At press time, Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories had 30 job openings posted at its expanding Vascular Devices division, which is finally proceeding on a 541,000-sq.-ft. (50,259-sq.-m.) West Coast R&D headquarters complex to be constructed on a former Cargill Salt pile site near the Redwood City port. The complex will house the division's global infrastructure for commercial management, sales and marketing, clinical and regulatory global management, strategic management, and the entire R&D leadership team as well as most R&D capability.       In May 2004, the company received promising news when the Redwood City Planning Commission saw fit to revise a zoning law pertaining to floor area ratios. While the original law was designed to limit large office buildings, the amendment allows developers to add space equal to up to 2 percent of the total floor area if some kind of public infrastructure is provided on-site. In this case, by including a home office for the nonprofit Marine Science Institute as well as a child care facility for its own employees, Abbott will be able to add 10,000 sq. ft. (929 sq. m.) of needed office space.
      Chuck Foltz, divisional vice president of product operations for Abbott Vascular Devices, is responsible for global manufacturing, regulatory, quality and program management. In an interview with Site Selection, he talked about the project's long germination, beginning when the 21-year company veteran came out to the West Coast operation in 2001.
      "When we acquired this business, we had about 60,000 sq. ft. (5,574 sq. m.) of the old Perclose operation [the artery suture maker that Abbott acquired in 1999 for $680 million] and about half of it empty," he says. "Now we're at about 140,000 sq. ft. (13,006 sq. m.), almost all of it full, so we've expanded fairly quickly."
      The same could be said of the vascular group as a whole. In addition to the Redwood City complex, the group occupies about 25,000 sq. ft. (2,323 sq. m.) in Galway, Ireland. But, Foltz says, "that [Galway] facility will likely be expanding to the tune of probably another 40,000 sq. ft. [3,716 sq. m.] in the next five months, and as much as 100,000 to 150,000 sq. ft. [9,290 to 13,935 sq. m.] over the next couple of years." (For more on the medical device industry in Galway, read the industry spotlight "Growing From Within," also in the September 2004 issue of Site Selection.)
      Abbott Vascular also has an 80,000-sq.-ft. (7,432-sq.-m.) cardiovascular facility in Rangendingen, Germany, about and hour and a half north of the German-Swiss border, through the acquisition of Jomed. Another 40,000-sq.-ft. (3,716-sq.-m.) facility in Beringen, Switzerland, about 20 minutes from Zurich, focuses on non-coronary products.
      "The other piece we tap into that isn't uniquely part of our vascular device group is our Chicago corporate offices, where a large portion of our current pharmaceutical skills resides," says Foltz.
      But out in Redwood City was where the vascular group's vision resided.
      "There are a lot of places we could have done that," says Foltz. "But it was Redwood City as we looked at what we wanted to do, which was build an R&D infrastructure as well as a localized manufacturing base with both pilot and scale-up capabilities, where some of the high-turnaround, innovative products we're dealing with have a very short longevity. So we wanted to have manufacturing and R&D as close together as was reasonably possible. The Redwood City area made a lot of sense to stay in because it's uniquely situated with a local skilled labor pool for manufacturing within five miles [2 km.], as well as the fact that we're nestled between two major universities, with Stanford down the street and [University of California] Berkeley across the Bay."
      The real estate gods were aligned as well.
      "As it turned out, the property right next door to where we were renting was available for sale, as Cargill Salt was looking to vacate that property, which it had occupied for many decades," explains Foltz. So the company acquired it, anticipating that it would need to go from a leased to owned situation within five to seven years. "We wanted to get that property acquired and then titled for the type of facility we want to build, because California entitlement allows you to put the kind of facility on it you want. At that point the property was entitled for heavy industry, and not for what we really want, which is medical laboratory R&D types of activities with a limited R&D capability."
      Knowing the division was poised for growth, Abbott looked to not only change the entitlement, but the maximum allowable space, doubling the ceiling to 1 million sq. ft. (92,900 sq. m.).
