Pro-Carbon joins forces with bio-fuels venture

    With a few strokes of a pen Monday afternoon, Mike Roberts signed documents to help finance a bio-fuels operation that he and his partners plan to build in Wellington.
    The money came from a five-decade old dream that was started to help bring business to Carbon County: Pro-Carbon.
    Pro-Carbon has not been very active in the area for the past two decades, although, quietly helped Intermark Steel in south Price start up in the last two years. That business now has contracts and is employing between 10 and 20 people, with growth expected.
    Because of its low profile for 25 years, few people even remember Pro Carbon, if they have ever heard of it at all. It was started in the late 1960s. Its first big project was to build the building that a short time later housed Koret of California, a clothing manufacturing company.
    That business hung around and provided jobs for Carbonites for about 20 years before the toll of foreign clothing companies driving American manufacturers out of business closed the local operation. Today that building still stands and Pro-Carbon owns it. Its present tenant is an industrial tire company, which has been a steady and helpful employer in the area.
    The board of Pro-Carbon, after a few weeks of deliberation, decided to fund part of Roberts’ project. Board members Tom Patterick and Richard Tatton represented the organization at the signing as Sherrie Gordon put her public notary stamp on the documents.
    The organization is owned by many individuals in the community who have stock in it, but the stock is not stock that grows in terms of income for the individual stockholders, but instead accrues value for Pro-Carbon itself.