Friday, Sep. 05, 2008

John Deere makes move to Olathe

Opus Northwest, LLC can check John Deere off a list of large corporations that relocated facilities to its Corporate Ridge office park at Kansas Highway 10 and Ridgeview Road.

The industrial and farm equipment giant announced Friday that it would move its North American sales and marketing headquarters from Lenexa to Olathe.

“It is widely recognized when you have green and yellow, you have the best,” Olathe Mayor Mike Copeland joked. On a more serious note, he added “As we all know, John Deere aspires to instinctively serve its customers and as a result delivers performance that endures. That’s the quality and excellence the city of Olathe wants to be partnered with.”

John Deere will break ground on a more than 126,000 square foot Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) gold certified facility in October.

Tim Merrett, John Deere’s North American vice president of agricultural equipment marketing, said benefits to the high-quality working facilities for the company’s employees and the benefits to environment outweighed the additional costs of building a LEED gold building.

“When you’re making an investment like this, it’s really important to (think about) not only how it affects yourselves, but those around you,” he said. “We’re trying to keep that in mind as we design and build this facility.”

Tim McKee, the Olathe chamber’s vice president of economic development, said according to their research, John Deere’s will be the first LEED gold building on the Kansas side of the metro area.

The 400 employees from the Lenexa building will move to Olathe, Merrett said, and the new building will allow for future add-on expansions, but didn’t provide specifics.

John Lagemann, John Deere’s North American vice president of agricultural sales, wouldn’t say how much the company would invest in Olathe with its new facility, but said it was “significant.”

McKee, who was instrumental in attracting John Deere to Corporate Ridge, said Olathe was lucky to have a company of it’s caliber invest in the community.

“It’s always good to have a Fortune 100 company in your city,” McKee said

The facility will support 1500 dealer locations across the country. Lagemann and Merrett cited the location’s proximity to local highways and easy access to the facility for locating at Corporate Ridge. They also noted the location near the Kansas State University campus at the Kansas Bioscience park and possible future partnerships with the university and bioscience sector as a reason for their attraction to site.

And they said the quality of Corporate Ridge as an established office park that will only grow, was a factor in their decision to locate there.

The park has the capacity 4.5 million square feet of office space capacity on more than 400 acres, said Dave Harrison, vice president and general manager of Opus Northwest LLC’s Kansas City Mo. office.

Currently the National Board of Respiratory Care and Terracon Consultants Inc. have located their company headquarters there. In addition the park includes offices for Garmin, Farmers Insurance, the Olathe Chamber of Commerce and Heath Ridge Fitness Center.

In June, John Q. Hammons Hotels and Resorts announced it would locate a 11-story, 315-room Embassy Suites and adjacent 80,000 square foot conference center there.

Harrison said John Deere’s inclusion at the park is a testament to the location, city and the environment created for businesses to locate there.

“A company with the caliber of John Deere validates the park, as did the other companies,” he said.

Copeland said recent corporate entities entering Olathe are the types of investment the community covets.

“There has never been a more exciting time in Olathe than right now,” said Mayor Mike Copeland. “... John Deer’s decision to locate here speaks volumes to the incredible economic momentum and success we’re experiencing.”

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