ST. LOUIS • When the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency opens its new facility on the city’s North Side early next decade, it doesn’t want to be an obscure federal agency tucked away in an industrial corridor anymore.
Instead, NGA Director Robert Cardillo on Thursday signaled a profound shift in how he envisions its new western headquarters — and the agency as a whole — interacting with the community around it.
The new 100-acre campus for the mapping agency that helped plan the raid that killed Osama bin Laden could include green space, a community education center and even shared offices for another government agency or private companies working with the NGA.
“I have no interest in creating a moat and big walls,†Cardillo said in an interview with the Post-Dispatch at the spy agency’s existing 23-acre campus on Second Street near the Anheuser-Busch Brewery.
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Cardillo said he wants to hear ideas from the community about how to develop the site. Already, the agency plans to foster more and better partnerships and interactions with St. Louis schools close to the new facility to get children interested in science and technology careers. Ultimately, that helps with recruitment, he said, one of his primary goals and a reason he decided to keep NGA in the city.
The physical presence of the campus itself will have to change, too, Cardillo said. He imagines a piece of art — maybe a globe — visible from the road as people walk or drive by.
“I’d like people to be proud of it,†he said of the headquarters, planned to open around 2023.
St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay said Cardillo has assured him the facility won’t be a “fortress†or an “island.â€
“I was really pleased to see they recognized the importance of being part of the community and they didn’t want to be just a federal agency with a lot of jobs,†Slay said in an interview.
The city’s primary focus now is readying the site for development to hand over to NGA in about a year. But Slay said there is an ongoing effort to solicit public ideas about what to do around the site, pointing out that the city owns a fair amount of land adjacent to it.
“We need to make sure that we’re working with the neighborhood, so we are having meetings and we’re doing public engagement, talking about, ‘OK, what do people living in the neighborhood want to see there?’â€
The city hopes to see the NGA spur the redevelopment of a swath of St. Louis that has suffered from decades of disinvestment and decay. Paul McKee has plans for hundreds of housing units just to the east, but his proposals for a major redevelopment of the North Side have been stalled for years.
If NGA doesn’t spark new investment in housing and services that attracts the young tech workers Cardillo hopes to hire, he admits “the opportunity does go down.†But simply staying in St. Louis, near the talent and new technology startups it is fostering, is a benefit by itself, he said.
Cardillo emphasized that the nature of his agency’s work is changing and that its new facility will have a “public-facing piece.†Keeping as low a profile as it has in the past won’t help it recruit the best and brightest or collaborate with the companies inventing the new data analysis and imaging technologies that will be NGA’s future tools.
Cardillo has specifically cited the Cortex technology district in the Central West End as one of the reasons the NGA chose to keep its western headquarters in St. Louis rather than move to a greenfield site next to Scott Air Force Base in St. Clair County.
“The advances now in our profession are happening in basements, garages, Cortex,†he said.
The NGA already has some employees working around the Cortex area, and Cortex CEO Dennis Lower said there are already cybersecurity companies with employees and services that “are in the same space†as NGA. New companies and out-of-state companies that want to do business with the agency can use Cortex or incubators downtown as “soft landing†space in order to move closer to the NGA, Lower added.
NGA is “sort of off the map†at its current location, Lower said, and its new direction should lead to more interactions among private companies and the agency’s employees. Ultimately, it should boost St. Louis’ profile as a place with plenty of tech talent.
“NGA is really a technology company and it’s a large technology company and it’s an expanding technology company,†Lower said.
Might Cortex someday use some of that shared space on NGA’s campus that Cardillo alluded to?
“We are exploring collaborations that might occur, but at this point it’s very early in the process,†Lower said.
No matter what happens, the public won’t be able to wander through the new complex without restriction. Some top secret intelligence work is done behind the gates of the old St. Louis Armory, and that kind of work will continue when NGA leaves the south riverfront for north St. Louis.
The new campus, four times the size of its existing location, could even make room for other intelligence agencies to be near the mappers and analysts at NGA. Cardillo said he has invited the FBI to relocate its regional headquarters, currently located at Market and 22nd Streets, to space on the planned NGA campus should it need the room in coming years.
Those discussions are ongoing, Cardillo said, and he won’t wait forever before deciding how to use the space. The FBI’s St. Louis office said that decision would be made by the U.S. General Services Administration. The GSA said it was too early to know if the FBI will continue using its current space.