L.A. to Get BP Amoco Regional Office

BP Amoco is setting up a small regional headquarters in downtown Los Angeles that will house the company’s new regional president for the Western United States, company officials said Tuesday.

The oil giant that was British Petroleum before it swallowed Los Angeles-based Atlantic Richfield and Chicago-based Amoco--and soon will be merely BP if shareholders approve the name change--will maintain an office with fewer than 100 employees headed by Bob Malone, an oil-industry veteran who recently was tapped to run BP’s operations in the Western states.

Malone said BP created his job “to recognize the importance of the United States to BP operations.” About half of BP’s assets and employees are in the United States, he said.

Malone, 48, joined British Petroleum in 1986, but spent the last four years as chief executive of Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which operates the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Another executive will be named to oversee BP operations in the Eastern states.

BP on Monday announced plans to rebrand all but its 1,800 Arco stations under the BP brand and new logo: a green, yellow and white sunburst. Redesigned stations will feature gasoline pumps that are connected to the Internet, giving customers up-to-date news headlines and sports scores, among other things.

BP’s purchase of Arco, which closed in April, stripped Los Angeles of another major corporate headquarters, and civic boosters bemoaned the loss of prestige and corporate largess. BP Chief Executive John Browne, however, vowed to continue Arco’s previous levels of charitable giving in the state while acknowledging that about 2,500 Arco employees would be laid off.

The regional BP headquarters will be in the 333 S. Hope St. building that was known before the merger as Arco Center (and before that as the headquarters of Security Pacific Bank). In addition to the regional headquarters, the offices will house dozens of employees who were scattered in several buildings downtown.

One thing that won’t be moving is the Arco logo that still tops the old Arco Tower, one of the twin 52-story landmark buildings on downtown’s Flower Street that not so long ago was Arco’s headquarters. Although Atlantic Richfield executives left that building late in 1998 as a cost-cutting move, a BP spokesman said the Arco sign will remain part of the skyline until 2005 under an old agreement with the property owners.