Vitamin Company Will Move to Carson : Business: Leiner Health Products, now based in Torrance, was courted by other states. But city’s inducements helped keep the manufacturer in California.

When Leiner Health Products in Torrance needed bigger headquarters, cities in Nevada, Arizona and Utah came courting.

No surprise there--restless South Bay companies are prime targets for poaching.

But this time, the company didn’t bite. It chose the town next door.

At a ceremony Thursday, Leiner, the nation’s largest vitamin manufacturer, announced that it will move from Torrance to Carson over the next six months.

Leiner’s relocation will bring 700 jobs to Carson, and the company expects to hire 300 more employees by 1995.

Leiner decided to stay in California after determining that employee severance and relocation costs would be too high. The state’s lifting of a tax on purchases of new equipment and workers’ compensation reform also helped, said Giffen Ott, the company’s vice president of manufacturing.

But the icing on the cake came from the city: Carson agreed to give Leiner $100,000 in tax breaks and to pay the $500,000 needed for a conveyor bridge linking the buildings on 233rd Street that the company will lease.

“It was like the response we would get from a city in the Midwest,” Ott said. “Our construction guys were in awe of how fast the turnaround time was for permits.”

With the South Bay’s economy reeling from job losses in the aerospace and defense industries, Leiner’s decision will be a bright spot.

The deal between Carson and Leiner is a sign that cities are becoming more aware that they have to do more than make promises to lure businesses, economists say.

Cities in other states are quick to “offer tax breaks, employee training, land. They sometimes view it as a zero sum gain, but it creates a good business environment,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

The company had sales of $250 million in 1992, up from $140 million a year earlier. Leiner makes over-the-counter drugs and vitamins for retailers.

The company signed a 10-year lease for the two buildings last week, and it plans to spend $9.4 million over the next year renovating the 471,000 square feet of space and buying new equipment for packaging and distribution.

Leiner officials indicated that the company could have gotten cheaper lease rates or free land had they gone out of state; in Nevada, there would have been no state taxes.

But Leiner officials said they had fears that the labor pool elsewhere was not as diverse as the South Bay’s.

Carson City Council members voted last week to fund the conveyor bridge, and they pledged not to bog the company down in red tape. The conveyor bridge will be funded with money from the city’s redevelopment agency.

“When we heard about the need for the bridge, we just said, ‘We can do that,’ ” said Mayor Michael Mitoma. “We are willing to take that extra step.”

In turn, the city expects to gain $2.5 million in property taxes from improvements on the building.

Torrance was never really in the running. Leiner had considered space now occupied by W. H. Harper Co. Inc., but it wouldn’t have been available for another year, Ott said. Other sites were either too expensive or too small, he said.

“It’s not desirable in any case when you lose a business,” said Torrance City Manager LeRoy Jackson. “But I don’t know if they would find anything that would make sense to them. They did not come to us and knock on our door.”