Downturn Means Fewer Firms Flocking to Tech Corridor By CARLOS MARTINEZ Staff Reporter Tech 101 Corridor cities have a whole new strategy these days. After years of seeing high-tech firms flock to the area and then years trapped in a downturn, the cities of Thousand Oaks, Camarillo and Oxnard are now learning to work with what they have. “We’re more concentrating on keeping what we have since the demand for businesses to come here has pretty much gone away,” said Jim Jevins, economic development consultant for Camarillo. “It used to be that you could easily attract these big firms, but that’s not happening anymore,” he added. The 40-mile stretch of the Ventura (101) Freeway between the San Fernando Valley and Ventura, better known as the Tech 101 Corridor, is home to about 600 technology companies employing about 115,000 people. Long gone are the trips to towns around the state where city officials would make their pitch to willing corporate officers seeking to move their firm to sunny Camarillo. In the past year just over a dozen new businesses moved to the city, thought most of these were the small fry variety, of only about five or six people, Jevins said. Down the road in Thousand Oaks, Gary Wartik economic development manager, tells a similar story of lessened interest by business seeking to relocate. “I’m not hearing the kind of interest we used to get from these companies,” Wartik said. The days of companies moving into a newly built 20,000 to 30,000-square foot building are all but gone in the 55-square-mile city. Despite the drop in companies moving in, the city has a few bright spots in recent months as Kohl’s department stores has agreed to build a 130,000-square-foot store in the city. That, along with a new Courtyard Marriott hotel and another hotel project, are the only projects tentatively planned for the city. Wartik blamed the bad economy and the combination of a lack of affordable housing and increasing land values in the city. “We have to refocus on small companies because we realize the larger companies just are not going to come to Thousand Oaks anymore,” he said. Last year, the city drew the interest of a food processing firm that sought to build a plant in the city, but concerns over high truck traffic and whether a suitable parcel would be available brought an end to that deal, Wartik said. Large spaces In Oxnard, that city’s large industrial area and its three massive business parks have continued to attract businesses in manufacturing and technology. Elizabeth Callahan, vice president of the Oxnard Economic Development Corp., said the city has continued to attract businesses which gravitate to its largely vacant business parks built in the 1990s. “We have not seen a slowdown in the number of companies moving in,” Callahan said. “Currently, we are looking at 23 companies that want to move to Oxnard, but some of the demand is weakening because of the growing cost of housing and land,” she said. Sysco Food Distributors is looking for a 40-acre parcel for a distribution center in the city, but so far no deals have been struck yet. If the company moves, it would add 500 new jobs to the area, Callahan said. Oxnard has had its share of big companies relocate there such as Larrivee Guitars moving in from Canada in 2001, and Astro Cosmos, a pipe and metal container manufacturer that moved from Ohio to the city last year. Both companies added nearly 300 jobs to the area, which is what the city wants most. “We’re not as interested in companies that provide few or no jobs to the people in our city,” Callahan said. “Our main purpose here is to create jobs so that’s why Sysco is so important to us because they’ll hire everyone locally.” Clyde Pratt, president and CEO of Kinamed Inc., a medical device firm that moved to Camarillo in 2001, said he believes the area will continue to attract businesses even as land and housing costs grow. “The attraction is really the area, the safety and the skilled workers that you have here,” he said. Brent Reinke, an attorney with Crosby Heafey’s Westlake Village office who specializes in helping fund tech firms, says the tech corridor’s slowing growth was expected given the troubled national economy. “Things were bound to slow down, but those areas are still very desirable and interest by companies is going to come back when the economy does,” Reinke said. Benjamin Kuo, publisher of an online technology news digest, www.socaltech.com, said the corridor has been adversely impacted by cheaper rents available in the Valley and even in parts of West Los Angeles where previous high rents kept buildings idle. “We’re hearing more and more about cheap rents on available buildings in L.A. and cheap rent is what attracted a lot of companies to Camarillo and Oxnard,” he said. It was just 10 years ago that the area began its boom with technology firms seemingly lining up to move into the tech corridor, made up mostly of technology firms that make telecommunications equipment like power supplies, servers, routers and high speed chips. Among the first to make the area its home was Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. which made high speed chips for the military before that market vanished and the company turned toward the commercial market by making chips for moving data over fiber optic networks. Scores of other firms followed including Inphi Inc., a high speed network equipment maker in Westlake Village, and Calabasas-based Xylan, another chip maker, later acquired by French technology firm, Alcatel. As more companies moved in, cities like Camarillo, Westlake Village and others along the corridor worked feverishly to make room for more through a more streamlined permit process for new construction while at the same time creating plans for industrial parks. Oxnard alone developed three large industrial parks of more than a million square feet of office space, while upgrading its heavy manufacturing zone for heavy industry. For Oxnard, the plan worked as the tech boom soured, non technology firms began to move in along with a mix of heavy and light manufacturing firms in recent years. “That’s the advantage they have because they can take heavy manufacturer and place them in their m-2 zone while the rest of these cities can’t,” said Camarillo’s Jevins, who also noted that city’s greater amount of available land for construction. As for Camarillo, Jevins admits his city is focused more on keeping the businesses it already has. “We want to keep on eye on businesses,” Jevins said, “and if they’re in trouble, we want to go in and try to help.”
