Intel finds ways to help DuPont, a former company town
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Intel, they thought, would bring up to 6,000 jobs by 2000, would draw affluent residents to DuPont and the planned community Weyerhaeuser was building around it, and would spawn a high-tech economy to rival Redmond or Seattle.
But reality rarely lives up to promises and expectations. Five years later, only 1,600 employees work at Intel's three-building site. No high-tech companies have followed. Tax benefits that politicians expected have fallen short.
Still, while the original vision hasn't materialized, the community that grew up around the E.I. du Pont de Nemours explosives manufacturer a century ago has seen some unexpected benefits.
Intel has become a community leader, sending employees to volunteer in the schools, building a computer clubhouse for underprivileged Tacoma teens and donating millions of dollars to push its agenda of improving math and science education.
"I don't think it had the same impact people envisioned it would have, but the impact has been very positive," said Pierce County Executive John Ladenburg. "We're bringing in more high-tech every day in this area, and it's helping transform our economy from the logging, smelter economy from a few years ago to a more modern economy, and that's what Pierce County needs."
Although the DuPont site isn't as big as originally envisioned, it's considered important to the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's future.
The engineers who work in DuPont played a huge role in helping bring to market Intel's much-awaited Itanium microprocessor chip, launched in May. The Itanium, Intel's first new complete chip design in 15 years, was not designed or manufactured in DuPont. But workers here design and manufacture the powerful server computers that house the chip. They are the machines Intel hopes companies will buy to run their Internet businesses and to power complicated computer programs.
"If you had to write a single bumper sticker, it would say `Itanium Systems Central,' " said Gerald Budelman, director of Intel's platform-enabling division, based in DuPont. "Other than design of the processor itself, the work and Itanium launch are taking place in DuPont."
That means Intel engineers in DuPont were the first to use an Itanium chip to make a computer run, in August 1999. And the 200 employees who build the server computers here assembled the first test machines months before Itanium-based computers ever hit the market.
For Intel and its 85,000 employees in 45 nations, in other words, the 185-acre site 50 miles south of Seattle is ground zero for developing the powerful server computers the company hopes will fuel its future. It can charge more for chips that go into those machines than it can for the Celeron, Pentium and Xeon chips that power personal computers. In addition, the 64-bit Itanium processors are able to process much more information than their 32-bit predecessors. As a result, Intel sees the Itanium servers being developed in DuPont as a key to its continued dominance in the computer-chip industry.
Intel employees in DuPont also design workstation computers used by individuals to do complex, graphic-intensive computing. And they engineer test tools and design other components that go into the servers and workstations.
The DuPont site also pioneered Intel's first E-business Solutions Center, a facility where companies that do a lot of their business over the Internet can come to work with Intel engineers. The first center was developed in DuPont. The company now has eight worldwide.
Jobs paying up to $60,000
The Internet was just becoming broadly popular when Intel on Sept. 15, 1995, announced it had chosen DuPont for the site of its first new campus in 10 years. The company, which over the years expanded from California to build a sizable operation in Oregon, said to expect up to 6,000 jobs within five years in DuPont, which would make it Pierce County's largest employer. Seventy percent of the employees would work in research and development and in administration, making up to $60,000 a year. State budget forecaster Chang Mook Sohn estimated that when built to capacity, Intel would contribute a half-billion dollars a year to the state's economy.
Pierce County and DuPont officials salivated at the thought of a prominent high-tech company coming into town. They gloated that Pierce County had won Intel over bids from Utah and Texas. They offered state and local tax incentives. And Weyerhaeuser, which would develop the Northwest Landing planned community in the area, agreed to pay $19.3 million to build a freeway interchange to serve Intel. The company worked with state officials to get it built in 18 months, less than half the time it would normally take.
With visions of seeing a high-tech mecca emerge, politicians tried to forget about the broken promises of other companies, including Boeing and Matsushita Semiconductor, both of which said they would bring thousands of jobs to Pierce County but never delivered.
