Almost Missed the Good News
Google to bring 1,000 jobs to Ann Arbor area
Google Inc. Tuesday announced plans to build an office and research center in Ann Arbor that will have up to 1,000 employees.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm made the announcement in a news conference at the state capitol in Lansing.
State officials said Tuesday that the project will handle online sales and operations for Google's AdWords program, which handles "pay-per-click" advertising to users of Google's Internet search engine.
They also said Google is considering several locations in Washtenaw County and has not yet determined whether it will lease existing space or build a new structure. If the company leases, its real estate investment will be about $20 million, plus lease payments. A new building would cost about $50 million.
Google estimated that the project would add up to 1,000 jobs within the first five years of operations, with an average weekly wage of $913, or $47,500 a year. As of midday Tuesday, there were job listings at www.google.com/jobs in Ann Arbor for application developers and print scanning operators and supervisors. Economists estimate the operation will also create about 1,200 spinoff jobs.
The new office will be Google's largest operations center outside its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Ann Arbor is home to the University of Michigan, where Larry Page, a Google co-founder and East Lansing native, earned a degree in engineering.
Page has maintained close ties with UM. Google plans to digitize all seven million volumes in its libraries.
The plan was seen as a significant boost to Michigan's lagging economy, as well as a boost to Granholm's re-election campaign.
"This is a huge, huge, huge, huge thing," Granholm told Detroit Free Press columnist Tom Walsh for a story in the newspaper's Tuesday editions. "It's a tremendous statement about Michigan having a cutting-edge work force."
"This decision is obviously a tremendous opportunity for the Ann Arbor area and the entire state of Michigan to bring the leading name in technology and innovation-based economic growth to our community and our state," said Michael Finney, CEO of Ann Arbor Spark, the community's main economic development agency. "We could not be more excited as a community to have them come, and we think having them here will further fuel some of the innovation-based business activities we have going on."
The state offered Google $38 million in tax breaks over 20 years, should its employment reach 2,000. Google already has a small sales office in Southfield.
Democrat Granholm is being challenged for re-election by Republican Dick DeVos. She has been criticized for not attracting high-tech jobs to the state.
Michigan's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 6 percent in May, compared with a national rate of 4.6 percent that month. Economists have said they expect the state's jobless rate to climb until 2008.
Google was founded in 1998 by Page and fellow Stanford University graduate student Sergey Brin. The company now has almost 7,000 employees.
--Reporting from IT Report editor Matt Roush, the Associated Press and Reuters