WellPoint Bringing 600-700 Jobs to Area

The corporate parent of Blue Cross of California plans to hire between 600 and 700 new employees in Ventura County by year’s end and move its corporate headquarters to Westlake.

About 300 of the new hires will be located in Newbury Park, where WellPoint Health Networks Inc.--which owns Blue Cross--has built a 113,000-square-foot office building on Corporate Center Drive.

The rest of the hiring will take place at WellPoint’s existing offices in Camarillo, Peter O’Neill, the managed-care company’s corporate communications manager, said Friday.

Offering a broad-based boost to Ventura County’s economy, the new jobs will range from clerical, customer service and claims positions to nursing, pharmaceutical, managerial and technical jobs. The new employees will handle insurance accounts for individuals, small employers and senior citizens.

“This is a wonderful tribute to the quality and caliber of residents we have in this general area--both here and in Camarillo,” said Thousand Oaks City Councilwoman Judy Lazar.

“I’m delighted--as I’m sure others will be--to see WellPoint expanding here. They’re a good employer with good jobs that provide a good service. I’m proud to see them grow here.”

Economics professor Ali Akbari of Cal Lutheran University believes the new jobs will increase consumer confidence and spur more job creation.

“When you create new jobs, you usually see a spillover or multiplier effect,” said Akbari, director of Cal Lutheran’s economic research center. “These new employees need people to do their dry-cleaning and to serve them fast food and offer other services.”

What’s more, major health-care corporations tend to attract others.

“This could lead to a situation where Ventura County becomes a new magnet in the health-care industry,” he said. In such situations an economy can develop “from the production of similar businesses and jobs. They feed on each other.”

Currently, the managed-care company employs 1,500 people in Thousand Oaks and 1,200 in Camarillo. It is the county’s sixth-largest employer overall and third-largest private employer, said Todd Giedt, operations manager for the Economic Forecast Project at UC Santa Barbara.

“This would move them up a notch even higher on our employers list,” Giedt said. “With 700 more, they’d still be behind the Naval Construction Battalion Center, the county, Point Mugu and Amgen. But they’d bump GTE down and go right behind Amgen.”

In addition, WellPoint is moving its corporate headquarters and 300 employees from Woodland Hills to La Tienda Road in the Westlake section of Thousand Oaks.

“That sounds really great,” said Judy St. John, past president of the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce and incoming leader of the Thousand Oaks Rotary Club.

Of the 300 new employees who will potentially shop in and around Newbury Park and Thousand Oaks, St. John said the sales-tax revenue they generate will be a boon to city services.

“We’re a sales-tax city, so we need these families to shop locally,” she said.

This is not WellPoint’s first move to expand in Ventura County.

Last year, the company added 901 employees here--most of them transfers from elsewhere--making the company Ventura County’s fastest-growing employer, said Giedt.

“We like having a presence in Ventura County,” WellPoint’s O’Neill said. “We have found a good quality and quantity of employees there. And most of the people who work in Ventura County live in Ventura County.”

In 1995, WellPoint publicized plans to open a high-profile, $180-million office development in Camarillo, which would have brought about 7,200 new employees to the county over eight years.

That plan fell through when WellPoint merged with Health Systems International that year, much to the chagrin of county boosters.

Times correspondent Troy Heie contributed to this story.