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Standard Structures sells key chunk of company
Wes DeMelo, right, and David DelSeco drill holes Friday for large metal plates that will help hold together a truss at Standard Structures' plant in Windsor. The truss is bound for a new library in Southern California.
KENT PORTER/Press DemocratPublished: Friday, September 16, 2011 at 4:30 p.m.
Last Modified: Friday, September 16, 2011 at 4:44 p.m.
Standard Structures, for decades a major Sonoma County manufacturer, has sold a key part of its engineered wood products business to an Idaho company.
The transaction follows a historic collapse in the construction industry that wiped out 75 percent of the company’s annual sales in just four years.
“Frankly it’s devastating,” company President Dick Caletti said Friday of the downturn. “All of our dreams have been kind of punctured.”
Late last month, Boise-based RedBuilt purchased Standard Structures’ proprietary business for manufacturing two types of engineered joists and truss systems. RedBuilt also signed a 20-year lease for more than 60,000 square feet of manufacturing and storage space at the Windsor plant off Shiloh Road and Highway 101.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
RedBuilt has agreed to hire upwards of 20 Standard Structures employees in sales and technical roles, Caletti said. He hopes the new company eventually will hire an additional 30 to 50 of his workers.
Standard Structures will retain about 60,000 square feet of space at the Windsor plant and continue to manufacture a line of straight and curved laminated wood beams for roofs and floor systems, Caletti said. But he is still finalizing plans on how many workers will remain.
Standard Structures already has leased out some of its Windsor plant and will seek to find tenants for the remaining 140,000 square feet of available space.
With the resumption of freight rail service, Caletti is contacting wineries and other businesses about loading and unloading freight at his plant’s rail spur.
RedBuilt will take control of its area at the plant in late October, Caletti said. A RedBuilt spokesman was unavailable Friday.
Caletti’s father, Carlo Caletti, began Standard Structures in Sacramento in 1947. He developed a system for glue-laminating wood into strong, lightweight beams and arches. The business moved to Healdsburg in 1952 and to Windsor in 1972.
Standard Structures’ engineered wood products are used to build schools, apartments, churches, shopping centers, bridges and other large projects across the United States, including the giant Coke bottle at AT&T Park in San Francisco.
As recently as 2007, the company was the county’s second-largest heavy manufacturer and Windsor’s second-largest employer, with a $10 million annual payroll.
“Dick Caletti’s an iconic figure in manufacturing, and so is his company,” said Keith Woods, chief executive officer for the North Coast Builders Exchange.
About six years ago Standard Structures began an Employee Stock Ownership Plan that was designed over time to sell the company to its workers. The effort was touted as a way to keep the business local and to provide a better future for the workers.
But the construction industry’s decline has upended those plans. Sales plunged from $59 million in 2006 to $14 million last year, tumbling all the way back to levels from 1969, when Caletti became president.
The company, which employed about 350 workers in 2006, had shrunk to fewer than 100 employees by this summer. About 50 people will help fulfill orders for the next two months.
“Sales have been so poor the last three years that we couldn’t continue on,” he said, prompting the decision to sell off part of the business.
The company is in the process of terminating the employee ownership plan, and “there will be no money left” in it for the workers, Caletti said.
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