The startling success of Columbia's Gateway corporate park is putting small Howard County shoulder to shoulder with much larger jurisdictions among Maryland's top job producers.

Among the top three counties in attracting jobs -- competing with Montgomery and Baltimore -- Howard is becoming less of a bedroom suburb and more of a place where people work and live.

Gateway, just south of Route 175 and bordering Interstate 95, is a driving force.

"What Gateway has allowed the county to do is accommodate the growth of high-tech and corporate firms," said Anirban Basu, director of applied economics at the Regional Economic Studies Institute at Towson University. "Not even in Anne Arundel, Timonium, and Annapolis -- there's nothing on the same scale as Gateway," Basu said.

And Richard W. Story, Howard's economic development authority chief executive, expects things to keep improving. "We started the decade with about 80,000 jobs and expect to be over 120,000 by the end of the year," he said, with office, service, retail, restaurant and warehouse jobs popping up across Howard County, where the unemployment rate is under 2 percent.

It may lack the dramatic impact of the General Motors truck transmission plant coming to White Marsh, but Gateway is quietly pumping prosperity into Howard County.

The GM plant will save 500 jobs in Baltimore County. But Gateway has attracted 3,000 jobs to 13-year-old Rouse Co. park in two years -- and company officials expect more than 4,000 others within three years, filling the company's 1.5 million square feet.

It is the county's single biggest job generator, Story said.

Gateway's success, despite the early '90s recession, has helped spark a 33.6 percent growth in jobs in the county through 1997, according to state government figures.

The money generated by that growth has underwritten government services for residents and perhaps helped keep down property and income tax rates.

"For every 4,000 jobs added in Howard County, there's roughly a total income impact of $250 million a year," Basu said.

"It's that deep corporate base that really allows county government to pay for its operations. We have seen Howard's revenues increasingly generated by the corporate side. That's a very healthy sign," Basu said.

Howard government officials agree.

"It's a lot of jobs and a lot of tax base that requires little in services from the county. Anytime we can bring in that kind of development, it excites me," said County Executive James N. Robey. County Council Chairman C. Vernon Gray, an East Columbia Democrat who has been on the council five terms and whose district includes Gateway, has a longer perspective.

"When you really face it, the Rouse Co. has been the economic engine for Howard County for decades. It's phenomenal," he said, referring to Columbia, and the continuing expansions within and outside the planned town.

Easing traffic

More good-paying local jobs also mean more Howard residents living near their work, Robey said, reducing the county's problems with commuter traffic. More than a third of Gateway workers live in the Columbia area, Rouse officials say.

Kent Henderson, 43, who moved to the area a year ago with his wife and their Oakland Mills High 10th-grader, is one of those new jobholders. He got a telemarketing job at Gateway and then moved his family to Columbia from temporary quarters in Baltimore.

"I didn't want to fight I-95 or I-695. By the time you get to work, you'd be exhausted," he said.

And Edward A. Ely, vice president and director of land sales and marketing for Rouse, sees nothing but blue skies ahead for the nearly 600-acre park.

"We're actually blessed with a wide variety of employers. We are not dependent on any one industry," he said.

In addition to more than 80 available acres within the park, Rouse owns 90 developable acres just north of Gateway across Route 175, Ely said. When all that's used up, Ely said, Rouse's focus will move south, to a new mixed-use community the developer is planning for the North Laurel area.

A tough start

Gateway was born from the failure of an earlier venture -- the construction of a General Electric appliance manufacturing plant on 1,000 acres in East Columbia that Rouse officials 30 hoped 30 years ago would provide jobs for their new town's residents. Although four huge industrial buildings were built during the 1970s, the plant never lived up to its billing, and Rouse bought the land back for redevelopment, starting Gateway in 1986 with Mike's Train House, a 40,000-square-foot model train manufacturer.

Part of the appliance park land is the Snowden Square shopping center, Columbia's first big-box discount center, and three of the GE buildings have been converted for other industrial or warehouse uses. A fourth, renamed the Renaissance Center, is being renovated to join an office park explosion that has produced a bigger economic boost than the GE plant ever could have.

Good location

Now, for companies ranging from long-term-stay motels to telemarketers, computer companies and health care companies, Gateway's developers offer high-tech equipped buildings midway between the region's two largest cities, close to I-95, near Baltimore-Washington International Airport and at Columbia's eastern entrance.

"Location matters," Ely said about Gateway. "It's in the right place in the world."

Micros Systems Inc., a growing, 22-year old computer company occupying four buildings in Beltsville, agrees, says Steven M. English, director of resource development. A huge steel skeleton for the company's s 250,000-square-foot headquarters is up at Gateway -- one of three buildings under construction. Micros also has an option for a second, 100,000-square-foot building on the site, English said.

Gateway is just a 10-minute longer drive than Beltsville for workers coming from the Washington area, English said, because I-95 is faster ride than Route 1. But many Micros employees live in or near Columbia anyway, he said. "We've been besieged by people asking for bicycle racks."

English said the growing company's buildings are too small, lacking the newest electrical, computer and air-conditioning systems, and are too spread out for its 750 employees.

"Because we are a computer company with one, two, three or four computers on each desk, we need a building that's networked, with good security, state-of-the-art air and electrical service," English said.

In addition to the three buildings under construction, two more complexes -- with another 410,000 square feet of space -- are to begin construction later this summer, said Ely and Cole Schnorf, senior vice president of development for Manekin LLC, a development and leasing company that moved to Gateway more than a decade ago, and builds, leases and manages buildings there.

Schnorf said a lack of restaurants, hotels, movies and shopping 15 years ago made it hard to attract businesses to Gateway, but that has changed.

A positive

"What was a bit of a problem during the '80s is now a positive," Schnorf said, referring to a lack of amenities solved by the Rouse-developed restaurant park across Route 175 and the two huge big-box discount shopping centers nearby.

Some of the companies moving to Gateway were in other Howard County, or even Columbia locations, but that doesn't mean empty space in older office buildings, leasing agents say.

Brian Watts is assistant vice president of a company looking for tenants for 30,000 square feet in the Clark building near the Columbia Mall. The building is newly renovated but more than 20 years Watts said he expects no problems.

"The market's so tight, nobody's having any trouble," he said. The space he's trying to fill will soon be vacated by Magellan Health Services, a big health care company consolidating offices in Gateway.

"When we were looking to expand, we were looking for a place to connect fiber-optic cables. That led us to Gateway," said Chuck Kanach, executive vice president of Magellan.

Technology isn't the only concern, however.

Day-care director Lisa Lockwood sees the growth reflected in her business in the Gateway Plaza shopping center, a small retail center in the office park.

"We're filled to capacity and have been for the last year to 18 months," she said, adding that her business, Children's Discovery Center, is looking for land nearby to build another of the chain's 260 centers.

"New companies coming in [to the park] inquire about discounts, but we tell them we not only don't have discounts, but we don't have room at all."

Pub Date: 7/25/99