Finance news

Defense contractor Technica Corp. expects to double its presence in Columbia by the fall as it expands from Northern Virginia into Greater Baltimore.

As the Baltimore Business Journal reported Friday, the company has leased a 7,600-square-foot facility at the Columbia Gateway business park in Howard County.

Mark O’Donnell, senior vice president of business development for Technica, said his company plans to expand its space at 6750 Alexander Bell Drive to 14,000 square feet by the fall. By then the Dulles, Va.-based company hopes to have hired or shifted as many as 45 workers to the area.

The timing of the company’s move, and others like it, has been a matter of much debate among the region’s real estate and economic development community since 2005.

That’s because Technica is one of dozens of defense contractors to the federal Defense Information Systems Agency, an arm of the U.S. Defense Department focused on communication part of the Pentagon focused on cyber security and other areas of information technology.

DISA is relocating from Arlington, Va., to Fort George G. Meade in Anne Arundel County as part of the Pentagon’s Base Realignment and Closure plan. BRAC, as the plan is known, is expected to bring about 25,000 government and private contracting jobs to Central Maryland. The bulk of those jobs are being shifted to Fort Meade and Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County. The BRAC moves are slated to be completed by September 2011.

The shift should create a significant demand for new homes, office space, restaurants and shops supporting the new workers. But few of those moves have taken place yet, leaving many developers to wonder when to expect the demand for those new projects will pick up.

Several projects have been put on hold until that happens, and many developers have been unable to finance their projects until they have signed tenants to take space in them.

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