Nashville company plans to build manufacturing plant on the West Plains
A Nashville, Tennessee-based building materials company is planning a new manufacturing facility on the West Plains.
Louisiana-Pacific Corp., which also does business as LP Building Solutions, is looking to build a siding prefinishing facility on more than 80 acres near Four Lakes, Colby Wilson, spokesman for LP Building Solutions, said in an email.
The company would produce its ExpertFinish siding product at the facility, which is contingent upon state and local approvals. The plant is expected to create about 60 new jobs, Wilson said.
In a phone call Wednesday, Wilson declined to comment on an exact location for the proposed facility or whether it would be near the Spokane International Airport’s rail and truck transload facility, but he said it would be “logical to assume that it would be built in that area.”
The facility would be LP Building Solutions’ fifth prefinishing facility. The company operates siding prefinishing plants in Roaring River, North Carolina; Green Bay, Wisconsin; and St. Louis.
A fourth plant in Bath, New York, is slated to begin production in the second quarter of 2023, Wilson said.
LP Building Solutions manufactures engineered wood building products for builders, remodelers and homeowners.
It operates 22 plants in the U.S., Canada, Chile and Brazil.
In an third-quarter earnings call Tuesday, LP Building Products CEO Brad Southern announced the company would be building a plant in Washington state to “accelerate ExpertFinish growth.”
ExpertFinish combines the look of traditional wood while featuring the durability and easier maintenance of engineered wood products, according to the company.
Southern said the company’s planned facilities in New York and Washington would more than double its prefinished siding capacity by the end of 2023.
“These projects will add scale, efficiency and geographic range, while simultaneously driving down cost,” Southern said in the earnings call.
LP Building Solutions’ proposed West Plains plant would mark a return to the region for Louisiana-Pacific Corp, which operated a saw mill in Post Falls for several decades.
The company closed the mill in 1995, citing a weakening lumber market, according to Spokesman-Review archives.