Lucent a Solid Bet for Irwindale
Irwindale has landed a big one. Lucent Technologies is building a huge plant complex to manufacture laser semiconductors and other optical-fiber components on a site that will attract other high-tech companies and transform the sand- and gravel-based economy of the San Gabriel Valley city.
Lucent’s Microelectronics division is spending $70 million to turn Home Savings’ old headquarters into a factory and to add a new fabrication plant for components that enable light pulses to carry conversations and data over the Internet.
Production will begin in November at the Irwindale complex, which will hire 600 employees in the next year and a half as Lucent expands by fifteenfold the optical component output of Ortel, the small Alhambra company it acquired last April for $2.95 billion.
Production also is increasing at Ortel’s old facility in Alhambra, which employs some 500. All of the expansion is being driven by exploding demand for fiber-optic components to build broadband Internet connections to homes and offices throughout the nation.
“Optical components today are a $4.5-billion business in annual revenues that experts predict will grow to $25 billion by 2004,” says Jeffrey Rittichier, general manager of optoelectronics for Lucent.
With Lucent’s buildup here, Southern California joins San Jose and the Washington area as development centers for the new optical technology.
And that’s good news in particular for the San Gabriel Valley, the vast area of 30 cities and 1.8 million residents that stretches east of Los Angeles. The valley will win increasing business in optical-fiber operations because of the availability of skilled and unskilled workers and the quality of its colleges and universities.
Lucent, in collaboration with Irwindale’s neighbor Baldwin Park and other valley organizations, drew 1,500 potential workers and suppliers to a job and business fair in Irwindale three weeks ago.
The attraction was the prospect of manufacturing jobs that pay $8.50 to $12 an hour but offer training and opportunity for entry-level workers.
“We’re looking for people with a high school education that we can train,” says George Pontiakos, Lucent’s director of operations. Lucent also helps support employees who take courses to improve their skills and pay levels.
Pontiakos and his colleagues surveyed other areas for expansion, including Phoenix, Albuquerque, Las Vegas and the high-tech complex around San Jose. But the company stayed here because it already has 500 employees at Ortel, a firm started 20 years ago by a Caltech physics professor and two of his students. Ortel made optical signal devices for the Defense Department and switched to components for cable television when defense contracts dried up in the 1990s.
Lucent also stayed because nearby Caltech, Cal Poly Pomona, USC, the Claremont Colleges and UC Irvine offer graduates in engineering and other disciplines as well as partnerships in technological research. The new Lucent complex reportedly offers six-figure incomes to engineers.
Still, for all the area’s higher education, the last decade has brought more underemployment than good jobs to the San Gabriel Valley.
Irwindale, a community of only 1,090 residents--most descendants of a few Mexican American families who came in the 1850s--has long sought new industries to offset its dependence on the mining of aggregates from the San Gabriel River basin. Pulverized San Gabriel River rock has formed the base of most roads in California and the Western states.
But Irwindale--named for a resident named Irwin who in the 1890s used a power pump to sink a water well--is remembered in recent times for having paid Al Davis $10 million in earnest money to consider moving the Raiders football team to the town. That was in 1987. Davis considered for 18 months, the deal didn’t come off and he pocketed the $10 million.
Needless to say, the Lucent buildup is a more substantial deal. Lucent is a giant company formed from the former Western Electric and Bell Labs operations of AT&T; when they were spun off in 1996. Now Lucent’s Microelectronics division, which had $4.8 billion in revenue itself last year, is going to spin off early in 2001.
An independent Microelectronics division--which may be named Avala--will sell components not only to Lucent but to Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems and companies expanding broadband Internet communications worldwide.
Its presence in Irwindale will be a boon to neighboring communities such as Baldwin Park, Azusa, Duarte, Covina, West Covina, El Monte and others whose residents will have good jobs close to home.
And it will be a magnet for suppliers and collaborators, such as Newport Corp. of Irvine, D-Star of Long Beach, Optical Micro Machines of San Diego, Integrated Micro Machines of Pasadena and many others, who are helping Southern California become a stronghold of optical communications.
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James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.
