By Kate Pastor

Local politicians may not be able to keep Stella D’oro factory jobs in the Bronx, but they will try to keep the factory owners from taking the baking equipment with them when they go.

Rep. Eliot Engel, Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz and City Councilman Oliver Koppell sent a joint letter to the city’s Department of Finance commissioner, saying that Lance Inc., which plans to buy Stella D’oro from Brynwood Partners, should not be allowed to move manufacturing equipment bought with tax abatement dollars from new York to Ohio.

After an 11-month strike, the private-equity firm Brynwood Partners announced in July that it would close the Kingsbridge Stella D’oro factory. Then, early this month, it announced an agreement to sell the brand and some of the factory’s equipment to Lance Inc., a North Carolina-based company that plans to move operations from Kingsbridge to Ashland, Ohio.

All three politicians have for months rallied with the workers and decried the loss of jobs, but as the end for the Kingsbridge factory draws near, they have settled on a different strategy, saying the factory’s machines belong, in part, to New York City taxpayers.

The pols are asking for a temporary restraining order that would bar the sale and prohibit the relocation of manufacturing equipment to another state until city taxpayer money is returned.

“We should not be sending our jobs and our tax money to Ohio. Brynwood Partners made a coldly calculated decision that they wanted to break the union, and when they lost a National Labor Relations Board decision, they decided to sell out,” Mr. Engel said in a statement.

They claim that while a New York State Manufacturing Assistance Program grant will not be distributed due to a requirement that jobs be preserved for at least five years, the city has given the company tax abatements under the Industrial and Commercial Abatement Program, formerly known as the Industrial and Commercial Incentive Program.

None of the politicians who wrote the letter could provide details about when the abatements were granted or how much money they were for, and a Department of Finance spokesman, Owen Stone, could not provide the information by press time. Lance Inc. and Brynwood Partners also did not respond by press time.