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O-I to start downtown exodus in July $20M Perrysburg facility still being built
The exodus from downtown by Owens-Illinois Inc. begins July 7, with initial employee groups being moved into existing O-I buildings in Levis Development Park in Perrysburg.
The company yesterday disclosed the timetable for its 360 downtown workers to be relocated from the current One SeaGate headquarters to Perrysburg, a move the Fortune 500 firm announced about a year ago.
The moves will take place each weekend over a period of about eight weeks, and by the end of August, top executives will be ready to move into a new $20 million headquarters facility in Perrysburg, spokesman Carol Gee said.
In the first group to move, 19 workers in the glass-container firm's purchasing operation will be relocated in one of three buildings in the Levis complex that were recently refurbished.
O-I, which has owned the Levis development since the mid-1960s, had three buildings there with a total of about 400,000 square feet of space, but some of that space was vacated two years ago when O-I sold its plastic-bottle operation. Its new headquarters building, still under construction, will have about 100,000 square feet.
The company hopes to be out of One SeaGate before the expiration of its 25-year lease Sept. 30, Ms. Gee said. The relocated employees will join about 585 workers in the Levis complex, which is off State Rt. 25 just south of I-475/U.S. 23.
Work on O-I's new headquarters is expected to be completed in about six weeks. In addition to that structure - designed by Albert Kahn Associates Inc. of Detroit and built by the Lathrop Co. of Maumee - the company is spending $9 million to refurbish its existing buildings.
One SeaGate, the $100 million 32-story riverfront office tower that has been home to O-I since 1981, has been owned by Newkirk Master Limited Partnership of Boston.
But that firm notified the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last year that it would likely default on the final "balloon" payment of $32 million, due this fall.
However, the insurance company responsible for covering that final payment - RVI Group, of Stamford, Conn. - said in March that it plans to purchase One SeaGate in September and hopes to have new tenants by January to fill much of the space vacated by O-I.
In recent years, O-I has occupied only about a fourth of the 874,000-square-foot tower, but at one time it had nearly 2,300 employees in the structure and filled almost all of the building.
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