PART 2 of Chuck Missar's Comments on the Decision about what Spectra-Physics might do (what follows is not on the audio)

We also talked about picking up our marbles and going home. If they get too tough, we can always move out. That had some downside, though. The cost of moving a professional is around $50,000 per person, and we had at least a hundred people we would take along if we moved. Ph.D.s and technical specialists essential to the business. A lot of them liked living here, going over to the coast on Saturday or out to climb and hike in the mountains after work, people who wanted to come to work for us BECAUSE we were in Eugene, Oregon.

Not that you can't get something like that environment in some California places, but the price of dirt's not cheap in California, either, or the taxes. But of course, that was an option we had to consider. And we were at a point that we could see over the horizon; we could see that our business was going up a sharp curve and we would need more capacity. The total cost of the expansion appeared to be $8 million. The cost of dealing with the mitigation and permitting might be between $350,000 and $500,000, depending on which land we bought and how much it cost to restore it. The cost of legal fees if we fought it would be about $4000 per lawyer per day, and the battle might drag out for a year, not with the lawyers working forty hours a week, of course, but a steady drain, you see, for quite a while out in the future, and meanwhile that money is not going to do anything toward getting bar code scanners built to meet the demand and hold on to our market share.

It was also notable that no other company in the area was stepping up to do any mitigation right off; we were out there by ourselves in this decision; since we were the biggest employer, others were sort of kicking back to see what we did before making any commitment, and the local people such as the former mayor and some of the important families who had invested thinking that the land could be resold were under no pressure to act quickly. But there was some urgency in this decision for us.

We had been bought up by a foreign firm, Ciba Geigy, and there were expectations about our growth and plans for expansion abroad if trade restrictions eased and Asia kept growing as a market. We were on a track, and we didn't want to be derailed. We had bought the site originally and done a master plan specifically to avoid derailment. And in the mean time we had put people in a building a mile away and everyone hated it; I mean hated it. We liked coming to work on a campus site and having everyone able to talk to everyone else and just walk across to the next building and give some technical help to the production people. The people at the other place couldn't be taken care of and worked with in the same way. We were only running one shift, and that was the way we wanted it, because you can't get your senior technical people to work a night shift and it's no good running production if you don't have technical support.

Well, you can see there were several important concerns that we had, and we were completely surprised by the reception we got when we went to present our permit request and got a letter back saying that the permit was not only not going through, they were thinking of penalties for our past "transgressions," things we had no idea were going to matter when we got our original permits to fill in a flood plain and build.

Return to Team Assignment 1.