Federal team established to aid struggling forest product industry

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it would establish an integrated, multi-agency Economic Development Assessment Team to assist Maine’s forest product industry following the string of several mill closures.

The catalyst for the EDAT comes from a March 2016 letter from Maine’s congressional delegation to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker.

The goal of the EDAT will be to use multiple federal government agencies and solicit stakeholder input to create economic development strategies to assist job growth in rural Maine communities, many of which have been hit the hardest by the recent hardships of the forest product industry.

Federal agencies resources available to an EDAT include the Economic Development Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor and the Department of Energy.

“This announcement is welcome news for Maine,” Maine’s Congressional Delegation said in a joint statement. “Our forest products industry is a central part of the state’s heritage and a vital pillar of the state’s economy, and an Economic Development Assessment Team will assist local public and private stakeholders in coordinating strategies so the industry can continue to be a source of good-paying jobs for Mainers for generations to come.”

In her letter announcing the creation of the assessment team, Pritzker said that the Commerce Department will deploy an EDAT that will work on site in northern Maine for three days in July, where it will “participate in a comprehensive set of stakeholder meetings to evaluate new and existing economic strategies for addressing the state’s forest-based economic challenges,” according to a release.

Pritzker added that the forest product EDAT will be modeled off the National Disaster Framework and will be similar to teams that have worked on other economic development crises including the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the 2011 Joplin EF-5 tornado disaster.

“At the conclusion of the EDAT process, regional and local stakeholders will have a bottom-up strategy, developed with input from their Federal partners, designed to foster robust economic growth and recovery,” Pritzker wrote in her letters to Maine’s congressional delegation. “EDATs are not designed to be a silver bullet, but EDA and its Federal partners are committed to working closely with you and the Maine stakeholders to come to help struggling communities statewide work toward building a robust and enduring economy.”

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