But it really speaks to the resilience, the survival of the north country. These are people who still know how to get it done. But it sure does get tiresome after a while.”

The State is waiting to see whether the Ethan Allen employees qualify for the Trade Assistance Act funds.

The Ethan Allen plant closes at the end of August.

For NHPR News, I’m Kathryn Wells.