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Boso visits Pendleton business

The Inter-Mountain photo by Brooke Binns During a tour of the Allegheny Wood Products Inc. Riverton Plant Tuesday, Sen. Greg Boso, center, speaks with Plant Manager Bob Clay, right, and Mark Lauer, left, about the plant's daily operations.

RIVERTON — A local West Virginia State Senate representative met with individuals in Pendleton County on Tuesday to discuss the region’s timber industry.

Sen. Greg Boso, R-Nicholas, visited Allegheny Wood Products Inc. in Riverton to meet with AWP officials and discuss West Virginia’s natural resources and the forestry industry.

“I appreciate AWP opening up their doors and allowing me to come and understand what they do and really to see how they are contributing to the economic opportunities that West Virginia has and to our future,” Boso said.

First founded in 1973, AWP began as a family owned hardwood sawmill company in the town of Riverton in Pendleton County. Since then, AWP has expanded and now includes three green sawmills, three sawmills with dry kilns on site, and two dry kiln concentration yards that employ 800 workers with locations around West Virginia and one in Pennsylvania.

“Manufacturing is what creates value because the trees in the woods or coal underneath the ground doesn’t really have any value, but when you take that tree and you turn it into lumber and you take the lumber and turn it into a cabinet, you’ve invested in something that creates value,” said Roger Sherman of the West Virginia Forestry Association.

Allegheny Wood Products President John Crites explained the majority of logs that AWP brings in are purchased from land owners around the region.

During its more than 40 years in business, AWP has exported to 30 countries around the world, with China being the leading importer of AWP’s materials.

“They have an industry that supports an additional 800-900 in contractors and other employees to make this industry work, so directly, they impact 1,600 people,” Boso said. “That doesn’t include the trickle-down effect of the businesses that are utilizing their products.”

Boso said there is an opportunity for expansion in the industry in the future.

“West Virginia’s forests are growing over two-and-one-half times faster than what they’re being cut – or what is dying through natural mortality,” Crites said.

“The reality is that we have an environment here with many natural resources around us that we need to be able to take advantage of,” Boso said. “We need to be responsible stewards, not to go to one extreme or the other, but to recognize that logging and forestry and utilizing the natural resources that are renewable actually is healthy for the forests – for us to be able to harvest those, to be able to create environments for wildlife and those types of habitats, and in 20 to 40 years, the areas that we have harvested will have renewed themselves.”

Boso, along with AWP officials and staff, touched on environmental concerns within the industry.

“From the Natural Resource Committee’s perspective, the things that we need to be able to do are to find the middle ground where we have fairness for industry to be able to accomplish the things that it needs to and to be good stewards with the environment that we have around us,” Boso said.

“We don’t have enough population to sell everything we can make to ourselves – we have to go outside the boarders of West Virginia,” Sherman said.

Sherman added the state of West Virginia is able to be very competitive in its ability to grow the raw material, but said the state is less competitive in its ability to be as successfully equal in business with other states and countries.

“If you’re only competing in your own community, then it doesn’t make any difference what your taxes are or what your fees are because everybody is the same, but if we go to Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio or China, we’re competing against other people who may or may not have the same constraints that we do, and that’s one of the things that holds back our participation in those other markets. We have to make sure that we’re competitive everywhere,” Sherman said.

“Business has to be profitable so that the family at home, where the worker is, can be profitable,” Boso said.

Boso serves on the Senate Natural Resource Committee and as the chair of both the Joint Standing Committee on Energy and Senate Energy, Industry, and Mining Committee.

“Sen. Boso has been a great friend to our industry – he has supported us and done as much as he could to try to help us while he has been in office,” Crites said.

Boso represents the 11th Senatorial District, which includes Nicholas, Pendleton, Pocahontas, Randolph, Upshur, Webster and part of Grant counties.

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