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La Crosse and replace them with a new center in the Indianapolis area, completing the company’s exodus from the city where it was founded.
The two local distribution centers together have 32 employees. Once they close at the end of April 2009, the company founded in 1897 as LaCrosse Rubber Mills will no longer have any employees or facilities in La Crosse.
LaCrosse Footwear has been based in Portland, Ore., since 2001, when it closed its footwear manufacturing plant in La Crosse and moved its headquarters from La Crosse because of competition from low-priced footwear made overseas.
The company had more than 1,000 employees in the city in the early 1990s.
The new Indianapolis-area distribution center will have improved efficiency through improved design and automation, LaCrosse Footwear said in a press release.
Indianapolis also has better truck and air transportation, Executive Vice President David Carlson told the Tribune in a telephone interview. Indiana-polis has FedEx and United Parcel Service hubs, said Carlson, who was in La Crosse Friday morning to inform employees of the decision to close the two local centers.
“The new distribution center will allow us to get closer to our customers and increase our speed of delivery,” he said. The company’s other distribution center will remain in Portland, he said.
The two local distribution centers are in the former Trane Plant 6 building at Lang Drive and St. Andrew Street, and in the Central States Warehouse complex along Caledonia Street.
“It’s one of those things where we have to compete nationally, and it’s unfortunate that we have to leave here to do that,” Carlson said of the move to the Indianapolis area.
“It’s disheartening,” Mayor Mark Johnsrud said of Friday’s announcement. “It’s the end of an era. We put in hundreds of hours” trying to convince LaCrosse Footwear to locate its new distribution center in the area.
“We’ve had discussions with them over the past two years,” Johnsrud said. “It seemed we were always in an uphill battle, that we were always competing against more central cities in the United States.”
Johnsrud said locating a new center in Indianapolis “makes sense from a standpoint of distribution. But it just shows there’s no allegiance left to the city of La Crosse or to the LaCrosse name. It shows it’s dollars and cents.”
“It’s a bitter disappointment,” said James Hill, executive director of the La Crosse Area Development Corp. “We had competed for that facility for almost two years and had what we thought was a pretty strong proposal,” he said.
The company wanted to have a 350,000-square-foot facility on almost 30 acres, Hill said. “A site of that size was not available in the city,” so local and state government and LADCO officials proposed a site in the Lakeview Business Park in West Salem, Wis., Hill said.
Developers have built warehouse facilities along interstate corridors in Indiana and are offering low prices “given that their economies are in a lot tougher place,” Hill said. “So we were fighting an uphill battle against a lower-cost facility and the very powerful effect of not having to pay (property) taxes for a long period of time” under some incentives being offered in Indiana.
“Since the early 2000s, their footprint in this community has been less and less and less,” said Dick Granchalek, president of the La Crosse Area Chamber of Commerce. “It’s disappointing, but I don’t know if I’d say surprising,” he said.
Steve Cahalan can be reached at (608) 791-8229 or scahalan@lacrossetribune.com.
