Area leaders gathered this morning for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s groundbreaking ceremony for its new campus in north St. Louis.
The 300 invited guests included Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, Sen. Roy Blunt, Sen. Josh Hawley, Rep. Adam Schiff, Rep. Lacy Clay, Rep. Ann Wagner, St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite and many local north St. Louis residents.
The new NGA campus will be located at the corner of Jefferson and Cass avenues and is scheduled to be open and fully operational by 2025.
“NGA’s new campus will be built with spaces that will facilitate information sharing and collaboration among NGA’s and St. Louis’s talented innovators,” NGA Director Vice Adm. Robert Sharp said. “Working together, we can better achieve NGA’s mission of providing world-class geospatial intelligence to U.S. service members and leaders to keep our nation secure.”
The new facility will include approximately 712,000 square feet of office space, parking garages, a visitor’s center, an inspection facility and control access points. Preparations for the new facility have been ongoing with NGA’s partners since NGA announced its selection of north St. Louis as the site in 2016. The city of St. Louis officially transferred the 97 acres of land for the new NGA campus to the U.S. Air Force in December 2018. St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Companies and Falls Church, Virginia-based HITT Contracting were selected as the design-build team leading the construction in March 2019.
With the groundbreaking, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will begin managing the construction on behalf of NGA.
The new site in north St. Louis will replace NGA’s current facility, which dates back to the 1840s, in south St. Louis. It has not yet been decided what will happen to NGA’s current campus, which is also owned by the U.S. Air Force, when NGA vacates the south St. Louis facility.