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Monday, May 12, 2008

Hewlett-Packard, a pioneer in the local high-tech industry and one of the largest private employers in the county, looks like it’s greasing the skids to close up shop and slip out of town.

But, then again, maybe not.

Maybe the secretive Palo Alto, Calif., -based company’s plans, which we now know include selling its 174-acre east Vancouver campus, will strengthen its future here. That’s what HP’s Emma McCulloch told The Columbian in an e-mail last week.

“These changes will help HP achieve long-term cost efficiencies while ensuring that HP Vancouver, Washington, operations are able to continue as usual,” she wrote.

But we can’t fault employees and local business leaders who have their doubts. After all, as The Columbian’s Courtney Sherwood reported Friday, the company said in February it wanted to rent, not sell, one of the buildings on its site at 18110 S.E. 34th St. But the newspaper subsequently learned that a decision had been made two months before to try to sell all the real estate there, then lease back as much building space as it needs to continue some unspecified level of operations.

“They are secretive,” said Jeanie Ashe of the Columbia River Economic Development Council (CREDC), a sentiment expressed by other business leaders as well Friday. HP is not even forthcoming about the number of its employees here. It had 3,300 on the local payroll in the late 1990s and 1,800 in 2005 when it stopped releasing the number. Based on what some employees have told The Columbian, it appears the payroll here is now 1,000 to 1,500.

Local business, government and political leaders shouldn’t passively let this clean company and its high-paying jobs slip and slide away. We encourage the formation of a delegation to visit HP headquarters in Palo Alto to learn what it can about the company’s goals and convince its executives that HP is a huge part of the economic and intellectual landscape here and is very much wanted for its storied history and its future in the high-tech world.

Such a delegation might include Mayor Royce Pollard; Eric Holmes, the city’s economic development director and Kelly Sills, his counterpart in county government; county Commissioner Steve Stuart; Bart Phillips of the CREDC (or Tim McMahon, CREDC board chairman); Beth Quartarolo, president of the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce and former HP executive here; Hal Dengerink, the dean of Washington State University Vancouver (or one of his top academic people in engineering or high-tech); state Rep. Deb Wallace, a Democrat whose district includes the HP campus; Sen. Joseph Zarelli, a Republican who is the GOP’s chief budget negotiator in the Senate, and Gov. Chris Gregoire (or Juli Wilkerson, director of the Department of Community Trade and Economic Development).

 McMahon of the CREDC said Friday that such a delegation would be “a great idea.”

Conversely, watching from the sidelines as this forward-looking company ponders a potential exit is a lousy idea.