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Posted Dec 6, 2009, 10:40 PM
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I enjoy discussing issues
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Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: MEGATITS
Posts: 411
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Pretty major development, and thankfully built on the VTA light rail line.
Quote:
Yahoo Santa Clara campus could house 12,000 workers
By Mike Swift
mswift@mercurynews.com
Posted: 11/24/2009 10:13:55 PM PST
Updated: 11/30/2009 12:35:36 PM PST
Despite a rocky three years, Yahoo is moving forward with plans to build a new campus that would house as many as 12,000 workers in Santa Clara, potentially the largest single real estate development in the city's history.
The total complex would include about 3 million square feet of office space, featuring 13 six-story buildings constructed over a large underground parking garage, according to a draft Environmental Impact Report released this week for public review.
"It's enough to make you yell, Yahoo!" said Santa Clara Vice Mayor Jamie Matthews. "To have such a massive future expansion in your city's future is a tremendous gift to all of Silicon Valley."
The Internet company on Tuesday declined to disclose the cost of the proposed 48-acre campus. Yahoo is going ahead with the plans, despite losing ground to Google and Microsoft in Internet search and this year cutting about 2,000 jobs. Final completion is years off and Yahoo could still scale back the project.
Yahoo's total work force is about 13,200, but a company spokeswoman would not say whether the world's largest e-mail provider plans to relocate its current corporate headquarters from Sunnyvale.
"At this point, it's too early to speculate on that," said the spokeswoman, Dana Lengkeek. "We're going through this development process, and we can't really say at this point we're going to do X, Y, or Z because that might impact the approval process."
However, according to the draft report, a key purpose of the project is to "consolidate Yahoo's existing leased office/R&D space and provide a campus in the City of Santa Clara, to meet future growth needs."
Officials in both Santa Clara and Sunnyvale said Yahoo has not notified them of any plans to move its headquarters.
"We're trying to be sensitive to that issue," said Matthews, the Santa Clara vice mayor.
"Yahoo has been a valued resident of our community, said John Pilger, a spokesman for Sunnyvale. "We certainly think it's important for them to be here, and we hope they would stay."
Yahoo's development plans, he added, don't "necessarily mean a headquarters is going to move. Moving a headquarters is a major undertaking; it's not just a matter of moving desks over there."
The Santa Clara site, which Yahoo purchased in 2006, is currently occupied by a cluster of mostly vacant office buildings, a short distance from the Santa Clara Convention Center and the site of a proposed stadium for the San Francisco 49ers. Yahoo declined to disclose the purchase price, which was withheld from public records.
But an analysis of county assessment records, which are based on the most recent sale data, suggest
the price was about $118 million.
The new campus would be built in a series of phases, with demolition starting within one year of approval by the city, according to the draft EIR. A public hearing on the project is tentatively scheduled Feb. 3, the public has until Jan. 6 to submit comments to the city on the plan.
Kevin Riley, Santa Clara's planning director, said he believes the Yahoo project would be the largest single real estate development in the city's history.
Although the new campus would be located near the VTA's Old Ironsides Light Rail stop, the EIR details plans for 9,900 parking spaces and says the campus would generate about 13,000 daily vehicle trips, even with the transit connection.
"The issue is traffic," Riley said of the project. Even though Yahoo will most likely encourage transit and bike use, "there are a lot of employees on a campus of that size, so there will be a lot of cars associated with the project."
One rationale for Yahoo to move to Santa Clara, where it already has some office space, would be the significant savings the company would realize buying power from the city's nonprofit municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power.
A fully built-out campus in Santa Clara would save Yahoo more than $1 million a year on electricity, said Larry Owens, manager of customer services for Silicon Valley Power. The city utility has the lowest systemwide average electricity cost in California, Owens said, and would offer a large commercial customer such as Yahoo savings of 25 percent to 30 percent over PG&E.
As the headquarters of Intel, and the home of many offices of other large tech companies, Santa Clara already has about 1.8 jobs for each of the city's approximately 117,000 residents. A Yahoo relocation would increase that imbalance, adding traffic and housing pressures, but Riley said there would also be economic pluses for the city.
"Typically in the economics of land use, business is a revenue generator and housing translates into service costs for a city," Riley said.
To provide some context for the size of Yahoo's plans, Mountain View-based Google has only about 3 million square feet of office space in the Bay Area — the same amount Yahoo is planning for Santa Clara.
Under new CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo reported a brighter economic outlook in its third quarter results last month, with a tripling of its profit amid signs its Internet advertising business is stabilizing.
Most of the jump was due to cost-cutting, but Bartz told analysts more recently that Yahoo plans to boost its operating profit margin to a range of 15 percent to 20 percent by 2012, up from just 6 percent this year.
Yahoo is also finalizing the terms of what it says will be a lucrative search partnership with Microsoft, a deal awaiting approval from regulators.
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