Conversion Work Begins at Missile Plant

Work officially began Monday on a project to transform the cavernous buildings of Pomona’s former General Dynamics missile plant into a furniture manufacturing center that will bring up to 2,000 new jobs to the area.

“This year we are welcoming business back into this site,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, who helped engineer the sale of the plant owned by the U.S. Navy to the city. “Certainly it is going to be a gateway to what I consider the furniture fashion center of California.”

The missile plant, where 12,000 were employed until its closure in 1994, will become home to Boyd Furniture Manufacturing, makers of upscale household and hotel furnishings, and Techsystems Group, an office furniture supplier, as well as their showrooms, dozens of restaurants and other small retailers, city officials said.

“This is going to be the beginning of great things for Pomona,” Pomona Councilwoman Nell Soto said.

The veteran councilwoman joined Boxer to help persuade the Navy last year to sell the site. The U.S. government swapped the site for 50,000 acres of state land near Death Valley under new provisions of the federal Desert Protection Act. The state in turn sold the missile plant site to the city for $13 million.

The Navy already had given the missile plant’s old recreation facilities, complete with gymnasium and ball fields, to the city for recreational use.

Boxer and many other officials Monday praised Soto’s one-woman crusade to reuse the site. ‘We don’t know what we are going to call it yet,” Boxer said. “I thought may be Soto Center.”