SHEBOYGAN - A local furniture manufacturer’s parent company has been looking to move out of Mayline's Sheboygan headquarters since acquiring the business last year, a corporate spokesperson confirmed this week.

“Since we acquired Mayline, we have been looking for a new site for the Sheboygan operation,” Polly Filing, spokesperson for Liberty Diversified International, said Wednesday.

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When and where Mayline could move hasn’t been finalized, Filing said. The company, known as Mayline-Safco since a corporate acquisition last year, is owned by Liberty Diversified, a Minneapolis company that owns several other businesses.

Filing didn’t confirm whether the company might close its Sheboygan location, which employs an estimated 185 workers in a factory and office spaces along North Commerce Street. She noted the company has considered at least one other site in Sheboygan, but has also looked at “multiple states and locations.”

“Like I said, we have not reached a decision where the new Mayline operations will be located,” she said.

Safco Products acquired Mayline in 2016. Both specialized in producing office furniture, according to a news release last year announcing the acquisition.

The acquisition, though, didn’t include purchase of Mayline’s real estate or buildings, Filing said, and the company has been looking for a new site ever since.

“We’ve told employees from the time that we purchased them that that operation would need to be relocated, whether that was in Sheboygan or elsewhere, because we don’t own the land or the site,” Filing said.

Asked this week about a rumored move by the company, Chad Pelishek, Sheboygan’s city planning and development director, said that “was a potential.”

“But we have not heard of a confirmation that that is indeed what’s happening,” he said. He directed other questions to the company.

Sheboygan Mayor Mike Vandersteen said Thursday the city hasn’t heard anything final from the company about future plans.

“We know that the company that is renting the buildings they’re in right now, and they had expressed a desire to build something different that would be more suited to their business,” he said.

Vandersteen said the company has looked at other sites in Sheboygan — one in the existing south-side Sheboygan Business Center and another on land where that center hopes to expand someday — but no definite plans by the company to stay have been worked out.

Vandersteen said the city has known of the company’s interest in relocating since about the time of the acquisition last year.

“We’re just in a holding pattern here waiting for their decision,” the mayor said.

Randy Tayloe, president of the IUE-CWA Local 800 furniture workers' union, which represents manufacturing employees at Mayline, said Thursday he hadn't received word from the company about plans to move.

"The local union has not officially been contacted by any company official to say that Mayline manufacturing is leaving Sheboygan," he said.

"All I know is that they're currently leasing the buildings here in Sheboygan and that they have been looking for a different building," Tayloe added. "But there has been no confirmation to the union that the Mayline employees will be out of work."

Filing said Mayline-Safco also employs about 10 workers at a warehouse in Arkansas. The company previously announced plans to move those operations to Minnesota in 2018, she said.

She added the company hopes to make a decision soon about its Sheboygan plant, but gave no word about when it might announce it.

“I think the most important thing for you to know,” she said, “is we have not reached a final decision and we have not announced to employees where the new location will be.”

Filing confirmed the company was considering a move to Milford, a tiny city in northwest Iowa. She said the city council there had recently approved an incentives package, “if we choose to relocate to their city.”