During a called meeting Wednesday, Aug. 25, the Wake Forest Town Board voted to provide $300,000 from the Futures Fund as seed money for the embryonic North Carolina Research Institute.
          The goal is to lure defense industry companies to the area by providing a Department of Defense certified laboratory facility that can also be used by our area’s existing defense contractors, 3 Phoenix and Greenwaves, as well as by professors from the engineering departments at Duke University and North Carolina State University.
          Those professors cannot do that highly classified work in the campus labs because of security issues, Town Manager Mark Williams explained this week. Currently they have to travel to Georgia Tech or to Washington, D.C., to find a secure DOD-certified facility.
          Marla Akridge, president of the Wake Forest Area Chamber of Commerce, said the idea for an institute grew from talks earlier this year between professors and officials at State, local defense contractors and the town.
          “This is a great venture,” Akridge said, for some highly specialized work.
          Akridge is working to set up a nonprofit corporation to operate the institute, fleshing out a business plan, organizing a board of directors for the corporation and working with Gerard Hayes of Wake Forest, the new executive director, to obtain a grant from the state Department of Commerce.
          The $300,000, Williams said, is to see the project through the first six months, after which they plan to be funded by grants and user fees. A town representative will be on the board of directors.
          Williams sees the laboratory facility attracting small entrepreneurial companies to Wake Forest, adding higher-end jobs and an increased tax base.
          One of the unknowns is where this laboratory facility will be. Riverplace, the former Burlington Mills textile plant on Capital Boulevard and the Neuse River, is one possibility but Williams said it has some brown fields issues and would need substantial rehabilitation. There is an alternative site, but neither Williams nor Akridge would identify that.
          Both 3 Phoenix and Greenwaves are involved in building and testing sensitive antennas.