To qualify for lucrative defense research work, Florida research park undergoes anti-terrorism makeover

Navy and Army contracting units, as well as other military agencies.

The complex is the park’s second-largest facility and the nexus of the region’s simulation-training industry, considered the largest such industry cluster in the country, with about 150 companies and more than 20,000 workers.

Burnett writes that the Florida Legislature paid for the rest of the project with a 2008 appropriation of $9.1 million.

Two civilian buildings owned by UCF and three privately owned buildings are part of the upgrade. The Pentagon required that those buildings be fortified because more than 25 percent of the people who work in them are military personnel.

More than 80 percent of the work is done, and the entire project — involving more than 720,000 square feet of building space — is expected to be completed this fall, said Joe Wallace, the research park’s executive director.

Although much of the new security is clearly visible, Wallace said, little has changed for most tenants in the park, which has nearly 60 buildings and 3.5 million square feet of office and other space. “It really has not changed the feel of the research park,” he said. “It still feels completely open, with the way things have been designed. From the road, you can certainly see the fences, but you’re not looking at some kind of fortress environment at all.”

Overall, the park contains nearly 120 companies employing about 10,000 workers in a broad range of work that includes defense-training systems, lasers, optics, information technology, multimedia systems, and data processing.

Although it raised some eyebrows when, during a state budget crisis, Central Florida officials lobbied the Legislature in 2008 to help pay for the park’s security upgrade, Wallace insists the move has paid off.

If the park had not meet the new Pentagon standards, he said, it risked losing much — if not all — of its long-established military infrastructure, as well as the companies that have been drawn by those agencies to Central Florida.

High-tech rivals in other parts of the country — such as Huntsville, Alabama, and Norfolk, Virginia — would have gladly accommodated the local military agencies if Central Florida had not, Wallace said. “The key here is that the state put up the money to keep this industry here,” he said. “We provided the security, met the standards and didn’t give them any reason to move these jobs out of state. Now the way it was constructed, there is also room to grow — something that is very important for this region, to grow this industry and add more high-value jobs.”