Welcome to Amgenville : Thousand Oaks, Biotechnology Firm Agree Theirs Has Been a Match Made in Heaven

On its way to becoming the world’s most successful biotechnology firm, Amgen made plenty of smart moves.

But John Fieschko, the company’s director of clinical manufacturing, says the smartest move of all may have been starting the company in the suburban city of Thousand Oaks.

He moved here from New Jersey to join the company 12 years ago--long before annual revenues spiked beyond the $1-billion marker--and settled into a world of intense scientific discovery. “Everyone worked day and night,” he said.

On the rare occasion when he wasn’t monitoring experiments bubbling away in a fermentation tank, he hit the few local bars, discovered the joys of sushi and drove out Kanan Road to the beach in his Alfa Romeo convertible. He was young and single and smart, and California was a world away from New Jersey. He loved it.

But Thousand Oaks wasn’t exactly cosmopolitan.

“If you wanted to go out for dinner at night there weren’t a lot of choices,” he said. Driving to Los Angeles was a hassle, but back then it was a must to find culture, entertainment and any other diversions from biological research.

A lot has changed since then for Fieschko, for Amgen and for Thousand Oaks. He is married now, has two small children, a posh North Ranch home, plenty of thriving Amgen stock and no more need--or desire--to hop in the car and head off to Los Angeles.

Thousand Oaks is more sophisticated now, Fieschko says. There are more restaurants, the local mall is increasingly upscale, and bookstores and coffee shops are cropping up throughout the city. There is even a $64-million performing arts center.

In the last 15 years, the company and the city have grown up side by side--each influencing the other in a variety of subtle ways.

“The growth of the community has perfectly matched my growth and lifestyle,” Fieschko said.

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It’s a love fest, really, the relationship between city and company.

Amgen employees fulfill the city’s demographic dreams. Because of stock options, many of its 2,542 local employees are financially comfortable. They can afford the area’s expensive housing and they have plenty of disposable income to spend in the city. They are well-educated: Two-thirds of them have bachelor or higher degrees.

Eighty percent of them live in the Conejo Valley and are committed to the area. In an era when businesses are fleeing California, Amgen is constantly expanding its 105-acre campus. The company’s charitable foundation will give about $800,000 to local schools and groups this year.

And like any good relationship, feelings are mutual. Thousand Oaks and Amgen mirror ambitions and goals to the point where they use each other as recruiting tools.

Being home to Amgen has given Thousand Oaks a name on the business world’s international map and helped reshape the image of the former cowboy and ranching town into a classier, more sophisticated, more desirable place to live.

In turn, Amgen’s location in safe and pleasant Thousand Oaks has frequently served as the enticement for top-flight East Coast scientists--some predisposed to think of Southern California as one of the least delightful places on earth.

Some impacts from having Amgen as a corporate resident are obvious: Local schoolteachers can point to the classroom microscope they wouldn’t have were it not for Amgen’s grant program.

Others are less easy to measure, such as sales at the local auto mall and the increasingly upscale tenants at The Oaks mall. The least tangible, but perhaps most striking change in Thousand Oaks, is a psychological one, a sense of pride in being linked with one of the most successful business stories of the decade.

Amgen has a reputation for being a classy operation, the kind of company that sets up an employee day-care center so well-run that it could make any working parent envious. The company parking lots gleam with expensive new cars. The two cafeterias serve food worth sticking around for. Amgen engineers fret over ways to get rid of asphalt roads running through the campus and replace them with greenery and footpaths.

Added to the image of class and the track record of high profits is the fact that Amgen’s only two products to date, Epogen and Neupogen, are medical wonders that help save lives. Industry may have bumped off the cows and sheep that used to graze the Conejo Valley, but at least it is good industry. No belching smokestacks, as Amgen spokesman David Kaye is wont to say.

“The cow town is gone,” said Steve Rubenstein, president of the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce. “We’re talking about going from the Western saddle to the English saddle.

“In the last 10 years we’ve gone from a sleepy unrecognized bedroom community to a very sophisticated, well-recognized, balanced community,” he said. “When I came out here it was a battle between the graduates from USC and UCLA versus those who had moved out here from Iowa and Oklahoma.

