Alcoa: We're not to blame
Tuesday, November 11, 2003 8:42 AM PST
By Pat Forgey
Printable version
E-mail this articleResponsibility for the failure of Longview Aluminum lies with smelter owner Michael Lynch and high power prices, not with former owner Alcoa, a spokesman for Pittsburgh-based Alcoa said Monday.
"Power rates from the Bonneville Power Administration are too high to profitably make aluminum," said spokesman Jack Siewert. Because of that Alcoa, is not interested in buying another Northwest smelter, he said.
"If we can't operate, at full capacity, two plants we already own, why would we buy a third?" he asked.
Alcoa has closed its smelter in Wenatchee, is operating one of three potlines at its Ferndale plant and has liquidated a smelter it owned in Troutdale, Ore. Numerous other Northwest smelters are also either curtailed, closed or liquidated.
The comments are the first from Alcoa since Longview Aluminum bankruptcy trustee Bill Brandt of Chicago, said last week that he was dismayed Alcoa decided not to buy the plant and said Longview Aluminum workers should also be blaming Alcoa for the failure of the smelter to reopen.
"I think what's happened here is a travesty," Brandt said last week of the problems facing Longview Aluminum.
Brandt said then that he thought the environmental cleanup of the property would cost Alcoa more than it would to run it. When Alcoa sold the plant in 2000 to Chicago businessman Lynch, it kept ownership of the property, which it leased Lynch.
Siewert acknowledged that Alcoa is responsible for the cleanup, but said even with that consideration, it does not make sense to try to make aluminum in the Pacific Northwest in a time of high power prices.
"It doesn't change the fundamental picture," he said. "You don't run a plant that's not competitive to solve another problem.
"There's virtually no capacity operating in the Pacific Northwest now, because of high BPA rates," Siewert said.
Trustee Brandt has said there are no buyers for the smelter and that he is getting ready to liquidate its assets. Members of the United Steelworkers of America and their supporters staged a rally at the smelter Saturday urging Brandt to delay the liquidation for 90 days in the hope that a buyer will surface.
A Bankruptcy Court judge in Chicago put Brandt, a Chicago businessman, in charge of Longview Aluminum in August, five months after Lynch, who purchased the plant in 2001, filed for bankruptcy protection.
Siewert said responsibility for the failure of Longview Aluminum lies with smelter owner Lynch and high power prices, not with former owner Alcoa.
"He (Lynch) could have taken the money that came in from the power sales and used that, reinvested that, in operating the plant," he said.
Lynch was unavailable for comment Monday.
Siewert said the unanticipated power crisis made running aluminum smelters in the northwest so difficult that even good business people were unable to operate their plants successfully. "That's the fundamental reason why the (Northwest) aluminum industry is not competitive," he said.
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