FLUOR’S PENDING MOVE TO THE DALLAS AREA IS THE EXCEPTION THAT PROVES the rule. You’ve got 100 Fluor execs moving out of Orange County to a more central location near key oil clients.
The trend is the other way,top execs moving (or staying) in OC and outsourcing the worker bees. In this case, Fluor is keeping its highly skilled bees, the engineers, here in OC and Long Beach.
It will be interesting to watch whether Fluor’s Aliso Viejo-based charitable foundation, which also stays put, starts cutting more checks to Texas. I imagine it will.
Also worth noting: Fluor’s been on quite an odyssey (see story, page 1). The company started in Santa Ana in 1912 and moved to Los Angeles (to be closer to the oil guys!) a few decades later. In the late 1970s, the company came to Irvine to ignite the OC office boom. By 1999, Fluor moved to a South County campus as part of an efficiency push.
In fact, Fluor continues to lose grandeur. It was at its conglomerate best when it had that audacious glass edifice in Irvine. Then to modernize, it moved into a low-rise in Aliso Viejo. Now the execs will be camping out by Dallas-FortWorth airport for better client handholding.
,Rick Reiff
