New Horizons

Baylor University announced in October that it will open a high-tech research park in an unlikely location and in concert with an unprecedented number of local partners.

Waco’s General Tire and Rubber Plant, located at MLK and Loop 360, opened in 1944 and helped supply the military during World War II. The facility closed in 1985, and the 300,000-square-foot, three-story brick building has sat empty ever since.

Most of the windows are painted over. Large pieces of paint curl off of the interior walls, and a fine black carbon dust blankets the building inside. Crisp papers with decades-old employee announcements remain in the glass-enclosed bulletin boards.

To envision this facility as a cutting-edge research center takes a lot of imagination. But imagination is in ample supply at Baylor, where officials have put together a collaborative effort involving Texas State Technical College (TSTC), McLennan Community College (MCC), the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce, the City of Waco, the City of Bellmead, McLennan County, and several other local entities.

The result will be the Central Texas Research and Technology Park, housing the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative (BRIC). According to Baylor’s press materials, “The Central Texas Research and Technology Park is a not-for-profit corporation . . . to develop, promote, and market science and engineering technologies, university research, and advanced technology training and workforce development.” The BRIC is the first project within the park. The renovated building will include:

• Incubator space for high-tech start-up companies and industry

• Graduate research space for Baylor’s School of Engineering and Computer Science

• A business resource center run by the Hankamer School of Business

• TSTC programs housed in forty-five thousand square feet

• Space for Baylor’s international partners in research

• Baylor’s CASPER research group (the Center for Astrophysics, Space, Physics, and Engineering Research), a collaboration with TSTC

• Meeting and conference space.

Baylor’s vice provost for research Dr. Truell Hyde said that taking the building from its present condition to a ready-to-customize “shell” condition will cost about $25 million. Baylor regents approved the expense of $10 million, and local lawmakers state senator Kip Averitt ’77, MBA 78, and Rep. Jim Dunnam ’86, JD ’87, helped secure $10 million from the state that will come to the project through TSTC. In addition, Hyde said, money has already been donated by the Cooper Foundation and the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce for the initial evaluation of the project and that the cities of Waco and Bellmead and McLennan County have pledged to the project.

Sarah Roberts ’02, the vice president of economic development for the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce, said that the new project will bring new revenue streams into the local economy through several sources. First, the project will attract more research money to Baylor, she said. It will also spur the incubation of new companies. And third, she said, the project will attract new talent to the area.

“It will bring to the area something that we haven’t had before,” she said. “According to the study done by the Perryman Group, the multiplier effect could bring up to twenty-two thousand jobs into the local economy in the next fifteen years.”

Roberts said, “In economic development, the community is our product to sell. And this is a product-development opportunity that we have never had before.”

The effect, she said, will be nothing short of “transformative.”

Hyde said the idea for a research park has been in his head since 2001, when he first took the job as vice provost for research and when the university launched the Baylor 2012 initiative, which includes ramping up faculty research.

Hyde knew the cost of a new facility would be astronomical. Baylor had just completed the sciences building at a cost of $110 million, he said, and new estimates for a comparable space were near $250 million.

“One day, John Lilley, who was Baylor president at the time, said to me, ‘I was talking about your idea to an alumnus of ours, and I think I may have a building for you,’” Hyde said.

But when Lilley said it was the old General Tire building, Hyde was skeptical. “I was looking for something high-tech, and it looked like a bombed-out shell,” Hyde said. But Lilley kept pushing the idea until one day, he waylaid Hyde in the Pat Neff parking lot and drove him out to the facility.

“I thought, ‘Whoa, this is big. And it’s completely empty, so there wouldn’t be a lot of demolition work.’” A core sample next to the front door showed that the building’s foundation was about eighteen inches of solid concrete. Hyde knew right away that the building could be ideal for high-tech lab spaces, which often need reinforced building foundations for vibration or thermal isolation. The facility is just a four-minute drive from Baylor’s Jim and Julie Turner Riverfront Athletic Park and is also near TSTC.

Clifton Robinson ’53, along with his co-owner, local realtor Bland Cromwell, donated the building to Baylor. Within the General Tire complex, there are other buildings that are currently occupied by Caterpillar Manufacturing and Clarke Products, which makes shower stalls. Some space is still leased to General Tire for storage.

Hyde’s current vision of the research park includes not just the General Tire building, but multiple buildings, put up by knowledge-based industries eager to be near the BRIC. He pictures a parking deck for workers and a neighborhood that is lively with service industries supporting the park.

“This is a research park, but, granted, there is only one building in it, and that’s us,” Hyde said. “But the park itself will be much larger than the one building and the twenty-one acres we have now.”