COASTAL OBSERVER

There are jobs available at local industries for many of the 674 employees at the International Paper Co. mill in Georgetown who learned last week that the facility will close by the end of the year, according to local officials. They are now working with the company and state agencies to match those jobs to the workforce.

But the closure of the mill that has dominated the city of Georgetown’s skyline since 1937 will still have far-reaching effects on businesses that provide timber and other goods and services to the company.

“It’s hard to assess the far-ranging impacts,” said Sarah Smith, executive director of the Waccamaw Regional Council of Governments, which provides economic development services to local governments. “It is going to carry forth into a number of businesses. It’s going to be big.”

By one estimate, the impact on the logging industry could affect over 1,000 people, she said.

The last delivery of pulp wood to the mill was Nov. 1, a day after IP announced the mill’s closing in a press release that took local officials by surprise. It once received 400 truckloads of wood a day.

The employees will be offered severance benefits, outplacement services and access to mental health resources, the company said.

IP will keep its box plant open in Georgetown. It produces containers from raw material shipped from Louisiana. The facility employs 125 people.

Georgetown County’s immediate focus is on keeping the mill’s employees in the county. Of the 526 hourly and 148 salaried workers at the mill, 646 live in the county.

“That is vital to us,” Angela Christian, the county administrator, said. “Helping these families find good jobs right here so they can continue to call this community home and thrive here is our top priority.”

IP was the third largest employer in the county, following Tidelands Health and the school district.

Several companies have said they have jobs available, Smith said.

“It’s an opportunity for employers to attract people,” she said.

A “rapid response team” from SC Works, part of the state Department of Employment and Workforce, set up this week at the mill’s training center to help workers find new jobs.

“Any person who has lost a job through no fault of their own is eligible for services,” Smith said. “There are programs and resources out there to assist them.”

The county plans to host a job fair Nov. 21 and 22 at the Howard Center, just down the street from the mill.

At a press conference this week officials emphasized that they are working together to mitigate the impacts of the closure.

“We are absolutely overwhelmed,” Ayla Dyer, workforce development director at Waccamaw Regional, said. “Numerous business and industries from across the state have reached out to let us know they have job openings and would like to hire these IP Georgetown workers.”

Tidelands Health has “a couple of hundred positions open right now,” said Bruce Bailey, CEO of Tidelands Heath. It has facilities in Georgetown and Horry counties and is looking at ways to help the IP employees.

Some IP employees have spouses who work at Tidelands, he added.

Tidelands is also working with a coalition of health and social services providers to ensure that IP employees and their families have access to care, Bailey said.

Dyer noted that job services are also available to contract workers and employees of other businesses that have been impacted by the closure.

The county has asked IP for a list of the local businesses it works with to try to assess that impact. Christian estimated that there could be another 200 contractors affected by the closure.

“It’s going to be a wide-running impact on a number of different sectors,” Smith said.

For example, with the mill no longer accepting timber, landowners who planted trees as an investment may no longer have a market for them or see prices depressed, particularly since a paper mill in North Charleston also closed this year, she said.

Beth Stedman, president of the Georgetown County Chamber of Commerce, said it will survey its members on their anticipated impacts from the mill closing. The chamber is trying to get data from the state Department of Commerce to help estimate the broader economic impact.

“For all the charettes and visioning that we’ve done, none of them anticipated that the paper mill wasn’t going to be here,” Stedman said. “People will have to be creative and patient – and patient is the word we have to underscore.”