There could be some new jobs soon at Hewlett-Packard's Corvallis campus - even if it isn't HP doing the hiring.

After years of downsizing, Hewlett-Packard has put two of the 11 buildings on its 140-acre Circle Boulevard complex - comprising more than 320,000 square feet of office and industrial space - up for lease. The Portland office of Cushman & Wakefield is the listing agency for the property.

Local economic-development officials have long hoped to see Hewlett-Packard make some of its vacant space available to other tenants, possibly enabling Corvallis to lure other high-tech employers to town.

"You're talking about some of the highest-end lab and office space anywhere," said Mysty Rusk, president of the Corvallis-Benton Chamber Coalition. "And if we had HP behind us, pushing that, that would be wonderful. That's space we don't have to sell."

If HP's pushing, however, the company's being awfully quiet about it. Corporate spokesman Ed Woodward declined to comment on the situation beyond a one-sentence statement about how Hewlett-Packard "is continually assessing its global real estate portfolio and reviewing underutilized or unused space."

Both buildings are three-story structures on the periphery of the campus, where workers could gain access without walking through areas occupied by Hewlett-Packard employees and potentially getting a peek at secret projects. The company recently applied for a building permit to install doors and access-card readers in one of the buildings, suggesting that HP is taking steps to secure its campus for additional tenants.

Building 1, as it's known on campus, is the smaller of the two at almost 57,000 square feet. Building 10 is much larger, with about 265,000 square feet, including 46,000 square feet of lab space. It also has its own cafeteria and fitness center, as well as conference space and two clean rooms for high-tech manufacturing.

A Cushman & Wakefield promotional brochure touts campus amenities such as abundant parking and athletic fields and quotes an annual rent of $18.50 per square foot, including utilities and other services. An online listing for the property calls it "perfect for a call center or large user."

The space in both buildings is divisible, so it could be leased to multiple tenants. If fully leased, the two buildings could house hundreds of workers - and that's good news for the local economy, according to Rusk.

"I'd rather see HP fill that space with HP employees again, but if I can't have that, I'd love to see somebody else there," she said.

Rusk hopes all that empty square footage in close proximity to Hewlett-Packard will lure out-of-town companies to move to Corvallis and create new job opportunities here. Potential recruits could include companies involved in automation, pharmaceuticals or systems integration, all of which play to the strengths of HP's local operations.

But Corvallis could also benefit, Rusk believes, from the simple ripple effect created by the addition of so much high-quality leasable office and industrial space.

"Even if it's local companies filling that space, that frees up other space," she said. "If you free up space, it gets filled."

HP broke ground on its Corvallis business park in 1976 as a home for its calculator division. The site boomed through the mid-1990s as the nerve center of the company's wildly successful inkjet printing operation, topping out at 11 buildings and about 6,000 employees.

Since then, however, multiple rounds of outsourcing, layoffs, buyouts and "work force transformation" programs have slashed the local headcount by half, leaving HP with acres of empty cubicles, labs and manufacturing space in Corvallis.

The company has been allowing ONAMI, the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute, to use half of Building 11 for free since 2003. And last year HP sold a 48,000-square-foot building known as MOB 4. The building, made up of modular units, was bought by a regional supplier of temporary office space which dismantled the structure and trucked the individual modules offsite for lease to other firms.

Bennett Hall is the business editor for the Gazette-Times. He can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.