Alliedsignal

Military contractor Raytheon Co. said yesterday that it has formally completed its purchase of AlliedSignal Communications Systems of Towson, which was first announced in July, for $62.5 million.Raytheon spokeswoman Deborah Drew said yesterday that day-to-day operations of the plant, which has projected revenues of $122 million this year, will continue without disruption for the time being. She said company leaders will decide if any staff cuts are needed.Raytheon, based in Lexington, Mass.

Construction could begin this summer on a $45 million office building at the former AlliedSignal chromium plant site, developers said yesterday - the surest sign yet of a revival at the once-polluted industrial property jutting into Baltimore Harbor. Developers would not name the likely tenant for one of the waterfront's last major vacant spaces. But city officials confirmed it is financial services giant Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc., which leases space in adjacent Fells Point and has shown interest in expanding in the city.

LOS ANGELES -- In a significant consolidation of the small airplane engine business, AlliedSignal Inc. said yesterday that it had agreed to buy the Lycoming Turbine Engine Division of Textron Inc. for $375 million in cash.AlliedSignal, a diversified manufacturing company based in Morristown, N.J., has been seeking to expand its aerospace business, which is based in Torrance, Calif. Its plant in Tucson, Ariz., makes motors for regional transport planes containing 19 to 30 seats.The acquisition of Textron's Lycoming division, which makes engines for planes with 70 to 115 seats, will make AlliedSignal the nation's largest manufacturer of small airplane engines, eclipsing Pratt & Whitney and Allison.

In an effort to ease the public onto a formerly polluted industrial site that juts into the Inner Harbor, developers who plan on building offices and shops there will first play host to a popular Canadian troupe of performers. Mayor Martin O'Malley plans to announce Feb. 5 that the Cirque du Soleil will perform on the former AlliedSignal chromium plant site under tents from April 11 to 27. The shows will be the first major attraction held on the site since a lengthy process of burying and capping toxic waste was completed in June 1999.

AlliedSignal Communication Systems in Towson has been awarded a contract valued at $180 million for the production of satellite communication equipment for use by the Defense Department's multiservice Special Operations Command.Jack Shaul, director of new ventures at the company, said the five-year contract represents "a new line of business with great growth potential" for the Joppa Road complex, formerly known as Bendix.Mr. Shaul said the new contract will require hiring new workers as the company moves into the production phase later this year.

AlliedSignal Inc. said yesterday that it will eliminate an undetermined number of jobs next month at its Communications Systems plant in Towson as part of a corporate restructuring.Wendy Kouba, a spokeswoman for the Teterboro, N.J., aerospace company, confirmed that there will be layoffs at the Joppa Road complex. But she said that just how many of the 1,100 workers will lose their jobs will not be known until the middle of February.The last major Allied layoff here was in February 1991, after the Air Force canceled a contract for the development of a military aircraft.

Jay Henry Stoudenmire, a retired electrical engineer who worked for AlliedSignal Corp. for more than 40 years, died of cancer Sunday at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson. He was 79 and lived in Hillendale. Born in the city and raised on Mount Royal Avenue, Mr. Stoudenmire was a 1939 graduate of Polytechnic Institute. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University School of Engineering. During World War II, he served as an electrician and technician aboard PT boats in the Italian Theater of operations.

Columbia-based AlliedSignal Technical Services Corp. has won a $28.8 million contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to install tracking systems in low Earth-orbiting satellites.The contract for the tracking systems, called "ground stations," follows a $197.2 million contract NASA awarded AlliedSignal last spring to operate, maintain and repair telecommunications, optics, television systems and meteorological forecasting equipment.The ground stations that Allied Signal will install under the latest contract are remote-control units that automatically track a single satellite or satellite systems that are orbiting less than 600 miles above the Earth.

Layoff notices went out this week to more than two dozen salaried employees at the AlliedSignal Communications Systems plant in Towson as part of a downsizing effort announced at the end of July.About the same number of employees took voluntary separation packages in August, for a total layoff of 50 to 55 workers, said company spokeswoman Maria Trintis Stamas."It was a tough business decision that we needed to make to help align our business costs with sales revenues," she said.The Towson plant employs roughly 1,000.

Lawrence A. Bossidy, chairman and chief executive officer of AlliedSignal Inc., has been named business leader of the year by the Sellinger School of Business at Loyola College in Maryland.Mr. Bossidy, 60, became CEO of the Fortune 500 diversified company in July 1991 and then chairman in January 1992. Before coming to Allied, he worked for General Electric Co. for 34 years, rising to the position of vice chairman and executive officer.While he has been head of AlliedSignal, the company has doubled its earnings and stock price.

