The Mount Vernon-based Skagit Valley Publishing Co. has struck a tentative deal with the McClatchy Co. newspaper chain to begin printing the McClatchy-owned Bellingham Herald starting sometime next year.

The agreement means that the Bellingham paper, a 22,000-circulation daily, will be printed at Skagit Valley Publishing Co.’s new headquarters, now under construction east of Interstate 5 along Anderson Road in Mount Vernon. The deal is expected to be finalized within a few weeks. The new building should be fully occupied by early next year, and Skagit Valley Publishing could be printing the Bellingham newspaper as early as April 2009.

The agreement will give Skagit Valley Publishing an additional revenue stream, while also allowing it to recoup a portion of its roughly $13 million investment in the 62,000-square-foot facility, said Publisher L. Stedem Wood, whose family has owned the company since 1964.

“I look at it as a partnership as well as a commercial customer,” he said of the deal with Sacramento-based McClatchy.

Wood said it’s too early to say if the deal will require his company to hire additional staff.

Skagit Valley Publishing currently publishes the Skagit Valley Herald, along with weekly publications: the Anacortes American, the Argus in Burlington and the Courier-Times in Sedro-Woolley. Those publications have a total circulation of about 32,000. It also operates a printing business and a specialty publications division.

Skagit Valley Publishing’s new office and production facility will feature an upgraded printing operation centered on a $5 million state-of-the-art printing press that’s capable of printing twice as fast as the company’s current equipment.