Thursday, January 01, 2009

HP Ready To Start Work on Call Center

By Rosalie Rayburn
Journal Staff Writer
       Computer giant Hewlett-Packard is ready to begin moving dirt within days for its Rio Rancho customer support center.
    Mayor Thomas Swisstack said stakes are already in the ground at the 17-acre Rio Rancho City Center site where HP plans to build its 218,000-square-foot center.
    The Palo Alto, Calif.-based computer and peripherals corporation has said it plans to open the center a year from now and will employ 1,350 people by 2013.
    Swisstack said expects earthmoving to begin at the HP site in advance of an official groundbreaking ceremony.
    City staff are working with staff from Gov. Bill Richardson's office to set a date for an official ribbon cutting ceremony with the governor in attendance, Swisstack said, in a phone interview Tuesday.
    Richardson held a news conference in June where he announced that HP had picked the Rio Rancho location for a customer support center, one of two nationwide where it is consolidating operations from 10 separate divisions. The other center is in Conway, Ark.
    City spokesman Peter Wells said in an e-mail to the Journal on Tuesday that a groundbreaking for the HP center is being planned for the end of January. City officials originally said HP would break ground on Jan. 2.
    They have also said that the University of New Mexico would break ground on the first building of its planned downtown Rio Rancho campus in January. UNM intends to open the 40,000-square-foot building, located northeast of City Hall, in December of 2009, Greg Hartman, principal architect with the Hartman + Majewski Design Group, told city councilors in a presentation early last month.
    Central New Mexico Community College plans to break ground on the first building of its Rio Rancho campus some time during the first quarter of 2009.
    "We are still on track for that," said CNM spokeswoman Alexis Kerschner, in a phone interview on Tuesday.
    Presbyterian Healthcare Services has broken ground and accomplished preliminary ground preparation for the hospital it plans to build in southwest Rio Rancho. Presbyterian is uncertain when it will begin construction because uncertainty in the financial markets has upset its plans to issue around $200 million worth of bonds to pay for the project.
    "We have to keep reassessing our assumptions, but we are very committed to Rio Rancho even if the project delays," Presbyterian spokesman Todd Sandman said in a phone interview last week.
   

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