Job Training Center to Move Into New Home

Lonnie Miramontes, executive director of the Oxnard division of the Center for Employment Training, is looking forward to having a little more elbow room at work.

He will be getting it within a couple of months, when officials of the nonprofit vocational training institution pack their bags and move from their home of 20 years on Oxnard’s A Street to the current GTE Phonemart location on South C Street.

The move, from a 17,000-square-foot, five-building site to a less cumbersome 20,000-square-foot single structure, is both a necessity and a blessing for CET.

“We’ve been looking for a place for three years now,” Miramontes said. “The building we currently are in was purchased by the city [of Oxnard] five years ago. We’ve been on a year-to-year lease because the city has been looking at redevelopment downtown. Last year, they said we can’t renew.”

The new building, which the nonprofit employment center was looking to buy before approximately $1 million in funds fell through, will allow the organization to offer additional work-training programs to its nearly 300 clients. CET is one of 40 affiliated training centers nationwide.

“We’ll have better control of our facilities, our offices and our students because we are going to be under one roof,” Miramontes said. “In the new building we’ll be able to offer new classes, because we’ll have better control and better flow between classrooms and skill rooms.”

Miramontes said the move will allow the institution to offer additional services, including longer hours that will allow clients to work during the day and train at night, and a child-care center for working parents. The new site also will nearly triple, to 140, the number of parking spaces.

The former GTE-owned building is now the property of Viola Constructors, a longtime Oxnard construction company that last year purchased the site from the phone company. The transaction returned to Viola a property that the firm built more than 25 years ago.

Viola owns about 130,000 square feet of commercial and industrial buildings in Ventura County.

“We were interested in this building--it’s been for sale for some time--but we weren’t interested in buying the building without a tenant,” Michael Viola, the company’s CEO, said. “When we approached [CET] originally, it was in the interest of landing them as a tenant for another building we own in downtown Oxnard, but that is only 10,000 square feet and we found there need was more in the way of 15,000 to 20,000 square feet.”

Viola said he is pleased to have the employment training center as a tenant.

“The nature of [CET’s] work appealed to me and the fact that they are nationwide gave me a sense of confidence that they would fulfill their lease obligation,” he said.

“I believe that the service they provide is in demand and will be in increasing demand as welfare reform changes the composition of the welfare recipient . . . in that they’re going to have to work.”

CET signed a six-year lease with Viola, with the requirement that the training center purchase the building by the end of that period.

A Viola-built structure’s housing a learning center is hardly out of the norm for the construction company. Beginning with the Buena High School campus in the late 1950s, Viola has developed a reputation for building educational institutions.

Its list of projects includes Thousand Oaks High School, Ventura High School, Balboa Middle School and about 100 other campuses in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

Viola is currently involved in $20 million in school construction, including the Lang Ranch School campus in Thousand Oaks and John F. Kennedy High School in Granada Hills.