Weyerhaeuser and DuPont officials envisioned Intel employees buying homes in DuPont or in shiny new Northwest Landing nearby, living the new-urbanism lifestyle amid designs by architect and community planner Peter Calthorpe. They dreamed of workers walking tree-lined boulevards to their jobs, stopping to chat with neighbors beside the bungalows and craftsman-style homes along the way.
But Intel scaled back its manufacturing facility from a high of about 650 in 1998 to about 200 today. It has built three buildings but, with only 1,600 workers in all, the third is only half full. It has no immediate plans to put up the other two in the planned five-building campus.
With the high-tech industry in a slump and Intel trying to cut thousands of jobs across the corporation through attrition, officials say the site will grow but not at the pace originally expected.
But the number of residents in DuPont and Northwest Landing has grown to 2,900 with or without Intel's help. Retail services, including a hotel, gas station and coffee shop, have followed.
"There have not been other high-tech users yet, but we're anticipating that there will be," said Greg Moore, Northwest Landing general manager.
Local schools getting help
One thing few residents or area leaders talked about when Intel opened on July 7, 1996, was the indirect impact the company would have on the community. While they talked about traffic, jobs and houses, Intel was thinking schools and children.
Intel's biggest contribution so far has not been property, sales and business taxes, but the more than $5 million in grants and computer equipment donated to local schools, teachers and students.
That includes $250,000 in technology to Chloe Clark Elementary School, scheduled to open in DuPont in the fall. The kindergarten-through-fourth-grade school will be the most technologically advanced of the five Steilacoom Historic School District elementary schools and will be the first school in DuPont in more than three decades.
Superintendent Arthur Himmler said the school would have looked much different if Intel hadn't been in DuPont.
"We wouldn't have had the tech goodies assigned to the school right now because we didn't have the quarter-million dollars. We would have done minimal on our own," he said. "Because of Intel our kids will be exposed to whatever is high-end tech right now."
The company also pledged $270,000 to the new Washington Institute of Technology at the University of Washington's Tacoma campus. The new center, approved by this year's Legislature, will offer undergraduate and graduate-level computer-science and engineering courses to 99 students when it opens in 2002.
Vicky Carwein, UW-Tacoma chancellor, praised the company for also contributing $230,000 over the past three years to help train schoolteachers on using technology in the classroom during two-week summer institutes.
The company also has strong ties to the UW's main campus, where it recruits liberally from the computer-science and engineering department. It has donated $12 million in equipment and research grants over the past five years. Additionally, on June 21, Intel said it would establish a research lab at the UW in Seattle where Intel and university researchers can collaborate on new technologies.
Drug den now a computer lab
Beyond support for education, the company in April opened the first Intel Computer Clubhouse in Washington in a former heroin den in Tacoma's Hilltop neighborhood. The after-school facility, run by the Tacoma Urban League and the Evergreen State College-Tacoma, provides computers and training for 8- to 18-year-olds who learn how to build their own Web page, make computer games and create music discs. In addition to giving $200,000 to fund the clubhouse for the first year - and additional support later on - Intel has sent employees to work as mentors and teachers for the students.
DuPont resident Paul Schilling doesn't live close enough to the Computer Clubhouse for his 8-year-old daughter, Rachel, to take advantage of its facilities. But she'll be using Intel's technology as a fourth-grader this fall at the new Chloe Clark school. Schilling is glad Intel came to DuPont and that his daughter - a third-generation DuPont resident - will benefit from the company in her back yard.
"This always was a company town," he said.
DuPont Mayor Judy Krill, who sat on the planning agency when the Intel project was approved, said Intel has taught her a lot about large corporations. She praises the company for its community involvement and the jobs it has brought so far.
But she adds: "It's a good lesson in being careful. For us it was our first experience in a large corporation, and we looked at it as it was presented. It's disappointing that it didn't happen as fast as we had hoped. But these large corporations make decisions on a multinational level. One of the things I've learned is to see these proposals with a little more skepticism. I'm sorry that it didn't happen (as expected). But it still might."
Free-lance writer Cynthia Flash covers business and technology from Bellevue. Reach her at cynthia@flashmediaservices.com.