Cal Poly’s Technology Park, a building that will house commercial firms for collaborative research, is several steps closer to becoming a reality.
At their Sept. 16th meeting, the CSU Board of Trustees approved the $4.5 million design-build proposal submitted by the San Luis Obispo firm, Rarig Construction. The park will be built in collaboration with the university.
Approval of the 25,000 square foot building on Mount Bishop Road came, as predicted, last August by the Project Manager Johan Uyttewaal.
“It went pretty much as expected,” said Mike Multari, Cal Poly’s assistant director of facilities and planning. “There was a lot of discussion beforehand where they do the analysis of financing. It was important to have prospective tenants that had expressed significant interest before the design was built.”
Thanks to the board’s decision, the state will be providing a little under half of the project’s budget with state revenue bonds, which will be repaid by tenants who lease the space, constituting the rest of the
money.
The Cal Poly organization backing the technology park, the Central Coast Research Partnership (C3RP), has compiled a list of future tenants and is highlighting the site’s unique features to draw in local firms.
Industries housed at the technology park will be limited to research and development in areas such as aerospace, software design and biotech.
Up to 25 percent of the building’s space is designed for use as wet labs, laboratories where chemicals, drugs or other biological matter are tested and analyzed.
James Dunning, the project’s administrator for C3RP, has worked to anticipate future tenants’ needs. He also has had a long relationship with the San Luis Obispo Chamber of Commerce.
“Most of the companies we’ve gotten have been local,” Dunning said. “The companies that we’ve been working with here have been able to grow very quickly because of the large student base. When you’re working with something like software, that’s something that is possible here. It’s important in business to be able to grow quickly and throw that kind of resource at a problem which might be more difficult for companies farther away from a university.”
The project is expected to benefit the local economy and give students more opportunities for internships and part-time employment.
The economic benefit for San Luis Obispo will come mainly from the presence of additional commerce and the introduction of tenant employees and their families. The firms involved will also benefit from access to university resources and the large available workforce of students who may find long-term placement after graduation.
Despite the project’s expected profitability, it has been in the works for a decade. Multari, Dunning and Uyttewaal all said the plans have been bouncing from desk to drawing board.
They agree that it would not have been possible without the efforts of Susan Opava, Cal Poly’s dean of research and graduate programs, who is credited with assembling the funding from private party donations, a grant from the US Economic Development Administration and finally the CSU Board of Trustees.
“Susan Opava has been kind of the quarterback on this project for quite a long time,” Multari said. “She was the one that secured the grant and she has been an important force in doing this.”
Clean-up of the project location, on the site of the old softball field, is set to begin within the next month. Construction should begin in earnest early next spring and tenant occupancy should be possible by June 2010.