By By Lisa Tindell
news editor
Citation Corp. officials have refused to comment on reports that the company has laid off as many as 100 people from the Brewton facility.
Two sources close to the plant have said Citation has had two rounds of layoffs in the past several months.
Jennifer Lee of The Millerschin Group, which serves as public relations contacts for Citation, which is headquartered in Novi, Mich., said company officials have made no announcements concerning layoffs at the Brewton plant.
Marshall Rogers, director of the Escambia County Industrial Development Authority, said that if layoffs had occurred, they might not have met a threshold for state reporting.
If the layoffs at the Brewton facility are accurate, they join a large number of layoffs in the region during the economic downturn of the past year.
But Rogers said although the number of unemployed workers has increased in the last year, the county has not been as hard hit as other neighboring counties.
According to information from the Alabama Department of Industrial Relations, Conecuh County had a 17.1 percent unemployment rate in April. Monroe County’s unemployment rate was at 16.3 percent in the same month, while Covington County’s rate was at 11.3 percent. The only county in the five-county cluster to see lower unemployment than Escambia is Baldwin County, which stodd at a 6.7 percent unemployment rate in April.
Alabama’s unemployment rate was reportedly 9 percent as of April 30, according to the Alabama Department of Industrial Relations. The rate has been steady for two months with no increase in average number of unemployed.
New unemployment numbers are due out before the end of the month.
Attempts to contact local officials with Citation Corporation have been unsuccessful.