Filter Manufacturer Plans Move to Oxnard

After 35 years in Newbury Park, PTI Technologies has outgrown its home, so the company is preparing a move to Oxnard in search of more elbow room.

Feeling confined in a 185,000-square-foot facility, officials of the filtration-product manufacturing company have purchased a 125,000-square-foot industrial building on Eastman Avenue and are planning to construct a 110,000-square-foot building on a recently purchased 10 acres of land within the McInnes Ranch Business Park.

Occupancy of the existing Oxnard building is scheduled for late 1999, with construction and occupancy of the McGinnis Ranch building in 2000.

PTI Technologies, which also operates a facility in San Diego, is a subsidiary of ESCO Electronics Corp., a St. Louis-based manufacturer of commercial and defense products.

“Now is definitely the time to move,” company spokeswoman Celia Kruse de la Rosa said. “We’re in a position where we have nowhere to grow in Newbury Park. This allows us to further our growth.”

PTI Technologies produces filtration products for industries such as aerospace, industrial, pharmaceutical and biotech. The company’s clients have included Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, Kelly Air Force Base in Texas and the Defense Supply Center in Ohio.

Kruse de la Rosa said most of the company’s 285 Ventura County employees live in Ventura, Oxnard and Camarillo, so the move to Oxnard makes sense logistically.

It should also help the delivery drivers who visit the manufacturing facility, she said.

“When trucks come in to make deliveries now, they have to go out of their way to get in,” she said. “We can only get so creative how we move things around for them.”