HP to move offices into Nautilus building

Hewlett-Packard’s new offices in east Vancouver will occupy about 68,000 square feet — about the size of Powell’s City of Books in downtown Portland — within the Nautilus Inc. building in east Vancouver, according to a building permit application approved by the city.

The application, which has won city approval, states that the $4 million project would create space for 793 workers. The company’s primary office area would have space for 655 workers occupying about 65,000 square feet. The building could accommodate another 138 workers in areas without fixed desks.

HP’s employee count at its current Vancouver site, where it operates a portion of its inkjet printing division, remains a closely held secret.

The building permit application, filed in October, lists no starting or ending date for the construction work. The city permits are valid through April 9.

HP, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is famously silent about details of its operations as well as the size of its work force at any specific location.

“We cannot comment on site specific activities or number of employees,” Cherie Britt, a company spokeswoman, said in an e-mail to The Columbian this week.

Owned by PacTrust

The Nautilus building at 1115 S.E. 164th Ave., surrounded by retail stores and one largely empty parking lot, is owned by PacTrust, a Portland real estate investment firm. PacTrust had no comment.

Permit applications submitted to the city in October list Emerick Construction Co. of Happy Valley, Ore., as general contractor. A single Emerick Construction Co. pickup truck parked Tuesday near the building’s original lobby entrance, now closed with relocation of Nautilus’ entrance to the building’s south side, offered the only hint of the work that is to come.

“We’re getting started as we speak,” said Mike Williams, Emerick’s project manager for the renovation. He said work would be done in several phases, adding that the company doesn’t yet have a firm completion date.

Details of HP’s relocation, which will vacate one of Clark County’s largest developed industrial sites, have been one of the county’s biggest guessing games in recent months. HP’s plans to move its shrunken work force to the Nautilus building — HP’s original home in Vancouver — are widely known, but the company has never disclosed the timing of its move.

An even bigger mystery: SEH America Inc.’s plans for the 174-acre east Vancouver site, at 18110 S.E. 34th St., that it purchased 18 months ago from Hewlett-Packard for $55 million.

SEH keeping mum

The silicon wafer company isn’t talking. At the time of its purchase of the HP site, some local officials raised the possibility that the company could create 1,000 jobs in the county. SEH currently employs about 900 workers at its manufacturing plant in Orchards.

Alisa Pyzka, Vancouver’s business development manager, said this week that she has no information from the company, a subsidiary of Japan’s Shin-Etsu Handotai Group. In a Monday work session, some Vancouver City Council members expressed frustration about how little they knew about SEH’s plans for the property.

When it purchased the property, SEH inherited an eight-year-old development agreement with the city, and the city’s 2007 comprehensive water plan commits Vancouver to increasing water supply to the site and surrounding areas, at an estimated cost of $4 million.

Wayne Bolio, senior vice-president at Nautilus Inc., said that with Nautilus down to 325 employees in a 480,000 square-foot building — bigger than six Powell’s bookstores — there’s plenty of room for HP. Nautilus occupies just 70,000 square feet and never filled more than one-third of the building.

“It is a very big building,” he said.

Hewlett-Packard and SEH America both have long histories in Vancouver. HP launched its electronic design and manufacturing plant in east Vancouver in the late 1970s. Expansion continued into the mid-1990s, with employment peaking at 3,500 in 1996. Just three years later, the company halted printer manufacturing in Vancouver, laying off 1,000 workers. The company’s work force has continued to decline.

SEH arrived in the early 1980s, growing to become second only to HP as a manufacturing employer, with 1,513 workers in 1997. The company began layoffs in 2001 and has never returned to its peak employment.