      "Those changes, associated with the fact that it borders the Bay, makes it pretty challenging," says Foltz. "As I'm finding out, the closer you get to the Bay, the more interested parties you get. You get a lot of the environmental and conservation concerns, wetlands issues, and the Bay is considered a prime area for local citizens to have access. So trying to navigate through managing the design of a site for entitlement that considered all those things was one of the things that took a bit of time with our architects. Also we had the Marine Science Institute on the property, and we wanted to maintain their ability to utilize the property, but not in a way that would interfere with our operations."
      Redwood City officials felt the company would need to install substantial infrastructure improvements, though the site's location on a peninsula naturally limited the possibilities and drove up the projected costs. Then, in 2003, Abbott acquired a company in Galway, Ireland, that had existing manufacturing capabilities.
      "As we started to re-address what our real needs were, the need to have full-scale manufacturing locally was not as strategically critical as it was to have the pharmaceutical capabilities, the research capabilities on devices and the pilot manufacturing here," says Foltz. "So we re-scoped our look at the property, still very desirous of going forward, looked at the existing zoning of 531,000 sq. ft. [49,330 sq. m.], and recognized that that should carry us with just highly skilled pilot manufacturing near R&D, and we could operate within our existing zoning. That made it a lot easier for the city to get their mind around what we wanted to do, to lessen some of the restrictions on building the infrastructure because it was within the existing zoning."
      From there it was only a hop, skip and a jump to getting the entitlement. But there were design issues, as Foltz points out that the conversion from a salt pile with a crane to an R&D HQ involved a lot more than updating head-count restrictions.
      "It is reclaimed land right on the Bay, and seawall surrounds the property that will have to be reinforced and improved upon to put a facility on the property," he says. "You really don't have land to build on, you're building on pylons that go deep into the Bay. The seismic and water considerations were the biggest issues we faced in the original design."
      Still ahead are agreements to be hammered out with the wetlands district and the Bay Area Conservation District. Foltz says early buy-in was the ticket to ride.
      "Our architects did a pretty good job of working with these agencies from the get-go, which is one of the things you learn," he says. "If you understand the affiliated agencies early and bring them in early, it really smoothes the process at the back end. As long as you know who the constituencies are. You don't want to leave anybody out. And we didn't have to do anything Herculean. It wasn't as if we did anything that detracted from the property. In fact some of the suggestions they made along the way really enhanced the impact of the property for the community as well as our own employees. It was really a pretty positive experience."
      In fact, compared to other parts of the world, it's more positive in California than many would believe.
      "Having operations in Europe, you actually appreciate better U.S. issues," says Foltz. "A lot of people say California is anti-competitive. But if you're operating in Germany and Switzerland, in particular, and you look at the labor issues there, the U.S. looks favorable, and California looks favorable in comparison. If you just look at our employee base in terms of productive work hours, our employee base in California is much more productive than our non-U.S. operations, just because they spend much more time on the job for a salaried employee, based on vacation schedules and holidays available in Europe. From a cost perspective, the labor cost is not that much more here in California, at least in the Redwood City area, because of the high amount of skilled labor we have. That's a little bit unique to this town, and not something broadly defined in the peninsula. That's one of the reasons we chose it."
      The uniqueness of the town isn't lost on its planning commission members either.
      "Although there are consistencies in the process across the state, how the processes are handled by cities and counties more determines how things are done," says John Seybert, facilities and project manager with locally based Peninsula Covenant Church, and a commission member since 2001. "Before I was on the commission, we built three homes on our church campus, and it was the good experience I had in that process that made me want to serve in Redwood City. Had we tried to build those houses in other jurisdictions, it would have been a different story. I continue to work with the building department in Redwood City and I consider it a pleasure to work with them. I honestly feel like I'm treated like a customer and not an adversary. And I've heard that from other builders here."