December 28, 2002
Lipton plant packs its bags
By DAN WHITE
The Santa Cruz SentinelSANTA CRUZ — They knew for an entire year that the end was coming.
But that didn´t make the end less painful for 135 employees of Lipton Tea employees, who watched their plant shut down shortly before Christmas.
A few are leaving the state to work at other Lipton plants. Many more will be heading to the local unemployment office.
"There are a lot of bitter employees, of course," said a female employee who did not give her name. "Some people got jobs in other plants, but a lot of people who worked here 25, 30 years no longer have a job."
After years of downscaling — including an ongoing shared leasing arrangement with Harmony Foods that began in the mid-1990s — company administration announced in January it would shut its local plant by the end of the year. Uniliver Bestfoods, which owns Lipton, said it would be cheaper to do business elsewhere "for the long-term future of our business."
Lipton was a ghost building on Friday afternoon with no one around but a security guard.
It´s been a dispiriting month for the Santa Cruz business community. Around the same time Lipton shut its doors, the Wherehouse music chain announced it was about to close its 10,000-square-foot store on Pacific Avenue — just down the street from the family-owned Integrand Designs store, which closed in September.
The Lipton shutdown follows more than 30 years of operation on Delaware Avenue.
A former plant manager, Wally Dale, 63, who retired three years ago, said some workers will go to Suffolk, Va., Tucson, Ariz., and the City Of Industry. He could not estimate how many lost their jobs.
Dale said the company worked hard to steer people who faced layoffs into job-training programs.
"Lipton bent over backward to try to do things right for employees," he said.
The current plant manager and representatives of the Netherlands-based Unilver Bestfoods could not be reached to comment.
During its peak in the mid-1980s, the plant occupied 320,000 square feet and had 550 employees. It produced three mainstay Lipton products: dried soups, tea bags and Wish Bone salad dressing. It added Fun Fruits, Fruit Rolls and other products that came and went.
"It got to the point where the plant was bigger than needed, there was idle space and it was not economic to run it anymore," Dale said.
The plant produced 20 million pounds of tea annually. The plant would receive tea in bulk, blend it, put it in tea bags and prepare it for shipping.
Dale said the loss is part of a general manufacturing downturn, but he also blamed the past two decades of progressive Santa Cruz city councils.
"We worked very hard to keep it open, but sometimes the economics of having a business in Santa Cruz just isn´t that feasible" Dale said.
He said the Santa Cruz Area Chamber of Commerce and a "pro-business" council in the early 1970s actively recruited and encouraged Lipton to make Santa Cruz its West Coast hub.
"(But) The City Council has been anti business for years, and if you look around you, there has been a migration out of Santa Cruz for quite some time."
He pointed to Texas Instruments and the William Wrigley Co. as businesses that pulled the plug on their Santa Cruz operations. All three companies were longtime tenants of the industrial area bordering Delaware Avenue on the city´s Westside.
The Lipton closing means there is suddenly 145,000 square feet of unused space in that building. A "For Lease" sign was already in front of the building Friday, hawking "warehouse and flex space."
The current owner of the Lipton building is a partnership that includes Barry Swenson Builder, said real estate broker Kristen Macken, who is trying to find a tenant to sub-lease the space from Lipton.
Macken said several warehousing and distribution companies, and one food manufacturer, have expressed interest in the space.
Councilman Mike Rotkin said none of the recent business closings, on an individual basis, were disasters for the city.
But taken together, they are part of a troubling trend, he said.
"Santa Cruz is not doing worse than its neighbors," he said. "Sometimes we outperformed others because of tourism. But we´re in a situation where the economy is down, sales taxes are off, and that hurts everybody. (Utility tax repeal) didn´t pass so we´re not in a complete meltdown. But we are in a serious economic crunch. There will undoubtedly be layoffs in the city government."
He denied the city has been anti business, and said it has worked with companies that provide industrial jobs. He said companies that avoid Santa Cruz also avoid countless other areas with environmental regulations.
He guessed it will be very difficult to find a comparable manufacturer to fill the space.
Rotkin said the city should continue to play to one of its greatest strengths: tourism. He said he planned to encourage the City Council to take up the issue of a conference hotel in the Beach Street area as a source of city revenue.
He hopes the council will put the idea on the table again perhaps by the end of the winter.
A previous, more intensive conference center-hotel plan drew strong opposition three years ago, and was rolled back because of community and council opposition.
One observer stated that the anti-business atmosphere there is a result of two decades of "progressive" Santa Cruz city councils.
Translation: LIBERAL city councils.
An apologist stated that Santa Cruz isn't the only city that businesses are avoiding because it isn't the only city with environmental regulations.
Now we're getting somewhere. Has the city council been in the thrall of the Greens by enacting onerous environmental regulations driving up the costs of corporate business? Any bets?
Texas Instruments, Lipton and the William Wrigley Company have fled Santa Cruz. So its council has decided to play to one of the city's strengths, "tourism".
Oh, yah. Makes sense to concentrate its efforts on replacing good-paying jobs and benefits from major corporations with minimum-wage hotel maid and tour guide jobs.
Santa Cruz is dead meat along with other cities in AZ till their citizens wake up and vote the local leftist idiots out of office.
And the moronic AZ tea bag stuffer RINO will solve everything by raising taxes!
Leni