Pacific Lumber Co. has filed for Chapter 11 (they say because of environmental restrictions)

[Kadie]

Pacific Lumber leans
Company in Headwaters deal files for bankruptcy, citing logging restrictions
Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, January 20, 2007


The Pacific Lumber Co. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, saying that environmental restrictions are preventing it from cutting enough redwoods to continue making payments on the roughly $714 million debt that Texas financier Charles Hurwitz incurred more than 20 years ago when he took over the Humboldt County company.

Pacific Lumber has been an environmental lightning rod in California ever since Hurwitz, aided by junk bond king Michael Milken, bought out the company in 1986 and more than doubled its cutting of old-growth redwood trees.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein brokered the 1999 Headwaters Forest deal in which Hurwitz's Maxxam Corp. agreed to sell about 10,000 acres of old-growth forest for $480 million to the government, which turned it into a park. It simultaneously agreed to a habitat conservation plan that obliged it to follow a strict set of logging rules on more than 200,000 remaining acres.

Thursday's bankruptcy filing actually involved six related companies, with Pacific Lumber the best known. Now the question is whether Pacific Lumber will ask that logging restrictions on its remaining forest lands be lifted and, if so, whether the Bankruptcy Court judge has the authority to void that deal.

snip...
In a statement Friday, Feinstein said she believes "Pacific Lumber is required to meet the obligations of the Habitat Conservation Plan whether or not they are in bankruptcy."

more...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/20/BUGA5NLRUE1.DTL

[Trajan]

1. Fuck them ....

The marketplace is what it is because good citizens were voted into legislatures and wrote legislation that was legitimately passed and signed into law.

The people have a RIGHT to protect their environment; a right that trumps the right of a corporation or individual to sell the very ground we stand on ....

He is owed nothing, except his day in BK court ....

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. NOT because of environmental restrictions

greedy CEO ran it into the ground.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=2695598#2695637

[WhiteTara]

3. they stole the retirement fund,

raped the forest and now they don't want to have to work for the remaining lumber. Hurwitz should be in jail for what he did to so many companies, Pacific Lumber being only one.

[mrcheerful]

4. Also don't forget that our good trading partners like japan

don't want refined lumber, they want whole trees so they can make money off the finished lumber from their own lumber mills. A little fact that was buried under the spotted owl vs lumber mills scam.

[Webster Green]

5. First thing Maxam did was put the worker's pensions into junk bonds

Then they started clear-cutting PalCo's redwood holdings, which had been somewhat well-maintained before the Maxam takeover.

Hurwitz is truly evil!:grr: