GRAND JUNCTION, Colo.—Within two weeks after nearly 150 workers lost their jobs at the Elk Creek Mine near Somerset at the start of the month, as many as a third of them had filed into the Delta Workforce Center.
There, they considered options that are likely to prove difficult not only for them, but the economy of the North Fork Valley.
They can try to stay in the area, but very possibly would have to settle for lower-paying work even with new training, or they can leave in pursuit of mining jobs elsewhere.
Either way, a lot of lucrative mining jobs, and the dollars they bring in locally, are gone, in a reminder that the very kind of industry that can so enrich a community also can leave it in a pinch when that industry takes a hit.
“It’s like textile mills in small southern towns. Everything’s peachy until the mill closes,” said Joe Winter, a senior economist with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
The domestic coal industry has faced recent challenges including increasing competition from natural gas as a power generation source following the boom in shale gas development.
Oxbow Mining’s Elk Creek Mine isn’t closing altogether—it pared about half of its workforce after having to abandon mining equipment in part of the mine that had become too dangerous because of spontaneous combustion. Many hundreds of miners continue to work at two other North Fork Valley mines, the Bowie No. 2 Mine and Arch Coal’s West Elk Mine.
Such a high concentration of mining brings significant revenue into the area from the sale of coal elsewhere and is important to an area’s economic structure, Winter said. That structure is rocked when some of that mining work and the associated outside money goes away.
Delta County Administrator Robbie LeValley has called the layoffs “a significant reduction” that will affect everything from sales tax to severance tax and federal mineral lease revenue.
One of the most noticeable impacts may be from laid-off workers choosing to leave the area altogether.
Oxbow Mining’s troubles began early this year, forcing some temporary furloughs at that time. Mining alone in the county in 2012 accounted for an average of 713 jobs, and mining also is a big part of adjacent Gunnison County’s economy.
Delta’s mining sector paid an average weekly wage of $1,324 a week last year, compared to a countywide average of $622 for all industries, Winter said.
Bill Thoennes, a spokesman for the state Department of Labor and Employment, said many of the laid-off miners were making more than $5,000 a month.
He said the Delta Workforce Center offers training through Colorado Mesa University and the Delta-Montrose Technical College, and can help workers who need to obtain a GED to improve their chances of getting hired.
But he said many miners who have visited the center were undecided about their future “in part because the jobs they have lost pay so well that it is difficult to find jobs—even those that require new skills—that pay anywhere close to what they were making.”
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Information from: The Daily Sentinel,
