Wilsonville Spokesman Online

Rockwell Collins will move jobs to Wilsonville from San Jose

About 100 positions will be added

• By: Patrick Johnson  
• Published: 11/17/2009 3:12:40 PM
• Last Updated: 11/18/2009 11:43:08 AM

The news isn’t all bleak when it comes to Wilsonville’s corporate tenants.

Rockwell Collins, which employs approximately 300 people near the now-empty InFocus building, will be expanding.

Pam Tvrdy, manager of media relations, said Monday that the company will be closing its San Jose site and moving jobs to the Wilsonville facility. She didn’t know the exact number of employees moving to Wilsonville as of press time.

“The facility in San Jose makes head up and heads down displays for military customers,” Tvrdy said. “We made the decision to close the facility down in August. This is part of an on-going effort to increase efficiencies. With that goal in mind, we are putting similar technologies together, and that is why we are moving this heads up display group to Wilsonville, which specializes in heads up displays.”

Blaise Edmonds, Wilsonville’s manager of current planning, said the city was informed late last month there would be approximately 120 more engineering jobs coming to the Wilsonville site.

“We received an e-mail about a week ago,” Edmonds said Friday.

Tvrdy said the jobs will be added to the current facility at 27300 S.W. Parkway Avenue.
Steve Gilmore, CEO of the Wilsonville Area Chamber of Commerce, said Friday his staff has helped create about 100 relocation packets, which help people find essential services around the Wilsonville area.
Gilmore said it’s a nice positive among news of other job losses and companies leaving Wilsonville.

“This is another example of a company moving more people to Wilsonville in the past year. You have to look at the Coca-Cola expansion, SSI and now Rockwell Collins to see that it isn’t all negative news out there,” Gilmore said. “With Rockwell Collins, anytime you are adding 100 extremely high-paying jobs that is a great thing for the local economy. Many of these jobs will be engineers and well paying and that is money that is going to come to Wilsonville that was being spent in northern California.”

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