The Canyon business park along Anaheim’s eastern border has for decades been anchored by aerospace and defense products maker Boeing Co.
Now with Boeing’s plan to pull up roots in a shift to Huntington Beach during the next several years, Anaheim officials and others see an even greater need to set up a quasi-governmental business center to train employees to use state-of-the-art machine tools and have access to super-clean wet labs for medical research.
The city of Anaheim recently kicked in slightly less than $100,000 to get the center going this fall. More funds and donated equipment may be added by other partners, officials said.
The center’s tentative name: the Business Innovation Resource Center.
“It would be a laboratory environment where biotech and other startups can conduct experiments in a clean room,there are not enough of these in Orange County,” said Gary Augusta, director of the Orange County Technology Action Network, or Octane,a group of local venture investors and companies.
“They are very expensive to build, ranging from $200 to $500 a square foot,” Augusta said.
The city is looking for as much as 8,000 square feet of space to house the center, said Janet Coe, Anaheim’s economic development director.
The wet lab will be built by donations of equipment and services from local entrepreneurs and engineers associated with Octane, Augusta said.
The center could be used to lure some Boeing telecommunications engineers to work on biomedical devices such as contact lenses that can measure moisture in the eye and send the data to a computer, or products that can transmit signals from a patient’s heart pacemaker to a cell phone, Augusta said.
The facility also will get some cutting-edge machine tools donated to help local aerospace contractors train workers.
The shortage of machine tool technicians is partly a result of an aging work force coupled with high housing costs in OC. Rising housing costs also have made it tough for technology companies in The Canyon to lure machine tool technicians from other areas.
Anaheim-based Haas Factory Outlet, a distributor of high precision machine tools in the region, plans to provide some machinery to the center for demonstrations and training, according to Don Martin, president of the local Haas outlet.
The unit handles machine tool sales for Oxnard-based Haas Automation Inc., the largest machine tool builder in North America.
These special tools follow computerized instructions to cut hunks of metal. They cost $20,000 to $450,000. The smaller ones can fit into a garage while the more sophisticated ones require technicians to climb a staircase to operate them.
“It’s quite a commitment on the part of the city to take on something of this nature,” Martin said.
Haas will work with the center’s other partners for training on the machine tools.
The partners include the Center for Applied Competitive Technology of the North Orange County Community College District, the Rapid Prototyping Center of the South Orange County Community College District and the Anaheim Workforce Investment Board.
The Rapid Prototyping Center plans to provide some industrial computer-aided design machinery and equipment, according to director Ken Patton.
“We hope to provide machinery without the pressure of a salesman,” Patton said.
The idea of establishing the center in The Canyon grew out of a desire by local businesses that want to keep an industrial base in the area along the Riverside (91) Freeway.
The Canyon is 2,645 acres and makes up 63% of Anaheim’s industrial space.
Businesses in The Canyon include Boeing, which sold a chunk of its land about a decade ago to make way for other companies, Fry’s Electronics, Pacific Sunwear of California Inc., Targus Group International Inc., Japan’s YKK Corp. and Universal Alloy Corp., part of Switzerland’s ALU Menziken Group.
“The intent of the center is to diversify the economy,” said Sheri Vander Dussen, Anaheim’s planning director. “We are not happy that Boeing has decided to move its employees to Huntington Beach. Boeing has been a valued member of our business community for years.”
Anaheim also has lost a number of industrial companies in the Platinum Triangle area around Angel Stadium. They’ve been displaced by homebuilders remaking the area into a mix of condominium towers, restaurants and shops.
