A beacon for the future

“It comes from the fact that over the last five or six years, so much investment has been made in electrical capacity and telecommunication,” said James Estep, the president of the WVHTC. “That capacity has helped position the park to be a good base not only for the Department of Commerce but also other agencies to address the cybersecurity challenges they and the rest of the country are facing now.”

The Department of Commerce, which works on cybersecurity issues, “continues to grow their presence in the park,” Estep added.

The upgraded infrastructure took place thanks to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, known as NOAA, locating offices in the I-79 Technology Park in 2010 and has come in handy in terms of attracting additional agencies.

With the WVHTC, Estep believes he has a proven formula for diversifying North Central West Virginia’s economy and helping the state achieve a more stable economic base.

The foundation traces its roots to 1990, when then-Congressman Alan Mollohan established the West Virginia High Technology Consortium to amplify the efforts of then-Sen. Robert C. Byrd. It was Byrd who, in 1993, brought a NASA center to the I-79 Technology Park. At the time, the park was a bucolic cow pasture overlooking Interstate 79.

In 1993, Mollohan established the consortium foundation and in 1996 the consortium and the foundation merged. Large companies such as Electronic Warfare Associates, Mantech and Lockheed Martin won federal contracts and opened offices in the area. The big companies mentored small companies that in turn won subcontracts.

According to a study by West Virginia University’s Center for Economic Research, 49 consortium member companies had West Virginia offices in 1994, employed 795 people and completed work valued at $77.9 million.

The region’s technology sector got a big boost in 1995 when Byrd brought the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) — the FBI’s largest unit, with about 3,000 employees — to a new $700 million Clarksburg campus.

There was very little Class A office space in the region back then. The consortium renovated the former U.S. Post Office in downtown Fairmont and was headquartered there until the $12 million, 110,000-square-foot Alan B. Mollohan Innovation Center opened in 1996 near the NASA Center in what became known as the I-79 Technology Park.

Byrd brought National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, operations to Morgantown that same year. By then more than 100 companies were affiliated with the consortium foundation. Some performed work for NASA. Some had contracts with the FBI. Others worked for NIOSH or the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown.

The region made news again in 2008 when the FBI awarded Lockheed Martin a contract potentially worth $1 billion to upgrade the agency’s primary fingerprint collection system and database.

The technology sector has continued to take root in the region, although it has experienced ups and downs. One of the highlights came in 2009 when Allegheny Power — now FirstEnergy — chose the tech park for an operations center.

While Mollohan is no longer in office and Byrd has passed away, the state’s Congressional delegation has remained highly supportive, Estep said.

Efforts to lure federal agencies bore fruit in 2010 when NOAA picked the tech park for a supercomputing center. In 2011 NOAA again picked the park — for a satellite command center. And in 2013 the agency chose to locate a telecommunications gateway in the park.

Amy Godfrey, assistant professor of economics at Fairmont State University, has conducted the most recent study of West Virginia’s technology sector. Her research found that the sector directly and indirectly accounted for 11,900 jobs and payrolls of $597.2 million in 2011, with most of the activity in North Central West Virginia.

Estep said he believes developments during the past two decades prove that attracting federal agencies that hire contractors who in turn hire subcontractors — what he calls “the federal anchor model” — is a strategy that works.

Here’s how the Braxton County native put it in testimony before the Legislature’s Joint Economic Development Committee last year: “It is paramount to the continued development of a viable state knowledge sector that we not only preserve these federal operations and grow them, but we recruit more of them. The federal anchor model is the only effort I am aware of in the state that can truly lead to the creation of a viable West Virginia knowledge sector.”

Estep said the foundation receives about $190,000 annually from the Legislature and will continue to need assistance until it can increase revenue from research, tech park rents and other income sources. He said he’s been urging legislators to increase the state’s outlay to $500,000 or more to help the high-tech sector in North Central West Virginia achieve its full potential. It’s especially important considering the fact that surrounding states have been making substantial investments in economic diversification for many years, he said.

Meanwhile, Estep continues to showcase the tech park to agencies and businesses. His pitch includes free land, low electricity rates; a location that’s just a half-hour flight or four-hour drive from Washington, D.C.; an expandable 14-megawatt electrical substation; and connections to NOAA’s 100-gigabit-per-second fiber-optic network.

In addition to attracting national agencies to its campus, historically, the WVHTC also has worked to bring high-tech solutions to the 21st-century war on terrorism, and that remains the case.

Currently, Dr. Balakishore “Kishore” Yellampalle, principal scientist and an expert in lasers and optics, has been working on a way to find bombs and other weapons without actually having to pat down or search a subject.

“Various national intelligence agencies as well as the Department of Defense have been putting a growing emphasis on technology to detect explosives and biological agents in trace amounts,” Estep said. “And so we have been working on several laser-based technologies to detect biological agents and those kinds of things.”

Using the field of spectroscopy, Yellampalle has been working to find solutions that will aid security officials in finding terrorists who might try to smuggle something on board a plane or inside a building.

“We’ve got some craziness going on and you have to be defensive,” Estep said.

By supplementing searches with “something that is more passive as people are walking through a hallway, scanning them with invisible lasers that are constantly looking for traces of things of concern, it improves the odds that we can prevent something bad from happening.” n