Firm to Bring 435 New Jobs to Oxnard : Business: Haas Automation will build on an 86-acre site. City officials say they promised a streamlined planning process.

Oxnard has wooed a major manufacturer from the San Fernando Valley that promises to bring more than 435 jobs, many of them high-paying, city officials announced Friday.

Haas Automation Inc. of Chatsworth plans to move to an 86-acre site in northeast Oxnard by March, 1997.

Company officials said they hope to add at least 65 new jobs once their 400,000-square-foot building is built and workers complete the move, making it the second-largest manufacturer in Oxnard behind Procter & Gamble.

Company officials said the average salary is nearly $40,000 a year and that assembly-line workers make more than $14 an hour.

“We don’t really make widgets,” General Manager Dennis Dupuis said. “We are very much a high-technology company.” Dupuis said Haas manufactures tools used in cutting metals and plastics.

City officials said they did not offer the company any financial incentives to move and instead lured them to Oxnard with the guarantee of a quick planning-approval process.

“We didn’t have to give away the farm,” Councilman Thomas Holden said. Holden said Oxnard did not waive any of its planning and development fees typically charged to builders.

The selling point, Holden said, was the city’s guarantee to approve Haas’ building plans within the next month.

Holden and Councilman Andres Herrera helped negotiate the deal along with Steven Kinney, president of the Greater Oxnard Economic Development Corp.

Herrera said city officials began a “long courting relationship” with Haas in February.

In the last two months, negotiations intensified as Los Angeles city officials made one last bid to keep the company within its city limits, Dupuis said.

“The city of Los Angeles did make a good effort,” Dupuis said, adding that the company also briefly considered Thousand Oaks and Camarillo. Dupuis said Oxnard won because of the combination of available land and a quick approval process.

Oxnard officials waited until Haas closed its 86-acre land deal and submitted planning papers before announcing the move to the site at Sturgis Road and Rice Avenue, Herrera said.

“Land procurement is always a delicate issue,” Herrera said. “When landowners hear a big buyer is interested in the area, the price always skyrockets.”

Herrera said that most of the major regulatory departments in the city have already signed off on the move and that only minor approvals are needed from the City Council and other departments for the project to break ground.

Dupuis also said two cities, Palmdale and Lancaster, put together sweetheart deals that included $2,000 cash for each employee and a land offering of $1 an acre to move inland.

“They had some great land prices and cash incentives,” Dupuis said. “But we never really listened. They weren’t places we really considered moving to.”

In the end, Dupuis said officials chose Oxnard over Chatsworth because of “the quality of life that Ventura County seems to have.”

Gene Haas, the company’s founder and president, announced last year that he intended to move his growing company to larger quarters and out of Chatsworth because he was fed up with the high crime rate and an unresponsive city government replete with a complicated and expensive building-permit process.

“We are not happy about losing a high-technology company like Haas,” said Dick Pearson, the Chatsworth Chamber of Commerce president-elect. “But the simple fact is that Los Angeles is just not competitive with the surrounding cities.”

Dupuis said the rapidly expanding company outgrew its 100,000-square-foot Chatsworth plant, causing months-long backlogs in filling orders. The company was founded in 1983 with three employees.

A UC Santa Barbara study, commissioned by the city, predicts that Haas will create 100 jobs during construction of the new building, pumping $9 million into the Oxnard economy through tax revenue, patronage of local businesses, workers buying homes and other factors. And once Haas has completed its move, according to the study, it’s estimated that more than $30 million will pour into the local economy as workers relocate and jobs are added.