“Then there was this transition. We run ‘em out of Dodge.”

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Welcome to Amgenville.

The Rancho Conejo Industrial Park was supposed to be home to many small corporations. Initially it was, but over the years Amgen has relentlessly gobbled up the entire 105-acre parcel, relocating co-tenants with graceful aplomb.

Invisible from the freeway, the sprawling campus has 30 buildings and 1.5 million square feet of office and lab space. The buildings are named by number only, as if in preparation for perpetual expansion.

Amgen has literally enveloped most of the original stucco and terracotta-roofed buildings, keeping their cores but enlarging them and replacing the exteriors with sleek modern designs. Parking lots are kept to the campus outskirts, so that employees can walk from building to building. Camp Amgen, the on-site day-care center, is in the middle of the complex.

Everything is clean and new and sparkling at Amgen headquarters. Even the construction sites seem orderly. “We’ve got development potential up to 3.8 million square feet and 8,000 people,” said site planner Chuck Seeger, leading a campus tour that requires a map and good walking shoes.

Amgen rents the theater at the Civic Arts Plaza now for full staff meetings; no room on the campus is big enough to accommodate the staff, and even the 1,800-seat theater is a little on the small side. About the only similarity between the original Amgen and the Amgen of today is the name.

The company started in 1980 with 3,000 square feet of office space. Seven scientists crammed into the office, next door to the Evangelical Free Church of the Conejo Valley and a Rolls Royce detailer. George Rathmann, the company’s founder, set up shop in a trailer in the parking lot.

Choosing Thousand Oaks as the location for the new company was lucky, Rathmann says. But since it involved scientists, it also included plotting, strategy and math. Rathmann, now the chairman of Icos Corp., a Washington state biotech firm, gives credit to Winston Salser, who was to be the research director of the new company.

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“Salser said if you visualize three dimensions of distance from Los Angeles and you plotted it, so to speak, that there would be a drop-off in smog about 10 to 15 miles out of the Valley,” Rathmann said. “There would also be a drop-off in the cost of housing at about that time, and then if you plotted the possibility of schools and other things available, he felt that as you pushed out from the city you would have something that was significantly better.”

Translation: Thousand Oaks would offer good schools, clean air, decent housing.

In the beginning, Amgen did not have that much to offer its scientists. They were working wildly on dozens of different ventures, but nothing was certain. Rathmann was an inspirational character, filled with vision for the future, but the potential for failure was huge.

So Thousand Oaks became a selling point of sorts for company recruiters. Now-Mayor Jaime Zukowski and her husband Mark were looking for a place to settle and raise children in 1982 when someone at a conference in San Diego told them about Amgen. They drove up to see Thousand Oaks, and Mark Zukowski accepted a job offer.

“It was paradise,” Mayor Zukowski said. “Amgen was so small and unproven at that time, it was Thousand Oaks that sold us. We were so impressed with the community.”

Not all the scientists were enthusiastic about moving to Southern California. Los Angeles seemed just this side of hell to some of them. But Thousand Oaks, lined up against the base of the Santa Monica Mountains, was not quite what they expected.

“We were somewhat hesitant to come out here,” said Frank Martin, one of the first scientists at Amgen. “I had no desire to live in Southern California, a place with so much pollution and overcrowding.”

While he was interviewing, his wife and kids went to play in Borchard Community Park. Suddenly, Southern California didn’t seem so bad.

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Fourteen years later, Martin is part of the reason Thousand Oaks residents love Amgen. When the company started getting wealthy in 1989, after FDA approval of wonder-drug Epogen, which stimulates production of red blood cells, Martin looked for a way to start giving back to the community.

He invited local schoolteachers into his lab to study DNA. Hugh Nelson, a science teacher at Newbury Park High School, took him up on the offer.

“It changed my life rather dramatically,” Nelson said. “It was very exciting, very intense, an enormous learning experience.”

For six weeks that summer, Nelson worked 10-hour days at Amgen, isolating and splicing genes. He helped Amgen scientists develop a kit to teach students the technique. Two of the kits circulate through the west San Fernando Valley and Ventura County, and last year traveled to 22 schools. Students spend three weeks learning how to isolate and splice genes.

