The Native Village of Napaimute is starting a commercial lumber business in the middle Kuskokwim this year. The workers are currently moving the sawmill 40 miles downriver from Chuathbaluk to three miles below Kalskag where the mill will cut commercial lumber on demand, creating jobs and providing cheaper, locally sourced lumber for Kuskokwim residents.
“We have a good crew. It looks like they don’t need me right now. I guess I could talk a little bit,” Mark Leary said. He’s the Director of Development and Operations for the Native Village of Napaimute.
Leary has been trucking milling equipment and buildings down the frozen Kuskokwim for weeks with the Napaimute crew. And when we talked, their truck had just broken down – again.
“We are six miles below Aniak in the middle of the river working. We’ll get it fixed. This is everyday stuff for us, breaking down on the river,” Leary said, laughing.
Leary said they could have waited for summer and chartered a barge to transport everything. But, he asked, who would benefit from that?
“Very few local people [are] working in the barge industry anymore, and we chose to move it ourselves by ice roads so our guys can get the work,” Leary said.
The same crew also plowed those ice roads, the Kuskokwim highway – 250 miles of smoothed ice connecting the Kuskokwim villages.
Leary said the ice road and the sawmill are all about creating jobs.
“You ask any young person in our region what they want,” Leary said. “They want a job. They want a job, and I have so many people calling, asking, ‘Do you got any openings? Do you got any openings?’ So many guys looking for work.”
When asked how many people the sawmill will put to work, Leary said that he’ll have to see.
“We might be 10, 12 people. And since all this is located near Kalskag, they all come from Kalskag,” Leary said. “And that’s huge for a community to have that many people working.”
The sawmill will sit three miles below Kalskag. It’ll be on the same 400 acres of white spruce where Napaimute harvests and operates a firewood business.
Napaimute leases the land from The Kuskokwim Corporation. Andrea Gusty with TKC said that they’re currently negotiating a new agreement that includes the sawmill.
“Napaimute has been an excellent steward of the land,” Gusty said. “We had safeguards in place, environmental safeguards, reforestation requirements, and Napaimute has followed all of those.”
Both parties expect to sign the new agreement soon.
Napaimute bought the sawmill from the Nelson family in Chuathbaulk, who hadn’t regularly used the mill for about a decade. Napaimute received a $600,000 federal grant to fund the move.
Besides jobs, Mark Leary said the business will also provide cheaper, locally sourced lumber for the Kuskokwim. The demand is already here.
“In the past couple weeks,” Leary said, “I’ve probably had six different families call me, wanting to purchase house packages, because they have tax return money right now.”
Leary says a 16 by 24 foot cabin package will sell for about $8,000. The crew should finish moving the equipment this week.
Anna Rose MacArthur is a reporter at KYUK in Bethel.
