Wheelchair Company to Lay Off 450 : Camarillo: Everest & Jennings will relocate to St. Louis because of the high cost of doing business in California, officials say.
Everest & Jennings International Ltd., a wheelchair manufacturer in Camarillo, announced Friday that it will lay off more than 450 employees when it relocates its corporate headquarters and manufacturing operations to St. Louis this summer.
Officials at Everest & Jennings said the company has struggled financially for several years and decided to relocate because of the high cost of doing business in California.
“We saw our costs continuing to increase, along with tighter and tighter environmental regulations, and it just became pretty obvious what we had to do,” said Barre L. Rorabaugh, the company’s president and chief executive officer.
The move will consolidate the company’s wheelchair manufacturing plant in Camarillo with the St. Louis-based subsidiary that manufactures beds for nursing homes and hospitals. Everest & Jennings is one of the world’s largest producers of wheelchairs and hospital beds.
Rorabaugh said Missouri Gov. John Ashcroft lured the 500-employee company to St. Louis by offering several million dollars in low-interest loans, training funds and tax abatements.
The move to St. Louis will cost $22 million, Rorabaugh said, but should save the firm more than $7 million annually in operational and administrative costs.
Most of the savings will come from Missouri’s more lenient environmental regulations and workers’ compensation standards, he said. Some of the savings will come from consolidating the company under one roof.
Everest & Jennings’ decision to leave its Mission Oaks Boulevard plant was not a total surprise to Camarillo officials.
Vice Mayor Charlotte Craven said city leaders knew the firm has had financial troubles in the past few years as it attempted to comply with a series of environmental regulations.
“We were aware that they were having a hard time, and we knew there might be a bankruptcy or a move,” Craven said.
The company moved its chrome plating operations to Hong Kong several years ago when it was unable to comply with state standards on discharging toxic waste into sewer lines, Craven said.
Later, Camarillo officials placed the company on a schedule to reduce its discharge of boron, another metal it was pouring into the city’s sewage system, Craven said.
“It is a shame they are having to leave, but the environmental standards are higher here than in most other states,” Craven said.
Rorabaugh said Missouri officials are not as strict in environmental enforcement. “The regulations are a bit more reasonable in St. Louis. They give a company a chance to improve.”
Everest & Jennings has been located in California for more than 58 years, and in Camarillo since 1980, Rorabaugh said. “We’ve been a California company so long, there are a lot of people here who just don’t know what to do.”
Rorabaugh said the company will only be financially able to relocate 20 to 40 employees to St. Louis. “We’ve asked everyone if they are interested in moving with us, but we won’t be able to move much more than that because the cost is so significant.”
The work force of 500 is evenly divided between salaried managers and hourly production workers, Rorabaugh said. All employees who do not find new jobs by September will be offered some severance pay, he said.
