A Topeka-based company that stores and destroys documents for area businesses has chosen Lawrence for a $1.2 million expansion project.

Jayhawk File Express has chosen Lawrence’s Franklin Business Park, in eastern Lawrence near the Douglas County Jail, to locate an approximately 50,000-square-foot warehouse that will employ five people.

The 6-year-old company stores documents for business professionals such as doctors, attorneys and architects, who have large volumes of paper records. It also shreds documents for companies that must dispose of records in a secure manner.

Bob Featherston, director of business development for the company, said growth in the Lawrence business community was the reason the company decided to expand here.

“We’re really expanding our geographic footprint in a significant way,” Featherston said. “There seems to be a lot of business success stories in Lawrence and we hope to be a part of that.”

Featherston said Wednesday that the jobs at the Lawrence facility would be a mix of management and service positions that are responsible for organizing, pulling and delivering files. Salary ranges haven’t been set but they will be more than $10-per-hour jobs, Featherston said. The company is not seeking a tax abatement from the city.

The expansion will bring the privately owned company’s employee total to 15 people. The company, which doesn’t release its sales totals, has been on a strong growth path, Featherston said. He said new federal legislation — such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which requires medical providers to be more stringent in how they handle documents involving private patient information — had helped the company’s storage business.

The company’s document destruction business also has been growing as more examples come to light of what can happen if the wrong information falls into the wrong hands, Featherston said.

“You hear an awful lot about identity theft these days, and that has helped people understand there is a strong need to destroy documents properly,” Featherston said.

When completed in 2005, Featherston said the Lawrence facility would be able to store more than 100,000 documents and would include a 12-foot-high paper shredder that spits out 1,500-pound bales of shredded documents that are then recycled.

Featherston said the company charges 20 cents per month for a normal-size file box. He said shredding charges vary depending on the project.

Economic development officials said they were pleased with the company’s decision to expand in Lawrence.

“It is a pretty significant investment that they’re making, and it will be a good enhancement to that business park,” said Lynn Parman, vice president of economic development for the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce.

Parman said she thought the company also had the potential to add more than the initial five jobs that will be part of the Lawrence project.

“They’ve seen an awful lot of growth over the last few years,” Parman said. “We’ll be glad to see them grow here.”