Jay Henry Stoudenmire, a retired electrical engineer who worked for AlliedSignal Corp. for more than 40 years, died of cancer Sunday at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson. He was 79 and lived in Hillendale. Born in the city and raised on Mount Royal Avenue, Mr. Stoudenmire was a 1939 graduate of Polytechnic Institute. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University School of Engineering. During World War II, he served as an electrician and technician aboard PT boats in the Italian Theater of operations.

EVEN BEFORE Celebrity Cruises starts Caribbean sailings from Baltimore in a few weeks, two heavy hitters are fighting for an opportunity to build a replacement for Dundalk's scruffy cruise terminal. Edwin F. Hale Sr., the banking and sports entrepreneur, wants cruise ships as part of his $100 million Canton Crossing office and retail complex, which broke ground last week. John Paterakis Sr., who owns one of the nation's biggest bakery empires, wants cruise ships to moor near Fells Point, where he is planning to redevelop the site of a former AlliedSignal chromium plant.

DANGER: Watch out for planners. There is no such sign at the Inner Harbor. Perhaps there should be as half a dozen city and state panels try to figure out how to further exploit Baltimore's No. 1 tourist destination. This could be good. The problem, though, is that many of these overlapping efforts are so ill-defined they are likely to produce only an illusion of planning. That would be outright dangerous. Consider the Inner Harbor Master Plan. The Baltimore Development Corp. is in the process of hiring a consultant for such a proposal.

A decision by European regulators yesterday to derail a merger between General Electric Co. and Honeywell International Inc. may revive a plan to build housing and offices on a toxic waste site in Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Honeywell, which owns the land, had agreed to explore a $300 million project proposed by local developers. The site near Caroline Street contains buried waste from a former AlliedSignal Corp. chromium ore plant. At 27 acres, it is the harbor front's largest undeveloped parcel.

Howard County officials have decided to delay selling two prime government buildings for at least a year while they plan construction of an office complex in Ellicott City - gambling that the market for office buildings will stay strong. The county had planned to sell the Gateway building, an 81,000-square-foot structure bought at fire-sale prices during the recession nearly a decade ago, and the twice-as-large former AlliedSignal building - both in Columbia - to help finance construction of buildings in Ellicott City.

Honeywell International Inc. will close its semiconductor chip foundry in Columbia and lay off 56 people by the end of the second quarter of 2001, company officials said yesterday. About 85 employees total will have been dismissed once the Microelectronics & Technology Center, on Old Annapolis Road, closes next year. Fifteen employees have relocated to another company unit - Honeywell Technology Solutions Inc. - at Columbia Gateway office park, according to Jeff Zhou, general manager of the plant.

First-quarter net income at AlliedSignal Inc. rose 12 percent compared with the same portion of last year, the company said yesterday.Its $335 million in net income, or 59 cents per diluted share, was a first-quarter record for the New Jersey conglomerate and beat last year's mark of $300 million or 52 cents per share.The rise came despite several divestitures that took place in 1998, including the sale to Raytheon Co. of a military electronics plant in Towson. Total sales for the first quarter were $3.6 billion, down 1 percent from the year-ago period.

The Aerospace division of AlliedSignal Inc. announced yesterday that it will eliminate 1,000 jobs over the next eight months at the former Textron Lycoming engine plant in Stratford, Conn.AlliedSignal acquired Textron Lycoming, the turbine engine division of Providence, R.I.-based Textron Inc., last month. At that time it said the purchase would result in job cuts as it combined the business with its Phoenix, Ariz.-based engines unit.The job cuts, due to begin in December, will leave about 1,200 employees at the Stratford plant.

General Electric Co. has made an offer to buy Honeywell International Inc., executives close to the talks said yesterday, scuttling a bid by United Technologies Corp. General Electric likely would keep some of Honeywell's businesses but sell other parts of the company, the executives said. Details of General Electric's offer were not immediately available. United Technologies, an old-style conglomerate that makes everything from jet engines to elevators, had offered to buy Honeywell for about $40.3 billion in stock but called off the talks after it learned another suitor had emerged.

IT'S ALL supposed to be very hush-hush. But local construction powerhouse Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse is teaming up with the Paterakis bakery and real estate empire. Their goal: To turn a vacant 27-acre peninsula near Fells Point into a snazzy waterfront showpiece and symbol of the city's dot.com dreams. Baltimore may never become another Silicon Valley, the concentration of computer industries between San Francisco and San Jose. But visionaries believe this city could duplicate the success of Boston's Route 128, lower Manhattan's Silicon Alley and Northern Virginia near Dulles Airport, which have become important centers of operational invention and brain power.