Sturgis welcomes California firearms company

[rp55]

Rapid City Journal (South Dakota).

STURGIS -- The Sturgis Industrial Park is getting a new tenant.

Bar-Sto Precision Machine, a firearms company based in Twentynine Palms, Calif., plans to relocate to Sturgis next year.

The company, which manufactures replacement pistol barrels, firearms accessories and high-end custom firearms, is building a 6,000-square-foot building and will move in by September 2010.

Bar-Sto employs 10 people at its California plant, and chief executive officer Irv Stone said three or four of those workers might move to Sturgis. Three-year projections call for Bar-Sto to bring 18 jobs to Sturgis.

Mayor Maury LaRue said before the groundbreaking that Friday ended a four-year project that featured many entities working together.

"It's nice that this happens in tough economic times," LaRue said.

LaRue said Sturgis is positioning itself as a precision manufacturing park. He said other gun manufacturers and the Sanford Undergound Laboratory at Homestake in Lead provide spinoff opportunities.

[HUTCH 7.62]

Damn that Sucks another firearm manufacters gone with the winds of change. But do you blame them this place we call home is hostile to bussiness' And it's got to be twice as hard to run any firearm related bussiness in the PRK

Reminds me My dads armalite AR-180 was made in Costa Mesa back in the 70's.

[Dirtbiker]

I know it is advantageous to move out of Ca but Sturgis???

One winter there will do those 4 Ca employees in.

Unless they are all motorcycle nuts.

[bwiese]

That may compensate in small part for the Sturgis firearms mfgrs that filed bankruptcy.

[Mitch]

South Dakota? I guess if you live in Twentynine Palms South Dakota is an improvement.

And Costa Mesa remains a great place to do business.

[Fjold]

I know it is advantageous to move out of Ca but Sturgis???

One winter there will do those 4 Ca employees in.

Unless they are all motorcycle nuts.

Butch Searcy of Searcy Firearms Manufacturing in Boron, CA opened up a second shop in Sturgis.

[audihenry]

A lot of states offer great incentives for business that CA just doesn't.

[minuteman]

Take me with you!

[Victory]

......

I wonder if there's any relation between this LaRue and the LaRue.

Oh, Mark...

-Vic

[ar15barrels]

I guess Irv is a Harley guy.
Who knew?

[bodger]

A lot of states offer great incentives for business that CA just doesn't.

Absolute truth. I run a small business here, the CA state government treats my company as if it were their own personal piggy bank. Local gov does the same.

I wonder what they'll do when they've ridden that horse to death and more buisnesses leave the state.

[dfletcher]

Absolute truth. I run a small business here, the CA state government treats my company as if it were their own personal piggy bank. Local gov does the same.

In addition to the taxes and regulation in general, SF mandates that we pay about 9 days a year sick pay AND that we offer an incentive for employees to ride BART - and we have to administer the BART incentive program, so we're basically doing the admin work for the city on that program.

A friend told me years ago that SF is like an old whore - she dresses the same way, walks the same walk but doesn't realize she just ain't what she used to be and doesn't understand why business is bad. I think the same can now be said for California as a whole.

[Jonathan Doe]

I have been to Bar-Sto twice for a tour. One less company to tour for new trainees at my office.

[Mitch]

A friend told me years ago that SF is like an old whore - she dresses the same way, walks the same walk but doesn't realize she just ain't what she used to be and doesn't understand why business is bad. I think the same can now be said for California as a whole.

That's not a bad comparison.

In the postwar era, California was rich and progressive and an example of good government for the rest of the country, especially with regard to law enforcement and education. My father was a San Leandro cop in the sixties, and he said the differences were stark when he went back east to visit my mother's cop brother in Pennsylvania.

California also had excellent public schools and the finest state-supported higher education system in the nation. As late as 1980 (when I left high school) a semester at Cal State was only a few hundred dollars, almost free as far as I was concerned.

But after World War II California experienced a huge population influx from the rest of the country, both in terms of people and businesses, so revenues grew rapidly. It was relatively easy to be magnanimous and progressive, building schools and freeways everywhere and paying your police and teachers twice the national average, when so much money was rolling in. It helped that when the music finally began to wind down, in the seventies, we had a relatively parsimonious governor in the person of Jerry Brown.

But California is no longer growing rapidly, it can no longer afford what it used to be able to afford, but no one wants to really admit it.

This is not just a problem for California, it's a national problem. The postwar economic boom was completely unprecedented not just in the history of the United States, but in the entire history of mankind! It was an anomalous era of tremendous prosperity that living Americans regard as a birthright, though in fact we will never see it again.

This collective national myopia is simply more acute in California, which experienced the best of the boom, and was largely insulated from the wrenching economic adjustments of the seventies and eighties.

Still, I love California. I was born and raised here and have been all over the country and even lived overseas for a few years, and since 1991 I have kept coming back to Costa Mesa. If it costs more to live here and work here, well, that's the price of not having to live in Ohio or Texas or New Jersey.

The only thing that could drive me out of California is the crowds of people moving here from other parts of the country (they finally drove my parents out). But as long as I stay off the freeways and out of shopping malls, I don't seem to encounter them all that much.

[Quser.619]

Wait until Silicon Valley fully collapses & Texas & other business friendly states begin to surpass California both economically & enjoy the boom of productive transplants.