Quesnel City Council will write a letter of support for the transfer of the forest license from C&C Wood Products to Quesnel Investment Corporation, the new owners of the specialty mill following a bankruptcy sale.
It is a requirement under Bill 22, and is also necessary to get that mill up and running again.
Mike Jenks, the President of Quesnel Investment Corporation, spoke at last night’s Council meeting, and talked about a new model for running the mill, one that won’t include in-house harvesting…
“Our model anticipates us doing a B2B agreement with one of the local mills where they will take our raw log, our round log, and pay a fair market value and then we’ll purchase a rough green blank to feed into the remanufacturing plant.”
Jenks also told Council that any excess logs would be sold or traded in the local market.
West Side Logging and West Side Log Hauling, which were also part of the bankruptcy sale of C&C, will both be liquefied.
Councillor Mitch Vik asked Jenks if the community could expect the remanufacturing business to be similar to what existed prior to your acquisition…
“Yes, but I would temper that with we don’t anticipate we would have the same number of employees in the mill facility because we’re not going to run the round log breakdown facility at all.  That will be torn out and there will be an infeed deck and we’ll bring in rough stripped blanks, we’ll dry them, and then they’ll go onto an infeed deck and get fed into the Remanufacturing Facility.”
Jenks was joined as a delegation by Quesnel Invesment Corportation’s Operations Manager George Paull and Forestry Superintendent Walter Fookes.
Paull spoke about the actual license that was the focus of last night’s presentation…
“C&C’s license is a non replacement forest license. The annual cut is 68,000 cubic meters a year. It’s non renewable and expires in 2027. It was purchased by C&C 13 years ago in a mountain pine beetle license.  As such it has license criteria and restrictions, such as location, west of the Fraser River in the Quesnel Forest District.  License criteria is 70 percent pine, and in our stands it has to have a minimum of 30 percent mountain pine beetle attack.”
Paull noted that a typical stand from this license looks like deteriorating wood salvage as in 40 percent of the wood is on the ground, and over half of it is dead.
He said it is very small wood, and the piece size is approximately .11 cubic meters a tree.
Paull added that the owner of this license has full silvaculture obligations for up to 15 years.
Council’s support was unanimous.