BANGOR DAILY NEWS • August 25, 2025
Millard Dority is the former building manager at College of the Atlantic, which has two structures that use cross-laminated timber, a competitor to steel and concrete. The college had to source its material from Austria. For an expansion at Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor, Dority wanted to use Maine wood. He figured in a state with millions of acres of forests, it would be easy to source wood and process it into CLT. But Maine doesn’t have any factories, so the wood had to be transported from New England to Illinois and then trucked back to the library. “When you consider we have all of these paper mills that are laying fallow, if one of those was a CLT manufacturer, it would make life a whole lot easier,” Dority said. Maine gets interest from CLT companies looking to locate here four or five times a year. After they research the market, nothing happens. The state is making efforts to turn that around by supporting workforce development, offering a 10% capital investment credit, and promoting its forest resources at national and international industry events.