By MATTHEW WATKINS
ROCKDALE -- A small line of Alcoa workers waited outside the Rockdale Workforce Center during lunchtime Wednesday, plagued with doubts about the future of their employment and of their town.
All of them anticipated being jobless in the near future, and most said they expected difficulty finding a new place to work.
Bryan resident Paul Blanton waited for an interview opportunity with Halliburton. He said he returned to the United States about 18 months ago after serving tours in Iraq and drives an hour a day to work as an operations supervisor at the aluminum plant.
Now he will probably return to Iraq and work for a defense contractor -- an unappealing prospect, he said, but probably the only one available.
"I could never find a job that paid this well in Bryan-College Station, as far as I am concerned," he said.
The chances of finding one in Rockdale are even more remote, he said.
"It is going to be a ghost town, I think," he said.
Aluminum manufacturer Alcoa announced Tuesday that it would lay off 660 workers by early December. Another 160 of the plant's workers have already lost their jobs this year. Hundreds of contract workers will also be out of work, officials said.
As the news spread through the town of fewer than 6,000, residents said a sense of fear and uncertainty emerged about the future of their city. Rockdale's economy has relied on the aluminum plant for half a century, residents said, and it is unclear how it will handle losing the equivalent of 20 percent of the city's population in jobs.
Few jobs
The cuts at Alcoa left employees who are awaiting layoffs with three general options: Some say said they plan to move away to find jobs in stronger markets; others said they would attempt to commute to Austin, Bryan-College Station or other nearby cities; and many older workers said they would likely retire early.
Randy Farr, 57, is among the last group. His house is paid off, and he will receive some severance pay and benefits for at least two years after he is laid off.
"The younger people are going to be hurting," he said as he smoked a cigarette and drank a beer in a downtown bar Wednesday afternoon. "They will have to move to other towns. This is the best place to work in Milam County in terms of pay and benefits."
The starting wage for an hourly Alcoa worker is more than $18 an hour with strong benefits, employees said, and workers commonly make $60,000 or more once they have gained experience and moved up in the plant.
Charles Starr, 42, stood outside the workforce commission in hopes of finding his next opportunity. He worked at the plant for about 15 years and was laid off once before for about a year.
He said he completed a graveyard shift Tuesday morning and bought an expensive washing machine before returning home. He received a call about an hour later informing him about the layoffs.
"I put the machine in my house; I still have to wash clothes," he said. "Alcoa is not the end of life, but I know it will be hard to find a job where I make this much."
Community leaders said they would work to train the hundreds of employees left without jobs and scheduled a job fair for Nov. 13. The Texas Workforce Commission said it was soliciting employers within 50 miles to find jobs that would allow residents to commute from Rockdale. Jobs available in the city are limited, they said.
About 140 of the more than 1,000 people who worked at the plant earlier this year will remain after the announced layoffs have been completed. At that time, the plant will no longer be the top employer in the city -- falling behind the 250-employee Rockdale school district.
"A few of those people are probably going to have to move out of Rockdale," said Interim City Manager Randy Holly. "We may end up with a lot of vacant property."
City officials said they hoped that some people would be able to commute from Rockdale to jobs in Austin. Residents said some plots of land have been bought in recent years by Austin workers hoping to build houses.
Another job prospect is Luminant -- a Dallas-based energy company that is building a plant set to open in August 2009. It will employ about 120 people in the area when the construction is done, officials said.
A 'crisis' situation
Rockdale is home to shops, banks and a few restaurants. Many of the buildings in downtown were already shuttered before Tuesday's announcement, and residents said they expected to see many more stores closed in the near future.
Holly described the situation as a crisis for the city, but he said he expected residents to band together and find a direction forward. The focus of the city will be economic development, he said, but how that development will be achieved is unclear.
No city tax dollars are allocated for economic growth incentives, officials said, and the city is expecting a drop in sales tax revenue. Officials are unsure of how much of a drop to expect.
Numerous capital improvement projects are under way in Rockdale, including a new wastewater plant and a new school.
"We are certainly disappointed, and we know it will affect us in a negative way," said Walter Pond, superintendent of Rockdale schools. "We anticipate we will have fewer students next year."
Businesses unrelated to the plant are also expected to suffer. Much of the money spent at local stores and restaurants is earned at Alcoa, residents said.
Gene Stork, owner of Talk of the Town hair salon in downtown Rockdale, said he felt the impact already.
"Every time something happens with Alcoa, my business just stops," he said as he stood in his empty shop Wednesday afternoon. He said he hadn't had a customer from Alcoa all day. "We are all pretty much panicking."
Stork said that threats of strikes or layoffs of a smaller scale had caused great reductions in his business in the past but that the town had not experienced anything like the job losses this time around.
"If my customers don't work there or their husbands don't work there, then they work for a business that relies on Alcoa's money," he said. "There is only the school and Wal-Mart to get a job now. There's a few banks, but without Alcoa they won't have much money in them."
He said he hoped that enough of his customers retire or commute to jobs elsewhere to keep him in business. Just to be safe, he said, he intends to begin taking computer programming classes.
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