Brea Suffers in Pullback by Allstate : Unemployment: The last of peak 830 workers at processing center will be out of work by year’s end. The insurer will move operation to Mississippi.

It was only five years ago, but it seems like a page from ancient history.

In 1988, Allstate Insurance Co.’s processing center in Brea needed employees so badly that it sent letters to customers asking them to refer job-seeking acquaintances.

Within two years, the company’s staffing efforts would take a sharp turn. Since 1990, Allstate has quietly let go nearly 700 Brea employees, including 200 during the past year.

The insurance conglomerate, based in Northbrook, Ill., became one of Brea’s biggest employers when it opened a regional operations center there in 1985. At peak employment in 1990, Allstate had more than 1,200 people on its Brea payrolls, with 830 at the operations center.

That year, the company decided to consolidate the processing center at a regional office in Jackson, Miss. Allstate since has been trimming the center’s staff through layoffs, early retirements and attrition.

By year’s end, Allstate will have shut down the remnants of the center, dismissing the final 153 employees.

“The term layoff sounds cold,” said Jim Plotts, vice president of the regional operations center in Brea. “In our case, fortunately, we were able to give the employees quite a bit of notice.”

Plotts said that a small number of the employees have relocated to Mississippi and other bases.

The center’s closure is part of a nationwide effort at Allstate to cut overhead by consolidating workloads, Plotts said. Over the past three years, the company has reduced its number of processing centers across the nation from 13 to eight.

“As computer technology has improved, sales agents have been able to take on some of our duties, such as customer address changes,” Plotts said.

His bureau served as Allstate’s California hub, where insurance policies were processed for 3 million customers in the state. “We answered 48,000 phone calls from customers a week,” Plotts said.

Allstate picked Jackson over Brea for the consolidation “because of the cost of doing business in California, to be succinct,” Plotts said.

“We can do in Jackson for 60 cents on the dollar what we could do in Brea,” he said. “Rent, salaries and workers’ comp all cost much more here--and that gets passed on to the customer.”

Last month, Allstate--a subsidiary of retail giant Sears, Roebuck & Co.--sold $2.12 billion worth of stock in the biggest initial public offering by a U.S. company.

Allstate will still have about 450 employees in Brea, including 250 in a business insurance office. Many of those people have been moved from small offices across the city to help fill the 200,000-square-foot complex vacated by the regional operations center. The company has two years left on the lease, Plotts said.

Plotts said that Allstate offered computer classes and resume counseling to help the terminated employees find new jobs. “Many of them had been with Allstate for 30 or 40 years,” he said, “and were intimidated about going out and looking for a job.”

The processing center’s departure is one of two major blows Brea has suffered recently. Last year, Bank of America shut down Security Pacific’s data processing headquarters there after the banks merged, transferring or terminating about 1,700 employees.

Unocal Corp. softened the one-two punch with an announcement Tuesday that the oil company would relocate 500 employees to Brea from Los Angeles and Illinois.

“We’re still doing well, although these losses are disheartening,” said Susan Georgino, deputy director of the Brea Redevelopment Agency. “We are a city with a nighttime population of 33,000 and a daytime population of 67,000, which shows that we have a healthy employment base here.”

Georgino complained that Brea is powerless to counteract some of the deterrents driving businesses from California.

“By and large, issues bothering businesses in Brea are issues we have no control over--statewide environmental regulations where you go to countless numbers of licensing review boards, the high cost of workers’ comp, and other states cutting deals to attract businesses,” she said. “It’s frustrating, because companies that have moved out tell us they were very happy with Brea.”