“I think the exposure to the real world of industry has helped the students enormously,” Nelson said. “All of a sudden our students have neighbors that have jobs here. They don’t get in a car and drive 50 miles to go push papers all day. They actually work here and make things.”

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In a world of budget cuts, Amgen is willing to spend money on students that the government isn’t. Nelson said the three-week sessions cost Amgen $9 per student in materials. He said that compares to a school allocation of only $7 per student for materials for the rest of the year in his science class.

“They say that they care and they show it,” Nelson said. “I dread the day when they stop making money hand over fist and the bean counters get in there.”

Amgen also offers a series of lectures for high school students each spring. Through the Amgen Foundation, the company gives grants of up to $500 to teachers who apply for teaching materials they can’t get from the school district. They range from gardening equipment to incubators and microscopes. Last year Amgen gave out $160,000 worth of the grants.

Then there are teaching awards--five $10,000 prizes doled out annually to Ventura County teachers nominated by the community.

Amgen employees also lend their time to an ambitious project, an $11-million children’s science museum to be called the Discovery Center in Thousand Oaks. A few of the company’s scientists dreamed up the idea and Amgen has given $25,000 in seed money to the group.

To support the performing arts, Amgen gives $50,000 annually to the Alliance for the Arts, the fund-raising arm of the Civic Arts Plaza. The company also gives money to adult literacy programs, a school for troubled kids and numerous other organizations.

Joseph Staines, president of the Amgen Foundation, said it was established to give something back to the community.

“We are trying to do this subtly, without fanfare,” Staines said.

Besides supporting the foundation, Amgen employees frequently volunteer in groups for community beautification projects. In September they spent a day cleaning up San Buenaventura State Beach, another day cleaning up graffiti in Ventura and Oxnard and another day painting a child-care facility in Agoura Hills.

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Does bringing bookstores, bagels and fancy cooking supply stores to town count as good works?

These yuppie essentials aren’t for everyone, and the onslaught of upscale retailers in Thousand Oaks certainly can’t be attributed exclusively to Amgen. But local business experts say being home to the company has helped change the retail face of Thousand Oaks.

“A major employer like Amgen coming to a city can change a city virtually overnight,” said Barbara Teucher, The Oaks mall manager.

When the mall opened in 1978, there were a lot of smaller, independently owned stores. Many of the businesses had 15-year leases. When they began to expire two years ago, national retailers with an eye on demographics were eager to fill their spots. The mom-and-pop stores and some modest chains, including Lerners, left the mall, replaced by the likes of Williams-Sonoma and Ann Taylor.

That trend continues. Preppy New England-based Talbots, which its spokeswoman Betsy Thompson said caters to customers with average household incomes of $88,000, opened a store at The Oaks just last week. Thompson said the company decided to come to Thousand Oaks based on the volume of catalogue sales it was doing in the area.

“We know we have customers there,” Thompson said.

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A Nine West shoe store also opened last week. Teucher said other retailers are on the way. The Broadway department store will be converted to a Macy’s next year.

“The demographics show these kinds of things are in demand,” said chamber President Rubenstein. “Why the next thing you know we’ll get a Neiman Marcus or a Saks Fifth Avenue. These people demand these kinds of things. And if they don’t get them here they will drive elsewhere.”

Which is exactly what they have been doing, said developer Rick Caruso, one of the principal architects of the city’s bookstore building boom.

“There is a very sophisticated, educated buyer with high disposable income in Thousand Oaks and there hasn’t been any place for them to go,” Caruso said.

To change that, he is constructing a Super Crown Books--complete with Starbucks Coffee and Noah’s Bagels--at Moorpark Road and Thousand Oaks Boulevard, just a few hundred yards from where Borders Books is about to open a 33,000-square-foot book and music store in the old Conejo Bowl. Caruso also has plans to build a Barnes & Noble bookstore on the eastern end of the city.

Looking up at the framework of the Super Crown Books, growing against a blue fall sky, one of the construction workers summed up the trend in eight words.

“The city is moving out to the country,” he said.

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Amgen’s growing role in the local economy and its image as the idealized version of a clean corporate neighbor have led local politicians to use the company as a campaigning tool. Amgen is discrete about involvement in city politics, having made only a few contributions to candidates in the last two elections.

