Lincoln Financial Consolidating Operations in Concord

Lincoln Financial Group, one of the city’s larger employers, will be consolidating its operations at its Concord facility during the next year but expects to remain committed to community involvement, according to corporate statement.

During the last couple of weeks, rumors had been circulating around the business community that there would be layoffs and transfers of employees from the Concord facility, at Granite Place off Rumford Street, to other locations, including a new facility in Atlanta. Last week, the company confirmed that it would be moving out of the north side of the building by the time the lease expires in late July 2016.

“We can confirm that Lincoln Financial Group has decided to not renew the lease of the North Wing of our Concord office when it expires on July 31, 2016,” according to Holly Fair, the director of corporate communications for the company. “Instead, we will adopt varying alternative work arrangements that enable us to consolidate our operations into the South Wing, which we continue to own and occupy. We fully support all of our staff here as we move through this transition, and we remain committed to our community involvement in Concord.”

A follow-up email requesting specifics about layoffs and employee transfers out of Concord was not returned on Sept. 17.

Lincoln Financial recently announced in both corporate press statements as well as a flurry of Georgia press articles that it would be expanding into a large office complex in Sandy Springs, GA, and bringing with it “hundreds of jobs” just a couple of years after the company went through layoffs both locally and nationally.

Steve Duprey of The Duprey Companies, who purchased the north side of the building earlier this year, confirmed that the company notified him last week that it would not be renewing the lease on his building. He said he wasn’t certain about the specifics beyond the notification.

The company, he said, might keep some space on the north side if there was not enough room on the south side during the consolidation. Lincoln Financial also owns about 110 acres of RO zoned land on the west side of the campus.

“We anticipated that it would be the case,” Duprey said of the non-renewal by the company. “When I bought it, I knew their lease was up in August. I always operate with the presumption (that I might) have to find tenants. That’s how I always start.”

Duprey said while there were a lot of vacant spaces in Concord in the 3,000 to 5,000 square feet range there were few spaces offering 20,000 square feet to a floor, which is what the north side offers.

Despite losing a big tenant, Duprey said the building was still a great buy. It has great heights – 14-feet, with room for utilities, he said, adding that the campus was “beautiful, with acres of parking,” and had been maintained in “pristine” condition. According to online records, he purchased the building for about one-fourth of its assessed value.

Duprey added that he had other companies potentially looking at the soon-to-be vacant space when Lincoln Financial leaves. However, that doesn’t mean new jobs are coming to Concord; Duprey said that entities looking at the space were currently in the area, meaning that there could be more vacant space around the city due to the consolidation. Currently, he noted, large business organizations were not moving into the city. Most of the new businesses in Concord were entities with under 25 employees.

In the past, he noted, there was always competition between states for companies. State officials were often visiting Massachusetts in an effort to pull companies and their workers over the border to get them to invest in the Granite State and utilize the New Hampshire advantage of no sales or income taxes, low business taxes and employee costs, as well as other quality public services, like utilities and schools. Today though, he said, state officials aren’t doing that much because they can’t make the claim that there is an advantage. Duprey rattled off a litany of line items – including high workers’ compensation insurance costs, expensive electricity and energy rates, and business taxes that were now higher in New Hampshire than neighboring states or other parts of the country. The lack of broad-based taxes remains, he said, but that’s not enough to attract companies to New Hampshire.

As well, Duprey added, many communities in the Granite State were now cannibalizing employees via intra-community business recruitment initiatives. This effort was something Concord wasn’t even trying. The city hasn’t had a point person on recruitment since Ken Lurvey retired as the city’s business development coordinator and the city’s administration was reorganized.

“(Concord) has to have an economic strategy,” he said, noting that thousands of new jobs have moved into Dover, Manchester, Nashua, Rochester, and Portsmouth due to recruitment efforts.

He added that state government was also putting an added burden on public services and expenses in the city without paying for them.