Brown also said business conditions have improved since Gov. George Pataki took office in 1995.

In an interview, Pataki recalled that he talked to then-Kodak CEO George Fisher shortly after the governor was elected in 1994 about why the company built a new plant in Colorado rather than Rochester in the early 1990s.

"Yes, it's the economic structure of the state,'' Pataki recalled Fisher telling him, "and it's also regulatory. Colorado has very high environmental standards, as does New York. But we can get the plant done in six months in Colorado, and here it would have taken, if we were lucky, two and a half years. And in the market, we couldn't wait that long.''

Fisher, now retired, declined to be interviewed.

Less than two years after Pataki took office, Kodak took advantage of the improved business climate. It took the company less than a year to put up a new $200 million film-base manufacturing facility at Kodak Park, said company spokesman Christopher Veronda, largely because state permitting processes had been streamlined.

But the state's more business-friendly environment didn't affect Kodak's plan to close the Lee Road plant in the summer.

The decision may have looked logical from the managers' perspective, but it still shocked Mike Flanagan, 39, who had put in 14 years with the company and figured he would retire from Kodak.

"I was with the company all these years, never called in sick; then they call us and say, 'We're closing up shop,' '' said Flanagan, who is single and lives in Greece, just a few blocks from Kodak Park, the sprawling Kodak manufacturing facility. He made about $40,000 a year before losing his job.

"I'm a good worker. They won't fire me,'' Flanagan said he told himself.

Flanagan wants to become a financial planner, using the $5,000 educational grant Kodak gave him as part of his severance package. But he suffered a setback during the summer, when he was in a motorcycle accident. Still, he's determined to work for himself eventually.

"I don't want to work for a company again,'' he said. "I want to rely on a job I can do myself and not worry about a boss.''

"If (downsizing) hits you personally, you don't really care much about the high-level vision of things,'' Carp, the Kodak boss, acknowledged. "You care about you personally. So, we'll continue to have to deal with that in the way we always have, which is, offer people transition training where we can'' and give generous severance packages to those who are let go.

Flanagan and other laid-off workers got 60 days' pay plus two weeks' salary for every year of service or a total of 38 weeks in Flanagan's case. They also got paid medical benefits through the end of last year, and the educational benefits were also available.

Nobody is talking about severance packages at the 500-acre Fuji complex in South Carolina, where in March 2003 the photo company announced a $100 million expansion to increase production of new X-ray film.

It brings the investment by Fuji at the site to $1.4 billion since ground was first broken in 1988.

About $130 million of that was for Fuji's single-use camera plant, which opened in 1995. Neither Kodak nor Fuji will say how many cameras the Rochester and Greenwood plants produce annually. But one Wall Street analyst who follows the industry, Ulysses Yannas of Buckman, Buckman and Reid, estimated Fuji made 30 million of them a year in Greenwood and Kodak made 25 million in Rochester.