Corporate Headquarters

Halliburton Co., the world's second-largest oilfield services provider, will move Chief Executive Officer David Lesar to a new corporate headquarters in Dubai to help the company expand in the Middle East and Asia. The move is part of an effort to shift business outside North America, which provided 55 percent of Halliburton's profit last quarter, and to court national oil companies that pump most of the oil in the Middle East. The company will keep a corporate office in Houston, where it has its headquarters today, the company said in a statement.

Sykesville residents have another opportunity today to review plans for a $3.5 million corporate headquarters proposed for a neighborhood at the northern edge of town.Fairhaven Retirement Community plans to build its office center on a 3-acre parcel across from its main entrance on Third Avenue.The proposal has spawned heated debate, which is expected to continue at a public hearing Monday. After that hearing, the Town Council is expected to vote on a rezoning petition. Changing the property from residential to business zoning would allow construction to proceed.

NEWS THAT W. R. Grace & Co. will move its corporate headquarters to Columbia was an exclamation point to the first state of the county address by Howard County Executive James N. Robey.The chemical company's move involves only about 40 jobs. But the decision to leave the Sun Belt mecca of Boca Raton, Fla., is strong commentary on Howard County's attractiveness to businesses looking for a home.Twelve companies made Howard County their corporate headquarters in 1998. The Howard County Economic Development Authority listed 91 new or expanded businesses last year.

HOW MUCH are 3,700 jobs worth? At what point does a government aid package to retain a business become corporate welfare?These are not easy questions, as is illustrated by the state's current negotiations with Marriott International Inc., which has outgrown its Bethesda headquarters and is weighing bids from both Virginia and Maryland for a new corporate headquarters.Losing a Fortune 500 company headquarters of Marriott's esteem would be a crushing blow for Maryland's economic development efforts.

The president and chief executive officer of W. R. Grace & Co. said yesterday that the relocation of the chemical company's worldwide headquarters to Columbia later this year will create 80 jobs, bringing the number of employees in Maryland to 1,100.Paul J. Norris, who also serves as W. R. Grace's chairman, said at the annual stockholders meeting at the Sheraton Columbia Hotel that the company's move from Boca Raton, Fla., to an existing site in Columbia will begin in July and be completed in September.

IF ATTRACTING the headquarters of one of America's largest publicly traded companies is a measure of good economic health, Howard County is in the pink.Luring Magellan Health Services Inc. to move to Columbia from Atlanta, which of late has been a destination for corporate headquarters, is a coup.It is further evidence that Maryland is an attractive place to do business.One of the nation's largest managed-care organizations, Magellan is familiar with Maryland. It employs about 600 people in Columbia and another 300 around the state.

W. R. Grace & Co.'s decision to relocate its worldwide headquarters in Columbia will raise the Baltimore region's visibility as a good place to live and work, industry observers and local officials say.There's also the benefit of having a firm whose chief executive officer wants to bulk up Grace's worldwide presence, they say."This company is in the process of changing its stripes," said Bear, Stearns & Co. analyst Christopher Bodnar. "It had been in a restructuring mode. Now, it's moving forward as an organization into a growth-focused, acquisition mode.

Helix/Medlantic, the seven-hospital health system created by the merger in May of Baltimore and Washington systems, will open headquarters early next year in Columbia.John P. McDaniel, chief executive of the merged system, said about 80 employees will work at the corporate headquarters, which will occupy 25,000 square feet in the Clark Building, 5665 Sterrett Place.McDaniel said the system would keep as much decision-making as possible at each facility "and keep it very thin at the corporate level."

BY SUMMER, USF&G Corp. will no longer be a major publicly held company based in Baltimore. The city's largest property and casualty insurer is being merged into St. Paul Cos. For Baltimore, this change is unsettling, but it does not have to be bad news.USF&G will join a long list of home-grown firms -- Alex. Brown & Sons, Noxell, A. S. Abell Co. -- acquired by or merged into out-of-town companies. With corporate merger activity at its highest levels in a century, the list of companies with local headquarters dwindles.

While Maryland businesses had few complaints with the just-completed session of the Maryland General Assembly, the state's largest utility suffered a major setback in its effort to alter its corporate structure.Flush with a $283 million surplus, lawmakers voted to accelerate an income tax cut that had been passed last year, reducing taxes by 5 percent instead of the planned 2 percent. At the same time, they approved funding for science and technology scholarships to confront what some see as the state's most pressing economic problem: the scarcity of high-technology workers.

