The Buck Stopped Here

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Leery of getting bogged down in a lengthy zoning dispute, developers shied away from the site. Without a deal on its old factory, Buck couldn't raise funds to build a new one. The whole relocation project stalled. "It's a horrid position, to have your whole company waiting to be shut down," says CJ. "It was agony." It took an entire year before Buck found a buyer--developer Lee Boyd, who proposed to tear down the factory and build 97 houses, provisionally named Buck's Landing. Boyd was willing to pay $9 million, provided he was able to win permission from local officials. But in March 2004 the airport authority rejected his plan. Desperate to regain momentum, CJ asked his board for permission to at least begin drafting plans for a new factory in Idaho, despite the fact that no one seemed to want the El Cajon site. The board agreed. Finally, two months later, Buck found a buyer: Race Car Dynamics, a manufacturer of components for light trucks and off-road vehicles. Race Car Dynamics, which had outgrown its facility in Jamul, 15 miles east of El Cajon, liked the site but offered only $7.5 million.

CJ bit his lip and made the deal.

The "Hit List"

Meanwhile, the company had to confront the painful process of deciding who would move to Idaho--and who would be left behind. Moving everyone would simply be too expensive. "It was kind of disturbing," remembers heat-treat specialist Paul Farner. "You don't know if you're going to be out of a job. You wonder if you're going to be the person who goes to Idaho."

Managers in every department identified key employees who would be invited to join Buck in Post Falls and help train new hires. After several rounds of negotiations, the so-called hit list was pared down to 75 of the company's most crucial people. The rest--approximately 200 workers--would lose their jobs. "Obviously there was great disappointment," says Duckett. "But moving was a matter of survival."

Buck tried to ease the pain by giving workers a year's notice, providing severance packages, and working with the California Department of Industrial Relations to provide retraining. At the same time, the company had to woo the workers it needed to move north. Each was offered $6,000 to cover relocation costs and a bonus of several weeks' salary, on the condition that they stay for at least one year after the move. Buck flew workers and their spouses to Idaho and rented buses to take them to see schools and neighborhoods. Local officials like Potter and Larkin led tours and answered questions, which ranged from the cosmic to the mundane. Some worried that they wouldn't be able to find a church that met their spiritual needs. Others fretted about their teenage children's sporting activities.

"Racial issues were a huge thing. The media had painted this place as a haven for racists."

A bigger problem was the culture gap between southern California and the Idaho panhandle. Kootenai County is one of the least diverse counties in America, according to the Census Bureau, with 95.8 percent of its population consisting of non-Hispanic whites. Worse, for several decades the area was the home of the Aryan Nations, a motley band of white supremacists headed by a former aerospace engineer named Richard G. Butler. The group is defunct, Butler is dead, and locals maintain that the overwhelming majority reject what he stood for. (In 2003, Butler ran for mayor of nearby Hayden, Idaho, and lost by a margin of 1,924 votes to 50.) Nonetheless, Kootenai County still struggles with the perception that it is unfriendly to minorities. "Racial issues were a huge thing," says Duckett. "The media had painted this place as a haven for racists." But those anxieties tended to melt away when employees took a look at the town for themselves. "This is as decent a place to live for people of color as any place in the United States," says Norman Gissel, past president of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. Duckett, whose fiancée is Hispanic, calls the whole issue "a major nonevent."

One thing that no one could soft-pedal was the weather. Post Falls gets an average of 50 inches of snow every winter, and in January the mercury hovers around 22° F, a slap in the face for anyone accustomed to the balmy climes of southern California. During one worker visit, employees awoke to a hailstorm. One of the spouses declared that she wasn't moving and refused to leave the hotel.

Affordable real estate was a pretty good consolation, however. In El Cajon, for example, Farner, the heat-treat specialist, lived in a double-wide mobile home with his wife, son, and five cats. "We were saving for a down payment," he says, "but we were always one step behind." In Post Falls, the couple purchased a 1,650-square-foot tri-level house on a half acre just a stone's throw from the crystal-clear waters of Hauser Lake.

In the end, 58 workers and their families decided to make the move. None of them, however, were from the sales and marketing department, which numbered about 15 employees. These employees were generally affluent enough to enjoy life in southern California. Rather than build a new sales force from scratch, CJ struck a deal. Buck would lease back a small section of the El Cajon plant for them and revisit the arrangement after two years. "We knew the company was vulnerable during relocation," says CJ. "We wanted to keep the familiar voices at the order desk for our dealers. Instead of disrupting the team, we'd leave them in place."

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