Mako to close N.C. plant
FOREST CITY, N.C. – Mako Marine International will shutter its boat plant in Forest City, N.C., the day after Christmas and lay off 125 people, the Triangle Business Journal reported in a story on Wednesday.
“The boating business throughout North Carolina has made our production schedule an unattainable objective,” Chuck Yarbrough, head of human resources for Mako Marine parent Tracker Marine Group, said in a letter to state officials, the newspaper reported.
Yarbrough told The Daily Courier, a newspaper in Forest City, that the down economy had cut orders to the point where keeping the plant open is untenable. But the company will keep its plant running through Christmas so that workers could keep making money through the holidays, The Triangle Business Journal reported.
In 2002, Mako was promised $150,000 from the One North Carolina economic development fund if it could bring 300 jobs to Forest City. Deborah Barnes, a spokeswoman for the N.C. Department of Commerce, says the company reached that target and got its payment in 2004. The company was required to keep the jobs until 2006 and did so. In the past two years, however, the number of workers at the plant has dwindled, the newspaper reported.
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