Moving a company to a new location is rarely an easy task, especially when that move entails the uprooting of the business to somewhere nearly 1,500 miles away.

This is what PAS MRO, a specialist in bearing return to service and component repair, intends to do when it moves from Irvine, California to Bristow, Oklahoma, a city located between Tulsa and Oklahoma City. The company hopes to complete the move by November 2020.

Jim Agee, president of the component repair specialist, puts the move down to simple economics, having initially been approached by the Oklahoma Department of Commerce last year. “The costs here [California] continue to go up and it’s extremely difficult now to run a company in this state,” he tells Aviation Week, citing high taxation and business rates as factors behind it decision to move.

Another issue is high housing prices in California making it difficult for PAS MRO employees to purchase a home there. So far, Agee says several staff members have committed to making the move to Oklahoma. Despite the move taking place in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, he says the business has felt minimal impacts of the crisis to date. Over the next three years, the company hopes to create 37 new jobs in technical roles and boost the local economy by around $3.2 billion.

“To start it [Oklahoma business] will be just like the operation in California, but over time it is likely we’ll start increasing capabilities,” Agee says, adding that it will likely look at expanding bearings repair capabilities of the business.

Agee says PAS MRO looked at four other states including Florida, Virginia, Arizona and Alabama, but chose Oklahoma’s offer, owing to the incentives on offer along with the state’s high density of MRO activity, which includes American Airlines’ maintenance facility where it carries out overhauls and the headquarters of parts repair specialist Nordam in Tulsa.