The slow goodbye finally has a date. Medtronic told its 370 Santa Rosa workers on Wednesday that the company will shut its Fountaingrove campus by spring 2028, ending a presence in Sonoma County that began in 1998 with what was then one of the largest medical-device deals in California history.
The work — pacemakers, coronary stents, replacement heart valves — will move to Santa Ana, to Mounds View, Minnesota, and to Galway, Ireland. First departures begin in the spring of next year. By the time it’s over, two buildings at 3540 and 3576 Unocal Place will go dark.
Medtronic spokesperson Krystin Hayward framed the exit in the language companies use for these decisions. “We are deeply proud of the contributions our employees have made here, which have advanced our mission, strengthening patient care, and positively impacted our community,” she said in a statement. The phrasing is familiar to anyone who has watched a manufacturer wind down: pride in the past, silence about what comes next for the people who built it.
A long thinning, not a sudden cut
What’s actually happening is the last act of a long thinning. Medtronic arrived in Santa Rosa in 1998, when it paid $3.7 billion for Arterial Vascular Engineering, a stent maker that had grown up around Fountaingrove. At its peak, the Santa Rosa operation employed roughly 1,200 people. By 2019 the headcount was down to 1,100, and Medtronic cut about 100 of those jobs that spring. In 2024 the company consolidated what remained into the two Unocal Place buildings. Wednesday’s announcement is the end of that line, not the start of a new one.
Christine Palmer of the Sonoma County Economic Development Collaborative offered the measured response such announcements typically draw. Medtronic, she said, “has been an important part of Sonoma County’s advanced manufacturing legacy.” Legacy, in this context, is past tense.
Why now
Medtronic has been restructuring above the Santa Rosa team’s heads for more than a year. The company is spinning off its diabetes business — the old MiniMed line — into a separate publicly traded firm, a move expected to dilute fiscal-2026 earnings by about a dozen cents a share. Tariff pressure on Medtronic’s global supply chain is running as high as $350 million for the year. And the coronary and peripheral vascular unit that runs out of Santa Rosa is being folded into a newly assembled CardioVascular Surgery business — a regrouping that, on paper, calls for fewer, larger sites and tighter integration with the company’s Minnesota and Irish centers.
The translation of that strategy for Sonoma County is straightforward. Santa Rosa, even consolidated, is too small to be a hub in a global cardiovascular network. Galway is one of Medtronic’s largest international manufacturing complexes. Mounds View has long been the home of the company’s cardiac-rhythm work. Santa Ana, in Orange County, gives Medtronic a Western U.S. footprint without the costs of operating in the North Bay.
What the North Bay loses
For Sonoma County, the loss is more than a payroll number. The 1998 acquisition seeded what was once an aspiring medical-device cluster, anchored by Medtronic and supported by the North Bay Life Science Alliance through the 2010s. With Medtronic on the way out, the cluster’s most visible anchor is gone.
There is no WARN Act filing yet. With first departures more than a year out, Medtronic is not legally required to file one until 60 days before the cuts begin. Workers do, however, have time — perhaps the only useful thing on offer in an exit announcement of this kind — to look at where else cardiovascular medtech work in the West is concentrated, and at what retraining funds the county and state make available for displaced manufacturing employees.