CAVE JUNCTION Ñ Ten months after 88 people lost their jobs with the closure of Rough and Ready Lumber’s mill, the mill has once again risen from the dead.

It will be Cave Junction’s second-largest employer behind Taylor’s Sausage when it re-opens in early summer, trimmed to 66 people because of increased automation.

“It’s really great it’s opening back up,” said 61-year-old Chuck D’Arpino, who worked 35 years at the mill and was there on Monday morning inquiring about returning. “It’s going to benefit everybody. I still want to work there.”

And he will.

“We’re excited to hire back our key people,” said mill owner Jennifer Phillippi on Monday, three days after a White City news conference. At the event, Gov. John Kitzhaber announced $4 million in state and federal tax credits and the $1 million Business Oregon loan that enabled the re-opening the mill, the largest employer in town for more than a half-century.

The funding will pay for increased automation in the small log mill built in the 1970s but largely idle the past 12 years, Phillippi said. It will also pay for a $1.6 million planer upgrade. The mill will still produce its signature pine for doors and windows from its large log mill, but also a significant amount of lumber as small as 6 inches in diameter from forest thinning and restoration.

Phillippi said it will take nearly three months for upgrades, and the mill should be going full-bore by July.

That’s a relief for D’Arpino, who saw this happen back in 2003 when the mill went from 145 people to 75 after a three-month closure.

After the closure last spring, he worked at It’s a Burl in Kerby and in landscaping and started pulling money out of his 401K to survive.

“I’d like to be able to put it back,” he said, adding that his wife and four daughters are thrilled the mill’s coming back.

Phillippi said a lot of people are calling about coming back to work, but the hiring process won’t begin until April or May.

“Some people are taking the training that was offered when we shut down, some have other jobs and some have moved, but we hope the majority of them will be able to come back,” Phillippi said. “They’re all skilled and well-trained.”

Phillippi said she and her husband and business partner, Link Phillippi, feared they’d be auctioning off the mill, but heard about the new market tax credits designed to benefit disadvantaged communities. The mill owners started to work in November with Chase Bank and Ecotrust, which also put together funding for mill renovations in Dillard and John Day.

“We didn’t know if it was going to work,” she said. “We didn’t want to say anything until we knew for sure.”

The deal closed on Feb. 28, and was announced on Friday.

“These upgrades make it feasible to run one shift. We couldn’t have run profitably on one shift with the previous setup,” Phillippi said. “The new setup will allow us to access logs from 6 to 15 inches.”

The Phillippis still harbor hopes of running two shifts, if negotiations in Congress over how to manage so-called O&C lands of western Oregon results in more federal timber. The mill used to get the majority of its logs from federal land, but today about 90 percent comes from private land.

“We have more confidence than we did before,” Phillippi said. “Whatever comes out of Congress has to have some certainty or it won’t work.”