A Newport-based technology company that plans to expand into a larger facility within a year is lobbying to buy a vacant school building from the city.

AVTECH Software Inc., which manufactures systems that protect data centers against computer hackers and interruptions caused by power failures, floods, fires and other environmental events, is headquartered in a mill building near the U.S. Naval Station in Newport.

The company also has sales, service and engineering facilities in Pennsylvania, in Washington state, and in England.

AVTECH is a leading player in the booming, multibillion-dollar IT and facilities environment monitoring market, with clients that include Raytheon, Hasbro, Citizens Bank, Microsoft, Yahoo, and some of the world’s most secure data centers, including those in the Pentagon, the White House and all branches of the U.S. military, said Michael Sigourney, AVTECH’s senior product specialist.

AVTECH, which has 30,000 customers in 104 countries, manufactures circuit boards in Methuen, Mass., and Nashua, N.H., and manufactures its hardware boxes in India. The company uses Northeast Manufacturing’s assembly facility in Portsmouth, Sigourney said.

The company, which currently has about 25 employees in Newport and another 75 or so in other states and abroad, is experiencing rapid growth and needs to move to a larger facility to accommodate up to 24 employees that the firm hopes to hire in the coming months, Sigourney said.

“We have an urgency to expand,” he said. “We’ve staffed up as much as we can in this building. Our business has doubled or tripled every year since 2004.”

Hoping to keep the company in Newport, Sigourney has submitted a proposal to buy the city’s vacant Sheffield School, an 86-year-old elementary school building that shut its doors in 2006 due to decreasing school population and budget constraints.

The Newport City Council recently began a formal public process to determine a use for the school building that best serves the city and the local community. In particular, there has been talk of converting the building into an affordable housing development, as has occurred with a couple of other former school buildings in the city.

But Sigourney said selling the building or entering into a long-term lease with his company would maximize the city’s future tax revenue on the property, and at the same time alleviate concerns of many local residents about turning the building into housing.

Sigourney, who lives down the block from the school, has met with numerous neighbors and abutters in an effort to gain support for AVTECH’s move to the property – promising, for example, to allow two nearby churches to continue using the building’s parking lot on evenings and weekends.

And he is pressing Newport officials to conclude its public process and put the school out to bid in a request for proposals by the end of the year. The property would also need to be rezoned from residential to low-impact commercial in order for AVTECH to bid on the building, he said.

If not, AVTECH will be forced to leave the city, Sigourney said. The company is considering an offer to move to the former Leviton Manufacturing Co. facility in Warwick, and has spoken with economic development officials in Fall River, who have an aggressive program to market abandoned and underutilized mill space in that city, he said.

“There’s no official offer on the table, but they have talked about a couple of years of no taxes, they’ve talked about free use of a mill building for maybe as much as six months if we say that we’re going to be there for ‘X’ number of years,” Sigourney said.

But Sigourney said he hopes to keep AVTECH in Newport, where many of its employees live and contribute to the community. The 33,000-square-foot Sheffield school building is the only available real estate in the city large enough to accommodate the rapidly expanding company, he said.

“Finding good people is one of the toughest things in a business, and I don’t want to lose that,” Sigourney said. “Moving is a hardship, no matter what. So if I can move a half-mile, keep my people, and contribute to the community that I’m already a part of, then I feel a lot better.” •