Spokane document management company Northwest Vital Records Center Inc. has acquired the assets of Comstor Information Management Inc., of Spokane Valley, from owner Jim Lewis as of Jan. 5, says Dan Mouchett, vice president and general manager of Northwest Vital Records. 

Lewis, who lives in Oregon City, Ore., says he started Comstor 33 years ago and was the sole owner until he decided to retire and sell the company to Northwest Vital Records. 

Mouchett says the Comstor operation will retain its name. 

Mouchett, who declines to disclose the terms of the transaction, says Northwest Vital Records will be relocating Comstor from its current 4,700-square-foot location at 11616 W. Montgomery to a 9,000-square-foot space at 441 W. Sharp. 

“We’ll be in place at the new location on Feb. 16,” Mouchett says.

Northwest Vital Records owns the West Sharp building, Mouchett says. It originally housed Northwest Microfilm, the microfilm processing company founded by Paul Rayburn, president of Northwest Vital Records, in 1969. Northwest Microfilm evolved into Northwest Vital Records.   

Comstor has 15 employees, Mouchett says, all of whom stayed on after the acquisition. Northwest Vital Records has 32 employees, he says, and is headquartered at 124 S. Wall.

Northwest Vital Records provides offsite document storage, management, and secure document shredding, Mouchett says. It also does online record storage and retrieval, media storage, hard drive deconstruction and recycling, and conversion of computerized records onto microfilm, he says. 

“Comstor does scanning of documents, microfilm conversion, and cloud storage,” Mouchett says. “Putting the two companies together gives you a complete document banking business. It’s a one-stop shop for our customers. There’s nothing we don’t do in association with document management now.”

Northwest Vital Records owns two additional buildings downtown, but Mouchett declines to disclose their locations, citing security concerns. The company also owns 20 acres of land west of Airway Heights on a decommissioned U.S. Army Nike missile site, Mouchett says, where it has several storage facilities.