A little more than a year after one plant at Ceres Research and Industrial Interplex announced its closure, a second manufacturer is shutting its doors.

Simpson Dura-Vent, which manufactures chimney and home venting products, will phase out operations over 24 months, CEO Stephen Eberhard said.

Collapse of the national housing market has snuffed demand, Eberhard said, quoting a 22-percent drop in overall sales in 2007 and calling home manufacturing suppliers “the most impacted industry” of economic downturns.

The company’s manufacturing headquarters in Vacaville, Calif., will stay open.

“We don’t see the housing market recovering from this particular situation for at least three years. We are faced with cutting costs and consolidating,” Eberhard said.

Employees were notified of the decision in early January. The plant, opened at Ceres in the late 1990s, employs about 170 full-time workers. Eberhard said demand is seasonal and, at peak activity, the plant has employed as many as 400.

Employees will be offered relocation to Vacaville and jobs at other plants of Simpson Manufacturing, the umbrella company of Simpson Dura-Vent and Simpson Strong-Tie, which manufactures construction fasteners in a handful of locations around the nation.

Simpson Manufacturing’s shares peaked at about $45 on the New York Stock Exchange in April 2006, and its value had dropped Friday to $27.27.

Though not offering severance pay, the company is giving a bonus to employees who stay on through the company’s phase-out timetable.

Though an imploding housing market has caused losses, the company’s departure from the Vicksburg area has as much to do with Warren County Supervisors’ denial of a tax reduction asked for in 2006, Eberhard said.

The company had requested a partial exemption from the county’s inventory tax levied against businesses, but was refused. Eberhard said the company must retain a distribution center in the middle U.S., but will seek to open one elsewhere despite Warren County’s convenient access to the interstate, river and railroad. He called the inventory tax “punitive.”

“I think it’s a bad idea for someone located at the intersection of (Interstate) 20 and the Mississippi, your ideal location for anyone in warehousing and distribution. Your inventory holdings is the wrong thing to tax,” Eberhard said.

Reached Friday, Board of Supervisors President Richard George retorted, “We didn’t grant it for them because we never granted it for anybody else.”

Warren County Port Commission Chairman Johnny Moss said, “I think that stuck under the craw of California. Supervisors did what they thought was the right thing at that time.”

Moss said word of a possible closing had circulated for some months and was made definitive to the Port Commission’s executive director, Wayne Mansfield, last week. Mansfield could not be reached Friday for comment.

News of the closure came as a surprise to other local officials.

“They’ve not told us anything,” George said. “What we know is what we’ve heard.”

Vicksburg Mayor Laurence Leyens also said he was not made aware of the closing.

County supervisors discussed, without consensus, granting inventory tax exemptions in 2006 when they were courting National Steel Car Ltd., a Canadian boxcar maker seeking locations for a rail car plant. Warren County was one of more than a dozen locations considered, but the company opted to settle its $200 million rail car plant and 1,800 jobs in Colbert County, Ala. State and local incentives for the company totaled about $140 million.

“What some call a tax exemption others call a shifting of the tax burden,” George said of Simpson Dura-Vent’s unsuccessful bid for inventory tax relief. “It would have cost the taxpayers a great deal of money because, once you do it for one, you’ve got to go ahead and do it for all. He knew what the business conditions were when he located here. And they enjoyed the business exemptions that were available.”

Simpson Dura-Vent is the second Ceres facility in about a year to leave the industrial park off Intersate 20. CalsonicKansei North America announced its closing in November 2006. The company, which made exhaust systems, catalytic converters and manifolds as a Tier 1 supplier for Nissan, opened at Ceres in 2002.

Left at the 20-year-old industrial part are a Tyson chicken and packaging plant; Yorozu, a Nissan supplier; and other manufacturers.

Also left at the industrial park is a 64,000-square-foot, empty spec building built about 12 years to attract business.