Erickson Retirement Communities, a struggling developer that has built retirement communities in 11 states, is working to separate its building and management entities, restructure debt and bring in an equity investor. The Catonsville-based company's real estate arm, which acquires land for campuses and builds projects, has been burdened by heavy debt amid the recession, Mel Tansill, a spokesman, said Monday. "The real estate side ... has been greatly impacted by the national recession, causing debt that we will work to eliminate through the business separation of the two entities," Tansill said in an e-mail.

Media research firm Arbitron Inc. said yesterday that it is relocating its corporate headquarters from New York City to Columbia, where most of its employees work. Michael Skarzynski, Arbitron's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement that he and other executives should live and work in Columbia because it is where most of the company's research is done. "He wanted to be where the action is, where the people who will execute the decisions are," said Thom Mocarsky, an Arbitron spokesman.

Erickson Retirement Communities, which develops and operates retirement communities in 11 states, laid off 260 employees Wednesday, a 2 percent staff reduction that the Catonsville-based company blamed on the deepening recession. Most of the cuts came at corporate headquarters, Erickson said in an announcement yesterday. The company, which operates 20 communities and has 13,000 employees, said a decision to slow its aggressive growth and development plans led to cuts in full- and part-time staff in construction, development and corporate support functions.

Constellation Energy's glass-encased office building will still host conference calls. Executives will buy lunch for clients. The charity golf game will go on. Much will survive the looming takeover of Baltimore's last Fortune 500 company. But the city, some say, is in store for a significant, if ephemeral, loss: prestige. If Des Moines-based MidAmerican Energy Holding Co.'s plans go forward, home-grown Constellation goes from Baltimore big shot to a box somewhere in the middle of Warren Buffett's vast organization chart.

AirTran Holdings Inc. reported yesterday that it narrowed its fourth-quarter loss by offsetting rising fuel costs with higher fares and fuller airplanes. The No. 2 airline at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport reported a net loss of $2.2 million, or 2 cents per share, for the quarter that ended Dec. 31. That compares with a loss of $3.6 million, or 4 cents per share, for the fourth quarter of 2006. Revenue soared 27 percent to $583.8 million. For the year, AirTran reported net income of $52.7 million, or 56 cents per share.

Sports apparel maker Under Armour Inc., which expects to outgrow its headquarters in Baltimore's Tide Point in about five years, is eyeing West Covington, an industrial swath of Middle Branch shoreline that city officials want to transform into an extensive mixed-use development. Officials at Baltimore Development Corp. have talked with Under Armour executives about West Covington and several other city sites as a possible home for a future corporate headquarters in an effort to help the company grow, said M.J. "Jay" Brodie, president of the BDC. "It's obviously in the city's interest to try to find possibilities for them within the 80 square miles of Baltimore," Brodie said.

When Harborplace opened 26 years ago, Mayor William Donald Schaefer refused to accept the shower of accolades. Praise made him nervous. He feared complacency. He wanted to know what else was in the pipeline. Pretty soon, he said, every city in America would have something shiny and new - newer and shinier than Baltimore's jewel. He might have permitted himself just a moment of satisfaction, but of course he was right. In a quarter-century, something that seemed revolutionary then - the reinvention of harbors as tourist magnets - would be eclipsed.

Halliburton Co., the world's second-largest oilfield services provider, will move Chief Executive Officer David Lesar to a new corporate headquarters in Dubai to help the company expand in the Middle East and Asia. The move is part of an effort to shift business outside North America, which provided 55 percent of Halliburton's profit last quarter, and to court national oil companies that pump most of the oil in the Middle East. The company will keep a corporate office in Houston, where it has its headquarters today, the company said in a statement.

Awards Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse received a MAXI Merit International Council of Shopping Centers award for its sales promotion and event initiative for the Belvedere Square shopping center. Open Basco Shower Enclosures opened a ware- house/showroom distribution center in Jessup. Organizations The Maryland State Medical Society (MedChi) elected Dr. Scott D. Hagaman, a Catonsville psychiatrist, president. Relocations Curry Architects relocated its offices to the Inner Harbor at the Power Plant Live on Pratt Street.

YOU know you're a genuine Baltimorean - in spirit, if not in current residence - if, upon hearing the news of a $250 million, 50-story condominium and hotel skyscraper going "where the News American used to be," you instantly recognize the location - right across from Harborplace, at 300 East Pratt. And you're a genuine Baltimorean if, the more you hear this kind of news (there's a lot of it coming out of downtown these days), you actually allow yourself a guarded moment of optimism. Guarded, of course, because news of exciting redevelopment projects in Baltimore comes, in the next breath, with all the other stuff.