Educational Service District (ESD) 112 has purchased the Ogden Business Park property from Christensen Group Inc. for approximately $18 million. The district’s Board of Directors approved the purchase earlier this summer.
The 5.22-acre business park is located along NE 65th Avenue in Vancouver. It features five buildings, including one warehouse, for a total of 215,000 square feet.
For ESD 112, the purchase is an opportunity to go from leasing to owning. The school district has been leasing three of the five buildings on the property since it moved there in 1992.
“We were the only ESD in the entire state of Washington that didn’t own their building,” said Lori Oberheide, ESD 112 executive director, communications and public engagement. “This was just such an incredible opportunity and also financially viable for us to have our own building.”
Illustrating the potential savings for the district, Superintendent Tim Merlino said, “As a lessee, we were paying about $750,000 a year. So between what we’re currently paying and what we’re going to be receiving in rent, if we keep the park full we would be freezing our rent at today’s rate for the next 20 years.”
At one point the school district had considered building a new 65,000-70,000-square-foot facility on property out at Evergreen Airport, but Merlino said it would have cost more money to move and construct a new facility than to stay at the business park, as the owner.
“It (the acquisition) also gives us an opportunity for some flexibility if we were to grow or have other programs here,” Oberheide added, alluding to ESD 112’s growth.
Today, roughly 220 school district employees work out of the Ogden Business Park location. That number continues to rise, said Oberheide, in large part due to the growth of the district’s early education programming.
“We’re growing tremendously,” she said. “Early learning is a huge area of growth for us, so we’re adding staff and we just don’t have the room. So looking at both short- and long-term solutions is going to be very important for us going forward.”
While the school district has no plans for any major changes on the property, there will be some minor improvements done to the buildings that the school district occupies, to better accommodate its programming.
The school district will continue to lease out the buildings it isn’t using. Other tenants on the property include Church & Dwight, an automotive parts company, an HVAC company and Grocery Outlet.
“This is the place we wanted to stay,” Oberheide concluded. “We’re rooted in this neighborhood and the facility works very well for us. The opportunity arose to purchase the park and we jumped on it.”
