Biz Buzz: Miner’s Hardware is opening in SLO

Miner’s Hardware is coming to San Luis Obispo.

The local hardware store company has signed a long-term lease — with an option to buy — with real estate developer Rob Rossi to take over a portion of the three-acre property previously occupied by Pacific Coast Home and Garden on Santa Barbara Avenue.

Miner’s plans to celebrate a soft opening at the end of May and a grand opening the first weekend in June, said Paul Filice, president of Miner’s Hardware Inc. The deal was finalized last week.

“We’ve had an overwhelming amount of support from the community,’’ Filice said. “We’ve been getting phone calls, e-mails and letters. It’s been an incredible welcome.”

The new store will feature a large garden area, and customers will be able to buy paint, tools, electrical equipment, hardware, housewares and other items. A new addition is lumber, Filice said.

Other improvements to the property include resurfacing of the parking lot, new floors inside, lighting, signage and refreshed landscaping.

Most of the staff at Pacific Home and Garden has been retained. The store will open with 25 to 30 employees and ramp up if necessary, he said.

This is the seventh Miner’s store in San Luis Obispo County. The company opened its latest store in Nipomo in October 2009.

“It’s (San Luis Obispo) has always been an area that we looked to get into, and we finally have the opportunity to do it,” Filice said.

— Julie Lynem

Women engineers announce awards

At a recent gala event, the Cal Poly Society of Women Engineers announced recipients of the 2010 Outstanding Women in Engineering and Technology Award.

Those were: Allison Holmgren, Jessica Paz, Cameron Schlemer, Roshani Patel and Alyssa Daw. The winners were selected based on faculty recommendations; grade point average; and leadership, work and extracurricular experience.

• Holmgren is an industrial engineering graduate student from Pleasanton and five-year member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers who participated in the student-managed home renovation project PolyHouse 2008. She has served as an air warfare systems intern at Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson, Ariz.

• Paz is an industrial engineering senior from San Luis Obispo who has served as president of Cal Poly’s Engineering Student Council and worked on the interior design of the PolyHouse 2009 project.

• Schlemer is a senior industrial engineering student from San Luis Obispo who has been on the Industrial Engineering Student Fee Committee since 2006, managed the PolyHouse 2008 project and has interned with Boeing in Washington.

• Patel is a civil engineering senior from Bakersfield and vice president of community service for the Cal Poly chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers. She assisted the captain for the first-place Concrete Canoe in the 2009 society’s national competition Daniel W. Mead Student Paper Contest, and she has performed experiments with the NSF-Sponsored Seismic Soil-Structure Interaction Project at UC Davis.

• Daw is a software engineer senior from Redmond, Wash., an active member of SWE since 2006 and a cross-country and indoor and outdoor track and field scholar-athlete who has served as a Google software engineer test intern. For her commitment to women’s equality, she received the Farrer Scholarship.

In addition, the Society of Women Engineers named mechanical engineering professor Lee McFarland as most supportive professor and presented $30,000 in scholarships at the gala, where students highlighted for their accomplishments joined industry representatives from 32 companies and agencies including Amazon.com, Northrop Grumman, Chevron, Cisco, Yahoo, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Yahoo! and the Central Intelligence Agency.

— Julia Hickey

• • •

Omni Design Group in San Luis Obispo has named Robert Winslow its director of civil engineering. For the past six years he worked for EDA Design Professionals in San Luis Obispo, managing projects such as the Colony Square movie theater in Atascadero and the replacement of the earthquake-damaged Acorn building in Paso Robles. In his new position, Winslow will focus on The Rottman Group’s The Annex, a 120,000-square-foot retail shopping center in Atascadero.

— Melanie Cleveland