Crown Moving makes move of its own
The board outside Crown Moving Company informs passers-by of the business' own move.
Port installing sprinklers to accommodate
The Crown Moving Company is packing up and moving on.
Beginning Friday, the company, located at 2000 W. Broadway, will make the trek to its new site at 5128 Randolph Road NE.
"We're moving to a larger facility," manager David Hermann said. "We need a little more room. It also allows us to hook up to the Zipp network for our communications and for our networking, make everything faster."
The move will allow the company more storage and storage that is climate-controlled, he said.
Regarding the possibility of adding more employees, Hermann pointed out that new employees are brought on during the busiest moving season, the summer, and said that things slow down dramatically during the winter.
The business shared its Broadway location with Lakeside Disposal, which will remain.
"We're basically two businesses — we just share the offices and the whole yard," Hermann said.
Hermann said he has been with the company for ten years; the company merged with Mayflower Agencies owner Bob Bernd in 1995. He said he was uncertain of the date that the moving company was started, but estimated that Bernd's parents began it in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
Port executive manager David Senne described Crown's new location as a "fairly new" building that the Port purchased from Pepsi as part of a deal to move that company into a larger Port-owned facility. He said that the Port will advertise its vacant buildings, and that a local real estate agent informed them of Crown.
"We are looking forward to this being a long-term customer," Senne said. "It's a good building and the transportation system supports their use of it for the storage of household goods."
Senne said a little difficulty arose in that Crown's intended use for the building includes the stacking of flammable items.
"According to the county fire marshal, (this) requires an upgrade on the fire system," he said. "So we're about to go out for bids so that we can have that constructed, and right now (Crown has) got conditional use for 120 days, pending the installation of the sprinkler system."
"They've been very accommodating," Hermann said of the Port. "I'd like to think we'll be able to better serve the people of Moses Lake, just because we have a bigger facility. It makes everything more efficient."