Neiman Enterprises cannot guarantee that Montrose Forest Products will operate beyond 60 days, as the Colorado mill is unable to find a buyer and is taking almost every log it cuts from America’s public forests. That is according to Jim Neiman, president of the fourth-generation family company, who issued a federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act notice on Tuesday after telling employees earlier in the day.
“For months, we searched for a buyer who could continue operating the mill in Montrose, but we were unable to secure one,” Neiman said in the announcement.
Ninety jobs go on a wind-down staggered from Tuesday to 6 November, as the mill cuts the last of the timber it holds. Neiman Enterprises credits local Forest Service staff, the Colorado State Forest Service and conservation groups with lifting supply over the past year.
Colorado’s largest lumber mill, Montrose, turns out more than 85 million board feet of premium studs a year. It cuts Engelmann spruce, lodgepole pine, Douglas fir and white fir off the forests of western Colorado.
The mill’s public-land share was counted at 96 per cent in a congressional release in August 2021, when it was cutting 350,000 board feet a day. Neiman names timber shortage and rising operating costs in Tuesday’s notice.
American sawmill capacity ran 6 per cent below its year-earlier level through the March quarter, according to a National Association of Home Builders analysis of Federal Reserve and Census Bureau data. It has fallen in every quarter since Donald Trump ordered federal forests opened to harvest in March 2025.
Production fell 0.4 per cent on a four-quarter average through March, while holding 1.7 per cent above a year earlier. Sawmill employment slipped to 82,800 in the same quarter, a twelfth straight decline and the lowest since 2010. Jesse Wade, the association’s director of tax and trade policy analysis, reads a utilisation rate of 71.8 per cent as capacity falling faster than production.
“There is more than ample supply out there on the landscape,” Tom Schultz said.
The Forest Service chief told a House Natural Resources subcommittee on 5 June that markets, not trees, are the brake on American supply, counting national forests as 5 per cent of what the country consumes. He signed a plan that month routing up to 500 million board feet to Montana mills over a decade, where two operations had already closed.
As it stands, America buys more wood than any other country, at US$25 billion in 2023, ahead of China at $17.1 billion, with Canadian lumber supplying a quarter of US consumption, down from a third. Meeting the order would take a 450 per cent increase in federal harvest volumes, through a mill base losing capacity.
European sawmillers are shedding capacity on log costs rather than weak demand alone, with Holmen cutting its Linghem mill in southern Sweden from 72,000 cubic metres a year to 26,000. Stora Enso opened talks in mid-August on closing Veitsiluoto, a century-old Finnish pine mill, for good.
Montrose Forest Products came out of receivership in 2012, when the Neiman family bought a closed mill that had run as Intermountain Resources with its log yard nearly empty. The family has put more than $60 million into it since, up from $42 million by 2021.
The company shut its Hill City sawmill in South Dakota in 2021, with 120 jobs going after cuts to Forest Service sales in the Black Hills. Neiman blamed reduced federal timber sales for that closure.
Neiman Enterprises continues to evaluate “all available options”, Neiman said, though “none currently ensures the mill will remain open”. Its mills at Hulett in Wyoming, Spearfish in South Dakota and Gilchrist in Oregon are not affected.
