Happy birthday, Hecla

Your community newspaper has been here since 1892, seemingly forever.

Your mining company headquarters? Forever and a year.

Unofficially, Hecla is Coeur d’Alene’s granddaddy business, having incorporated in 1891 and thus celebrating its 125th birthday this year. You might have noticed something about that in today’s paper.

What you might not have noticed is how much Hecla means to the overall North Idaho culture and economy. True, dependence on natural resources like mining and timber proved to be an inadequate long-term economic strategy for the region all by themselves. The advent of serious tourism, construction and other means of economic diversity have provided desperately needed jobs stability, so that come sector shortcomings or even serious recessions, North Idaho can weather the worst fiscal storms.

Through it all, Hecla has been a light in the tunnel.

Not that it’s been easy. Hecla has endured mercurial swings in metals prices, natural disasters, paying a Superfund settlement of more than a quarter-billion dollars in 2011, all while coping with the ever-increasing cost of doing business because of regulatory mandates.

Now in one of those low tides because of weak commodities prices, Hecla soldiers on. The company still provides many of the highest paying jobs in North Idaho. Did you know that wages and benefits for miners amount to near six-figure annual incomes? We shudder to imagine what Mullan, Wallace and Kellogg would look like without Hecla and the Lucky Friday Mine.

While Hecla has remained true to the region, the other mining company headquartered in Coeur d’Alene did not. After 85 years here, Coeur d’Alene Mines uprooted to Chicago in 2013 when the state of Illinois approved a 10-year, $1.68 million tax credit package, according to the Chicago Tribune. Sixty good-paying jobs were lost just like that. We only hope that the price of betrayal included Cubs season tickets.

The Press salutes Hecla CEO Phillips S. Baker, his management staff and the company’s board of directors, which includes Baker, Ted Crumley, Terry V. Rogers, George R. Nethercutt Jr., Charles B. Stanley, and Dr. Anthony P. Taylor.

Hecla isn’t just the nation’s largest producer of silver. To those of us who live here, the company is pure gold.