Research park lands 2 anchors

Two federal tenants will anchor a massive research park the University of Maryland plans to build near its College Park campus, the institution will announce Thursday.

The National Center for Weather and Climate Prediction and the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Languages, a university partnership with the National Security Agency to teach and translate understudied languages, will take space.

On about 120 acres near the College Park Metro Station, the park, known as M Square, could eventually encompass 2 million square feet of commercial space and employ as many as 5,000 people.

To build the research park - the university's first - the university has teamed up with Columbia-based developers, Corporate Office Properties Trust and Manekin LLC, as well as with NAI Michael Companies in Lanham.

As an equity partner in the deal, the university stands to profit from the development but officials say M Square's purpose is mainly to generate research ties between the university and its federal and private neighbors.

Our first priority and the reason for creating M Square is to fuel this economic engine that is our research program, said John Porcari, vice president for administrative affairs at the University of Maryland, College Park. The types of users in the park will keep the research going.

The university received $350 million in research funds last year, for example.

Brian Darmody, the university's assistant vice president of research and economic development, said he expects the park to draw large research and development organizations that feed off of the university's strong research base in areas such as engineering and mathematics.

Those organizations, in turn, will attract private firms looking to cluster around them.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American Center for Physics are already located within the park.

Under renovation now is a building to house the Center for Advanced Study of Language, where government and university researchers will study languages like Farsi, which are critical to national security.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has chosen a 7.5-acre site in the park to build its Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, a facility that will consolidate parts of at least three NOAA divisions, including the National Weather Service.

The 226,000-square-foot building will include a climate prediction center and house about 800 employees.

The U.S. General Service Administration is expected to choose a developer for the new building from a list of finalists that includes Corporate Office Properties by the end of the year.

The NOAA building is a very important building internationally, said Dwight S. Taylor, president of Corporate Development Services, the construction management subsidiary of Corporate Office Properties. People will be coming from all over the world.

Taylor said the park's first speculative buildings will go up while the NOAA building, which is expected to be ready for occupancy in 2007, is being built.

Others will be built according to market demand, he said.

Other components of the research park include a mixed-use development.

Manekin is expected to build about 300,000 square feet of commercial space and 400 residential units on the Metro site.

We don't want a sterile atmosphere, said Darmody. We are going to integrate it so that it appears like it is one area and one park. We want it to appear seamless.

A research park in College Park is just one among several parks either under development or in the planning stages.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore is building the first of eight buildings that it will dedicate to biosciences. East Baltimore Development Inc. is looking for a developer to build a bioscience research park, the centerpiece of an 80-acre neighborhood revitalization in the area north of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. And officials at Montgomery College are in talks with a private developer to build a 35-acre business park off the I-270 technology corridor.

Maryland's Porcari expects the fledgling parks to complement each other, not compete.

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