Bill would cut red tape in lumber industry
Rep. Karl Gillespie has a plan to axe restrictions on timber trade. NCGA photo
A bill introduced by Macon County Republican Rep. Karl Gillespie that seeks to bolster North Carolina’s local sawmill industry has garnered widespread bipartisan interest for its potential economic, environmental and housing affordability benefits.
“It resonated with me and our district and the needs that we have,” Gillespie told The Smoky Mountain News. “Talking to folks across the state, it was evident that there was a need for this.”
The bill, titled “Promote North Carolina Sawmills,” would amend the North Carolina Residential Code to allow lumber that has not been grade-stamped by a grading bureau to be used in one- or two-family residential construction.
Lumber grading is a system or process used to classify lumber based on appearance, quality and strength utilizing a visual inspection or machine grading to scope out defects. Grading helps to ensure that different kinds of lumber meet quality standards for different applications.
Manual lumber grading takes just a few seconds per board, so trained graders can grade 800 to 1,200 boards per hour — about the number of boards in a typical single-family home. Automated systems use optical scanners to grade lumber almost instantly. Softwoods like pine and spruce are easier to grade than hardwoods, which have more defects and require more scrutiny, especially for appearance grades.
Large sawmills usually employ their own in-house graders; however, the bill only applies to operations that mill less than 1 million board-feet per year. West Frasier, the largest softwood producer in the United States, mills about 7 billion board-feet each year, so an operation milling less than 1 million board-feet would truly be among the smallest of the small.
Related Items
Lying about Social Security isn’t the answer
Appeal of election needs to end
North Carolina sees drought, widespread abnormally dry conditions
Trump and Musk are a joke
“These mills are typically portable mills, not all but some are, or they're a portable mill that’s set up permanently in a location,” said Gillespie. “They're all over my district.”
Gillespie’s bill is not a new idea in the North Carolina legislature. A similar bill was introduced in 2019 but failed to gain traction, however the current version has a number of Democratic co-sponsors and sailed through the House in less than a month, passing into the Senate by a vote of 114-1.
There are some caveats to the bill. The lumber must meet or exceed the requirements of the NCRC and be sold directly to the owner of the dwelling or their authorized representative by the owner or an employee of a qualifying sawmill that milled the lumber and has a certificate from a state-approved lumber-grading training program. The sawmill owner must also have a certificate that states the wood meets standards, and the structure must be inspected by code enforcement officials.
The structural integrity of the wood isn’t an issue, Gillespie said. During a committee hearing, he was asked about safety concerns and said that he wouldn’t have supported the bill if safety was even a remote concern.
“Almost all of us are able to look from our front porch in one direction or another if you live in the rural parts of North Carolina and see a home that's built out of ungraded lumber — truly rough-sawn, no grading whatsoever done on it,” Gillespie said, mentioning that some of the oldest extant homes in the state were constructed before grade-stamping was even a thing.
Benefits of the bill are threefold.
Environmentally, people who own forested land that practice active management cut certain amounts of timber at certain times, leaving a steady supply of ready local lumber on hand.
Economically, although Gillespie’s far-west district made up of Cherokee, Clay, Graham and Macon counties wasn’t hit as hard by Helene as other counties to the east, there’s plenty of downed wood just waiting to be dragged out and milled. Large sawmills often overlook these smaller loads, whereas small operators may be more willing to process them into usable lumber.
The bill also directs the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service to establish a lumber grading training program, providing career opportunities for those who might want to work in the timber industry and ensuring small sawmill operators can adhere to the law.
And on the affordable housing front, Gillespie says the bill would have a positive impact on both the price of lumber and the speed at which it goes from forest to families building homes.
“There's no doubt that if you are buying this lumber from your local mill, that it will cost less for a two-by-four, two-by-six or whatever you're using,” he said. “We have not done a study to try to determine what that percentage is, but yes, it will certainly save money.”
Large-scale lumber producers and grading bureaus that currently control the grading process, along with Industry lobbyists, may argue that grade-stamped lumber provides an extra layer of quality assurance that should not be bypassed; however, the state of New York is similarly permissive on the use of lumber that isn’t grade-stamped for residential construction.
The bill passed its first reading in the Senate on March 20, and was subsequently referred to the rules committee.
“I support that bill completely,” said Sen. Kevin Corbin (R-Macon). “I think anything we can do that has the potential for making building easier and/or lowering building costs makes sense.”
