MISSOULA -- The beating goes on in the timber industry in Montana.

No one's buying what Tricon Timber of St. Regis has to sell, so the largest private employer in Mineral County has cut back operations from two shifts to one, laying off 40 full- and part-time employees.

That leaves only 60 workers at the stud mill in St. Regis and Tricon's post and pole plant in Superior -- less than half the 125 to 130 who were on the payroll a year ago, said Tricon manager Angelo Ververis.

"I tell you, it's been real quiet as far as lumber sales go. Real quiet," Ververis said.

Tricon workers were informed of the cutbacks at a meeting last Wednesday. The layoffs went into effect the following day.

They come on the heels of Plum Creek Timber Co.'s announcement on Sept. 11 that 35 workers will be laid off from the company's Columbia Falls mill and the closure of Stimson Lumber's final operations in Bonner last spring.

The chaos on Wall Street over the past week was a staggering blow to a sagging market for Tricon.

"With the financial institutions having their problems, it affects our markets. It's tough to get lending for mortgages. They've tightened up on everything," Ververis said Monday.

The layoffs are a shocking setback for Mineral County, which has a population of 4,000 and a work force of 1,200 to 1,400.

"This kind of shakes everybody's timbers, so to speak," said Kevin Chamberlain, the county's Montana State University extension agent. "For us, (even) five jobs are very significant, and those are good jobs. They're not seasonal, minimum-wage, no-benefit jobs. Those are manufacturing, timber industry-type jobs that have a chance of supporting a family."

Chamberlain said he personally knows four of the laid-off Tricon workers.

"It's not some disconnected off-the-wall thing. It's the fabric of our community," he said.

In the past, officials at Tricon and other Western mills have blamed layoffs on a lack of available, affordable timber.

Ververis said that even though demand is low, supply remains a problem. Tricon reportedly bid roughly $91,000 on a timber sale of some 4 million board feet in the Bitterroot National Forest. It was nearly 2.5 times higher than the minimum bid.

"We are still actively looking for timber. There's never enough of that to go around," said Ververis. "That's always been one of the bigger reasons we've had for the hard times, because if you could get a good timber supply at market prices, you could weather the storm. So you've got two things working against you."

Tricon owner Ken Verley, who founded the company in 1990, could not be reached for comment. His is one of five lumber mills still operating in western Montana, along with Plum Creek, Pyramid Mountain in Seeley Lake, Sun Mountain in Deer Lodge, and Thompson River Lumber in Thompson Falls.

Perhaps no county is as affected by dives in the timber industry as Mineral.

"As far as economic development and trying to replace natural resource extraction industry jobs, we haven't been successful," Chamberlain said. "At the end of the day we're still a county that's 87 percent public land. With that percentage, we don't have a tax base, we don't have a lot of other things going for us.

"When you don't receive any benefit from 87 percent of our county, it's a little tough to keep doors open and schools going and infrastructure in place and all those kinds of things."

Chamberlain hailed discussions by the Missoula Area Economic Development Corp. concerning the loss of infrastructure in the forest products industry.

"I mean, this is a way we're able to pay to get things done in the woods," he said. "In other words, those logs have a value. If we don't have these (mills), we can have all the dead trees in the world but no way to do anything with them."