Chevron to Move Technology Center in O.C. to Bay Area

Chevron Corp., continuing to shrink its Southern California operations, said Thursday it plans to sell its technology center in La Habra, eliminating about 330 high-paying jobs in Orange County’s northernmost city.

Most of the engineers and geologists at the facility will be transferred to the San Francisco area as part of Chevron’s effort to consolidate operations and cut long-term operating costs.

The company said the technology office, which supports its international oil and gas exploration and production efforts, will be moved to Chevron’s offices in San Ramon and Richmond starting in April. The relocation should take about a year.

Chevron officials said they could not say how many employees would be transferred and how many would be laid off. “There will be some job losses though,” a spokeswoman said.

The property is the last remnant of a major Chevron oil field in north Orange County. Chevron sold 371 acres of its La Habra property in 1995 as part of a mass divestiture of 18,000 acres--some of it played-out oil fields, the rest investment properties acquired over the years when the company was involved in housing developments.

The company says it is cutting costs to weather a prolonged period of low oil prices that slashed its earnings. Last year, Chevron’s earnings tumbled 40% to $1.98 billion, while sales declined about 14% to $30 billion from $35 billion.

“We said in December that our cost-cutting projection for 1999 was $500 million,” spokeswoman Dawn Soper said. “There will be costs to the company this year to consolidate and realign this operation,” she said. “But we expect that over the long term, the efficiencies will reduce operating costs significantly.”

The relocation of the technology unit will leave only a 190-employee regional retail marketing operation at the La Habra site. Chevron said it will announce plans for that unit within a few weeks, but it is expected to remain in Southern California.

San Francisco-based Chevron also has a major refinery, with about 1,400 employees, in El Segundo.

The company, the nation’s fourth-largest oil firm, said it plans to refurbish the 27-acre La Habra complex, which includes eight office buildings, before putting it on the market next year.

State law will require Chevron to clean up any toxic or hazardous materials on the property, which once was part of a producing oil field and included a small chemical research laboratory.

But the company already has done a lot of cleanup over the years, Soper said. Until a survey of the property is completed, the company can’t estimate the environmental cleanup that remains, she said.

Although the move will cost La Habra more than 300 jobs, most of the employees live in other cities, said Bob Laing, general manager of the technology unit.

City officials in La Habra were fairly upbeat about the situation, many speculating that the land will be far more valuable generating property taxes once Chevron sells it. That’s because the oil company has owned the land since the early 1900s and its tax base has been kept artificially low under restrictions imposed by the statewide property tax limitation measure--Proposition 13--approved by voters in 1978.

Laing, who announced the pending move to employees early Thursday, said feelings were mixed but that most understood and agreed with the business reasons.