One of downtown Bremerton’s longtime landmarks, the old Medical-Dental Building has been renamed Pacific Place One.

   Dimension 4, Inc., a software and information services company, will be moving its Seattle headquarters to Bremerton early this month, taking over the remodeled Medical/Dental building — now called Pacific Place One.
   Dimension 4 has had a presence in downtown Bremerton since in 1999, and the majority of its 100 plus employees currently work the Bremerton office.
   “The labor pool for the kind of work we do was better over here than in Seattle,” said Kent McManus, president of Dimension 4.
   Dimension 4 will occupy the entire building with the exception of the basement and some retail space. The company’s Seattle employees were scheduled to relocate to two of the office building’s four stories on Sept. 1. The remaining two stories will be completed for occupation in spring of 2005, and at that point the current Bremerton office, now located on 4th Street, will move.
   The company’s main information services offering consists of using a proprietary software program that can “understand” the intellectual content of a graphic, converting it into an electronic-format, “intelligent” graphic that can be used in engineering documents, technical manuals, and so on. Over the last several years Dimension 4 has been doing a lot of work on technical manuals for the Department of Defense. “That’s becoming a major part of our business,” said McManus
   

Job Supertendent Frank Phipps, with Larry Grimmius

While the software development portion of the business has been focused in Seattle to this point, the Bremerton office has handled the production work. Dimension 4 has worked with a number of educational institutions in Kitsap County to create AutoCAD training programs and courses of study — both at the high school and college level—which are tailored to Dimension 4’s requirements.
   “The programs give the students the training they need to be successful in our company,” said McManus.
   He doesn’t anticipate a great deal of turnover, at least initially, from relocating the two dozen or so Seattle employees to Bremerton. If there is turnover, though, the upcoming recruiting plans the company has should make up for it.
   “We’re growing pretty quickly,” McManus. “We’ll be recruiting very soon for both software developers and additional production staff.”
   The extensive renovation of the Medical-Dental Building was a massive undertaking. Mike Brown of FPH Construction, which has done the extensive renovation and retrofitting work, commented, “The biggest challenge was estimating the redevelopment costs in an older building that we didn’t own at the time.”
   The fact that no demolition work to see what was actually underneath and behind the walls could be done before the work actually began, complicated the process of estimating just how much the work would cost to do.
   In addition to unexpected structural imperfections later to be revealed, there were certain expected and anticipated conditions to be dealt with — such as asbestos removal. The only question was how much.
   Meeting Dimension 4”s timeline was another challenge due to the massive amount of demolition required before the renovations could even begin.
   Brown complimented the City of Bremerton’s permitting and fire officials in helping move the project forward. “They were fantastic,” said Brown. “They have a great attitude about helping Bremerton make the transition to the city it’s going to be in the future.”
   Brown, who is a part owner of the building in addition to being the contractor, is high on the city. “We believe in, and we’re banking on the future of Bremerton,” he said. “Once this project is completed, I believe there’ll be more and more activity, Bremerton will do just fine.”