G-P lab site waits for buyer

For sale: A Camas laboratory campus that once thrived with researchers bent to their test tubes in search of efficiencies for the town’s giant paper mill.

Lab researchers experimented with making paper out everything from grass clippings to cherry tree bark to synthetic wood pulp to bagasse, a fibrous residue of sugar cane.

Chemists at the hillside lab also generated pollution controls, developed fast-growing trees and produced the chemical basis for the controversial drug DMSO.

“They tried to make paper out of just about anything,” said Bill Connelly, a commercial real estate broker who is marketing the 15-acre collection of laboratories, offices and outbuildings for its owner, Atlanta-based Georgia-Pacific Corp.

A time line Georgia-Pacific Corp.’s Central Research Division

Now the sprawling campus will play a role in determining the future of Camas.

Georgia-Pacific recently won permission to subdivide the lab tract, which is above the mill on the north side of Northwest Seventh Avenue between Drake and Division streets, making it easier to entice more buyers.

Connelly expects that new tenants could range from software developers, who would need office space, to companies that assemble products.

To Camas Mayor Paul Dennis that translates into a potential growth spurt.

“It would introduce more activity on the fringe of downtown,” said Dennis, who is also an economic development consultant with Cascade Planning Group in Camas.

He predicts that turning over the Camas lab site to new businesses could generate as many as 150 jobs and would have a lasting effect on the city and its revitalization efforts.

This new influx of businesses would be a boon to the area, which is undergoing a renaissance with the building of an $8 million library, new street lamps, walkways and benches.

Slow start

Though the site, which overlooks the mill, is considered prime property, Georgia-Pacific faces its share of challenges in attracting buyers.

The tract has been on the market for a year at $5.25 million and few have shown interest in buying all or part of the property and its assortment of buildings.

“We’ve given a few property tours, but had no offers. That’s not surprising. The real estate market has softened in general,” Connelly said.

Dennis attributed the lack of activity so far to the tight lending environment.

The site, which is surrounded by chain-link fencing, has about 124,000 square feet of vacant space.

It includes:

• A three-story, 32,000-square-foot office structure and a 43,000-square-foot laboratory building overlooking the mill.

• A 32,000-square-foot warehouse and manufacturing building that once housed a miniature paper mill for developing test products.

• Five smaller storage buildings, ranging from 1,200 square feet to 6,000 square feet.

Until buyers are found, this property is largely stagnant.

Only one office building at the research site is occupied by fewer than 50 Georgia-Pacific employees, said Kelly Ferguson, the company’s director of public affairs and communications. Most of the jobs focus on work that is unrelated to the Camas operation.

“The plan is to relocate those employees as we find a buyer,” Ferguson said.

Georgia-Pacific, however, will continue to operate the site’s adjoining retention pond and filter plant, a system that cleans the water used to make pulp.

Colorful history

Certainly, the Camas property’s past demonstrates its potential. The site has had a colorful history.

In 1952, the lab site opened and served as home to the research division for San Francisco-based Crown Zellerbach Corp., which owned the mill at the time. Research operations at the site continued through 1997 and but ended when the mill’s next owner, Richmond, Va.-based James River Corp., shut down the site. James River dispersed 110 employees as the company merged with the Fort Howard Corp. of Green Bay, Wis. The resulting company, Fort James, then became the mill’s owner.

In 2000, it was purchased by Georgia-Pacific. Ownership shifted once again in 2005 when Georgia-Pacific was acquired by Koch Industries Inc. of Wichita, Kan.

At its peak in the post-World War II years, the paper mill operation employed more than 2,500 workers and was Clark County’s largest employer through most of the 20th century.

Today, 504 people hold jobs at the Camas Georgia-Pacific mill, which makes white business paper and paper towel products for commercial and institutional use.

The most recent mill layoff took place in 2007, shrinking its local work force from 800 to 500 employees.

If sold and redeveloped, the Camas laboratory site could replace some of those jobs, bringing more people to live and shop in the town, said Brent Erickson, executive director of the 280-member Camas-Washougal Chamber of Commerce.

“It could start to make up for the mill’s work force reductions,” Erickson said.