PORTLAND – Employees of a Pacific Northwest discount chain with stores in northeast Oregon have voted to keep it in the family.

An overwhelming number of Bi-Mart employees voted to buy into an employee stock option plan, making them part-owners of the chain – and warding off the specter of a future buy-out.

Bi-Mart, with 64 stores in Oregon, Washington and Montana, has been bought and sold 15 times in its 49-year history.

Bi-Mart’s Hermiston store employs 34 , including 29 full-time. The company also has stores in Pendleton, La Grande, Baker City, Walla Walla and Ontario. The Pendleton store declined to provide its number of employees, but Don Leber, a Bi-Mart spokesman in Eugene, said stores average 50 to 60 employees.

“We’re obviously very excited about it,” Leber said. “More than 72 percent of the eligible employees took advantage of this opportunity.”

CEO Marty Smith said, “For the employees, what it means is that instead of just getting wages, they get to share in the proceeds of the company.”

Other well-known companies that are employee-owned include Proctor and Gamble, Anheuser-Busch and Jeld-Wen. Smith said he had been toying with the idea of the employee ownership ever since the company was last bought by Rite-Aid in 1997.

“Each time we were sold, I could see the effect it had on employees – the uncertainty,” said Smith. “This way they get an opportunity to get some control over their destiny.”

Bi-Mart topped $620 million in sales last year, when it opened its first store in rural Montana, where it intends to expand.

The company has a history of focusing on employees. Around 76 percent of its work force is full-time, compared with a national discount chain average of 30 percent. Nearly half have been there more than five years.

To keep its work force permanent, Smith said, the company keeps overhead to a minimum. Its retail locations are not much more than concrete boxes and stores do not exceed 30,000 square feet.

Bi-Mart, which was started by a group of investors in Yakima, Wash., in 1955, was bought by Smith and other senior managers from the Rite Aid Corporation in 1997.

They tried to establish an ESOP, or Employee Owned Stock Option Plan, but failed because the window of opportunity for the sale was too short.

It became a privately-held company, owned by a Portland-based investment firm, Endeavour Capital. When the firm decided to sell last year, Smith was ready and put in motion the employee-owned plan – a process that took close to a year to complete and culminated two weeks ago in a company-wide vote.