urbanSTL

With GEOINT in St. Louis, officials plan to make announcements this week regarding geospatial initiatives taking place in St. Louis. Some key initiatives already were unveiled in the lead-up to the event, including:

• Greater St. Louis Inc. said Thursday that it has become a strategic partner of USGIF, becoming one of USGIF’s 27 strategic partners. 
• The NGA Accelerator, a St. Louis-based program designed to incubate geospatial technology startups, last week unveiledits second cohort. The Accelerator also announced it will return for a third cohort. 
• Westway Services Group LLC, a Virginia-based developer of secure facilities for government and industry, said it will build an office building in the Cortex district. Officials said the development is being built to support St. Louis' growing geospatial and cybersecurity communities. 

Beyond this week’s conference, St. Louis will host the GEOINT Symposium again in 2023 and 2025.

NGA is partnering with area schools, like St. Louis University and Harris-Stowe State University, to help jumpstart the talent pool. On Wednesday the University of Missouri-St. Louis signed an agreement with NGA for a new educational partnership to develop STEM courses to prepare students for careers in geospatial intelligence.

Mark Tatgenhorst, geospatial program director for T-REX, said two years ago the downtown technology incubator had just three geospatial organizations. Today there are 50. At Arch Grants, a nonprofit that provides cash to startups, 20% of the companies it supports identify as geospatial, said Executive Director Emily Lohse-Busch.

Current plans for the project call for redeveloping two buildings in Hyde Park to create a workforce development and job training hub for GGAYBA’s programming. The Old North component of the campus calls for building a two-story, 36,000-square-foot geospatial simulation theater to offer experiential learning opportunities.

Sanjay Kumar, founder and chief executive, said the firm used to have an office in Washington, D.C., but he liked St. Louis' central location and was impressed by the geospatial industry's growth here. "We realize there's an opportunity to be part of this growth, and of developing a geospatial hub and geospatial ecosystem," he said in an interview last week.

kota wrote: ↑

Feb 04, 2022

Article about Westway Services Group. They've recently built 75K sq ft of SCIF space at the Globe Building downtown. Westway is forecasting that St Louis may need 300K sq ft of SCIF space:

https://www.gwprime.geospatialworld.net ... or-growth/

The period of growth that the president of the Westway Services Group is referring to includes developing a 75,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art SCIF at The Globe Building in St. Louis, MO. “We determined in St. Louis over the next five years, assuming everything materializes, there is going to be a requirement of 300,000 sq. ft. of space. So, there was an immediate demand, and if you got to build a building that’s a two-year project. We found The Globe Building and were able to lease space from Steven Stone that allowed us to accelerate the timeline and get people in. So, The Globe is the first building that’s going in this town. And that building is right now 170% subscribed,” explains Pryor.

The SCIF at The Globe Building is the first of its kind outside the national capital region and underscores the importance of the emergence of St. Louis as the National Geospatial- Intelligence Hub. It’s also a reflection of a bigger trend of the growing demand for a secure workspace. “There are a couple of other potential sites (in St. Louis) that we are looking at. We know as soon as we put the shovel in ground… I already have people lined up for…,” says Pryor. “But there are going to be a number of hubs outside the national capital region. St. Louis is one of those hubs, Austin, Texas, is going to be another hub; Denver, Colorado is going to be another hub; Huntsville, Alabama is another hub; Miami, Tampa … and all that area is another hub. So on and so forth.”