Wednesday, September 6, 2017 11:15 am

OAKLAND, Calif. (From news reports) -- KapStone Container has decided to cease operations at its Oakland facility. The Kapstone closure will eliminate 67 jobs, according to an official company filing with state labor agencies.

The KapStone Container shutdown was signaled in both a filing with the state Employment Development Department as well as a management discussion of recent earnings results.

Workers at KapStone are expected to have their jobs until Oct. 1, when the plant closes on a "permanent" basis, the EDD filing showed.

The Oakland operation may have become a less attractive asset after KapStone bought Texas-based Victory Packaging in 2015 for $615 million.

Plus, the Oakland operation didn't function as efficiently as other sites in terms of meeting the needs of Victory packaging operations in the San Bernardino County city of Ontario, company executives stated during a July 27 conference call to discuss company financial results.

"Victory has a big presence in Southern California," Matt Kaplan, chief executive officer of Kapstone Paper and Packaging, said during the conference call. "We were serving some of the Southern California needs from Oakland, which was a very high cost way of doing it. The Oakland Victory business will be transferred to Ontario."

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