But that did not keep politicians from trying to link themselves to a sort of Amgenian future for the city. Elect me, many of them said, and I’ll bring the next Amgen to Thousand Oaks.

Rubenstein finds the promise amusing, given that Amgen became a success story only after years and years of scientists toiling away unnoticed in that industrial park. It is unlikely that another corporation as vast as Amgen has become would relocate thousands of employees to Thousand Oaks, he said.

“What they have done for the area is put us on the international map,” Rubenstein said. “And it is causing other biotech research industries to look at our area.”

Rubenstein and city officials believe that Baxter Healthcare Corp., now awaiting FDA approval to open a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant a stone’s throw from Amgen, probably was drawn to Thousand Oaks because of Amgen’s presence. Baxter Company officials put it a little differently.

“We felt we needed to be in an attractive place where people wanted to live,” Vice President Johan Vandersande said. “Being in proximity to Amgen won’t hurt or help us.”

“I’m sure they would never admit that,” said one Amgen executive. “But it’s obvious to us. We have similar labor pools and a number of our people have already been recruited away.”

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City officials are in awe of Amgen. They have seen the benefits of having the company in town. It is the city’s largest employer. Although no taxes are generated by its annual worldwide sales--$1.6 billion in 1994--employees recycle their salaries into Thousand Oaks.

They are also grateful that Amgen’s rise to glory in the biotech world coincided with an otherwise bleak time for the area. Downsizing in the defense industry caused the Northrop Corp. to pull out of the area just as Amgen began its hiring frenzy.

“If Amgen had not been here, there would have been a tremendously different economic reality,” City Manager Grant Brimhall said.

Thanks to the City Council, Amgen is set for expansion. In March 1994, the council--with the exception of Amgen spouse Zukowski, who had a possible conflict of interest--unanimously approved a set of growth plans for the company that went against city policy.

“In expanding, they needed to violate all of our standards,” Councilwoman Judy Lazar said. “I felt it was very justified.”

Even Councilwoman Elois Zeanah, a stickler for upholding city standards, approved the plans, which included constructing 75-foot-high buildings. The city’s height limit is 35 feet for commercial and office buildings.

Council members defend the exemptions. The 75-foot buildings will not interfere with views in residential areas, they argue. The company’s need for high ceilings is valid because the laboratories require air circulation, they say.

Plus, Amgen can always be counted on to do things in the best possible way, Brimhall said.

“You have to look at what they have done over there,” Brimhall said. “Are they schlock buildings or are they structures that are designed to be long term? These are things with long-term value.”

Steve Larson, the pastor at the Evangelical Free Church, discovered how true that was when Amgen relocated his church from the middle of its growing campus to a new building the company built down the street.

“They built us a better facility,” Larson marveled. “What was so amazing was that everything was done really on the basis of a handshake and on their word.”

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The love affair between the company and the city seems likely to prosper and grow.

Amgen officials say that the company is here to stay and that they intend to add more employees by year’s end. They dismiss talk of being bought out by another corporation, largely because few companies could afford the price Amgen would bring.

Amgen appears to be content in its role as kindly benefactor to a city eager to maintain and expand its upper-middle-class reputation. And city officials aren’t letting go.

“I think we should do everything possible to keep them,” Councilwoman Lazar said. “How important is Amgen? Amgen is important. God forbid Amgen should downsize or suffer setbacks.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Amgen Growth in Thousand Oaks

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Year Revenues Local employees 1980 0 7 1981 0 50 1982 $2.7 million 85 1983 $1.5 million 108 1984 $6.1 million 159 1985 $10.1 million 174 1986 $23.4 million 230 1987 $34.7 million 319 1988 $53.3 million 455 1989 $147.6 million 584 1990 $298.7 million 813 1991 $682.1 million 1,251 1992 $1.093 billion 1,682 1993 $1.373 billion 2,183 1994 $1.647 billion 2,379 1995 NA 2,496

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Note: A large jump in earnings and employees in 1989 came with FDA approval of Epogen, and even larger increases followed in 1991 with FDA approval of Neupogen.