Investment to expand CIC predicted to benefit Bossier Parish

Traffic going either way on Interstate 20 on the edge of Bossier City has a clear view of the Cyber Innovation Center’s 64-acre research park.

The concept and planning have been seven years in the making, and the executive director of CIC and the associated National Cyber Research Park, Craig Spohn, said things are beginning to happen fast at the site.

The new building smell has hardly dissipated and heavy equipment is back on the property turning soil for a new phase of the project. The new construction will hold tenant Computer Science Corporation.

Headquartered in Falls Church, Va., CSC serves clients in 70 countries with information technology services. The company’s Integrated Technology Center will employ 800, it said in announcing the construction. “It will be an 116,000-squarefoot building,” Spohn said. Just for scale, the existing CIC building is a 130,000 square-foot building. He said the company will offer 24-hour support services from the new location and generate about $40 million a year in revenue.

Spohn said the location of the facility will send a signal to the cyber industry that Bossier Parish is a serious IT player.

“To me CSC is the bell-cow, the cow that all the other cows follow,” Spohn said. He predicted that when others in the cyber business see what CSC is investing in Bossier, those companies will want to follow. Spohn said CSC had 134 other cities on its list of potential new locations, but CIC and Bossier aggressively went out to attract the new tenant.

“The investment we made in CSC is to the tune of about $116 million if you use the calculation of the cooperative endeavor agreement between the city, the parish, the CIC, the state of Louisiana and the CSC,” he said.

What makes such aggression rewarding for the community, Spohn said, is providing the workforce for the next generation of service workers.

“We wanted to figure out what the magic dust was you sprinkled on a community to make it more vibrant. I think that knowledge-based workforce would be that magic dust. What it does is creates a good solid tax base. It provides diversification of the economic footprint of a region.”

Spohn said the project began to grow a workforce that was not available anywhere in the country. CIC recruited ninth graders headed for tenth grade and sent then to cyber-camp in Ruston. That effort produced dividends for the region in more ways than one, he said.

“The only place in the country that I know about that started specifically growing cyber capable resources is [North Louisiana]. If you looked at the investment in millions of dollars in how to create a cyber ready workforce, there’s nobody else that can compare to us. The cooperative endeavor agreement put $9 million in Louisiana Tech to quadruple the number of computer scientists that the school produces annually.”

Spohn said the only cyber engineering degree in the United States was created at Louisiana Tech University. Associate degree level courses were designed in cooperation with Bossier Parish Community College.

“If you look at the effect of what we did with high school students, you see a 20-,30-, 40-percent increase in engineering sciences enrollment at Louisiana Tech from the schools that have participated in these camps,” he said.

So the workforce is on its way to becoming a reality, and the economic impact of the effort is also showing dividends, Spohn said. The initial investment in CIC was $107 million, half from the state and half from the city and Bossier Parish. The investment in CSC was another $116 million. “That adds up to $223 million. If you took a picture of what the economic effect was going to be over the course of time, the return that you can point to that’s either already occurred or is on the books as a function of the cooperative venture agreement is $796 million,” Spohn said, or a return of 357 percent. He said those numbers don’t take into account the collateral benefits the new construction and employees will generate. He said other major companies are looking to Bossier as a possible relocation site and that bodes well for continuing the growth.

–Joe Todaro