Firm with IDA tax breaks shipping jobs to New Jersey, but also growing on LI

A Port Washington beauty products manufacturer and its subsidiary that received Nassau IDA assistance will move 56 warehouse jobs to New Jersey, according to a state regulatory notice.

Kiss Products Inc., which sells do-it-yourself nail kits, false eyelashes and cosmetics, will move 52 jobs, and its unit Ivy Enterprises will move four, all around May 22, to Piscataway, according to the WARN notice. Those planned moves come after Ivy Enterprises said in October it would move 24 warehouse jobs to the same New Jersey location around March 22.  

Kiss is building a warehouse in Piscataway for which it received New Jersey state tax incentives. The company’s legal counsel, David Cho, said he didn’t know what those incentives included.

In a bid to keep the company from relocating from Long Island to the Midwest or the South, the Nassau County Industrial Development Agency in 2013 offered Ivy a 12-year break on property taxes, $105,000 off a mortgage recording tax and a $583,000 sales tax exemption on equipment related to a new $13.5 million, 72,500-square-foot warehouse and office in Port Washington.  

Ivy is in compliance with the terms of its IDA aid, Cho said.

“We are growing, and we are expanding” on Long Island, he said. “This may look bad, but we have grown beyond the number of jobs being lost here. And we feel very good overall about that.”

The company operates out of three buildings on Long Island, including its new headquarters on Harbor Park Drive in Port Washington.

“We continue to manufacture and market from all three buildings,” he said.

In exchange for the aid in 2013, Ivy said it would add 30 employees to its then 80-member workforce over three years, bringing its total employment to 110. After the two rounds of job relocations, Ivy will have 133 employees here, based on the totals in the WARN notices. Kiss currently has 419 employees here, its WARN notice states.

Richard Kessel, chairman of the Nassau IDA, said he regretted the company was moving jobs out of the county.

“Obviously we don’t want to see any jobs going to New Jersey, but if they are in compliance with their IDA requirements, there’s not much we would do,” Kessel said. “But because they are moving some employees to New Jersey, it is something we will check, to make sure they are meeting their job requirements and keep a watchful eye as we go forward.”

Under New York’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, companies with at least 50 full-time employees must file a 90-day notice of a mass layoff or closing.