In good Butler County job news, the former Liz Claiborne distribution center in West Chester Twp. didn’t close after all.

The center’s current owners, New York, N.Y.-based Fifth & Pacific Companies Inc., have kept the facility open for now.

Originally Liz Claiborne Inc., amid efforts to reduce debt and manage costs, announced in 2011 its West Chester Twp. distribution center would close. It was the last company-owned distribution center in the U.S.

Later in 2012, the Liz Claiborne business changed names to Fifth & Pacific Companies as a way to focus on its brands Juicy Couture, kate spade and Lucky Brand. The Liz Claiborne name brand was sold to J.C. Penney Corp. Inc. Fifth & Pacific’s business began transitioning from primarily serving department stores to being more of a direct-to-consumer retailer, the company said last year

The distribution center, 8741 Jacquemin Drive, West Chester Twp., was supposed to close Sept. 1 2012, cutting 365 jobs, according to a layoff notice the company filed in 2012 with Ohio Office of Workforce Development. Work was being transferred to a distribution center in California.

Now Fifth & Pacific is saying that the California distribution center was taking too long and costing too much to open.

Plans are back on for Ohio.

During a conference call to investors last October to update them on the third quarter, Fifth & Pacific CEO Bill McComb said: “We’ve run into some start-up issues with our migration from our Ohio distribution center to the related third-party logistics facility in California. These issues materialized in August as our fall volumes began to climb significantly on a daily basis.

As a result, we made the decision to keep the Ohio DC open through the near-term. In order to mitigate significant shipping risk that could meaningfully hurt our business, we have delayed the migration of certain parts of our business out of Ohio, and have redeployed certain elements back to Ohio.”

Fifth & Pacific has hired the third party logistics provider Ridge Global Services to run West Chester Twp. operations.

More recently, Chief Financial and Chief Operating Officer George Carrara said, “We have already begun the transition back to our Ohio distribution facility and expect to complete this transition during Q2.” He was speaking Feb. 21 to investors in a conference call discussing the company’s 2012 annual results.

More information was not available Thursday or Friday about how many employees are working at the West Chester Twp. distribution center now, and if any layoffs occurred last year.