Hughes to Move Irvine Unit to Rancho Santa Margarita
In anticipation of future traffic strangulation in the Irvine area, and in order to consolidate its Orange County operations at one site, Hughes Aircraft Co. will move its 950-employee Microelectronics Systems Division from Irvine to a $30-million plant that will be built next year in the new 400-acre Rancho Santa Margarita Business Park.
Hughes is the second big corporation to choose the Santa Margarita Business Park, where Unisys (formerly Burroughs Corp.) and five smaller companies also have made deals to occupy new manufacturing plants since marketing of the industrial land began last February.
The business park is at the center of a 5,000-acre master-planned residential and business community taking shape on a broad, grassy plateau just east of Mission Viejo at the foot of Saddleback Mountain. It is a community planned for 45,000 residents. Planners say about half of the residents would be able to walk or bicycle to their jobs in the community’s business core if they bought homes in the surrounding residential developments.
Would Consolidate Operations
William Grockel, assistant division manager and project manager at Hughes Microelectronics Division, said Hughes wants to consolidate operations now scattered in seven leased buildings in Irvine.
He said Hughes, which spent 2 1/2 years searching for a relocation site, was attracted primarily by the relatively low land costs at the Santa Margarita Business Park. In addition, he said, the company wanted to move farther south to be closer to the homes of many of its professional workers and to escape future freeway traffic in the Irvine area.
“The freeways around us are going to be jammed solidly in future years,” Grockel predicted.
Bowers & Perez Inc., a Los Angeles developer, is in escrow to buy 25 acres at the Santa Margarita Business Park on which it will build a 300,000-square-foot office and manufacturing complex that it will lease to Hughes, according to Marty Stradtman, Santa Margarita’s director of commercial and industrial land sales. Grockel said Hughes will take a 10-year lease and purchase an option on the building and an option to buy 25 additional acres for future expansion.
Construction of the Hughes facility is expected to begin next March and be completed in a year.
52 Acres Sold
Stradtman said that about 52 acres in the business park have been sold, on which 600,000 square feet of manufacturing plants and offices will be built and occupied by prearranged users. Stradtman said he expects about 50 more acres to be sold next year.
Of the companies that will be moving to the park, all but one--Shugart Co., a Glendale subcontractor--are relocating from other areas in Orange County.
