Once a strong force in Lane County’s economy, the RV business is quickly sputtering out.
Country Coach LLC, Monaco Coach Corp. and Marathon Coach were once prime operators in Lane County’s economy, employing 4,500 people in 2005.
But while people are still hoping for the best as the economy picks up, it’s clear that the industry’s presence is no longer what it once was.
A year ago at this time, local RV makers sent workers home for their customary holiday furloughs. Most workers never came back. Within months, two companies, Monaco Coach Corp. and Country Coach LLC, filed for bankruptcy.
Today, Country Coach is all but dead, its bankruptcy case now in Chapter 7, meaning everything it owns will be sold to satisfy debtors. Monaco Coach, once a high-flying publicly traded company headquartered in Coburg, became a tiny division of a multinational corporation, Navistar International, after its assets were sold off in bankruptcy. A third manufacturer, Marathon Coach, remains in business, but has limped along on a curtailed production schedule, building a fraction of the high-end bus conversions that it did in previous years.
Read the full story at The Daily Astorian.
{biztweet}Lane County RV industry{/biztweet}
