The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development Center is about to go through another growth spurt similar to the 1960s, and people will be looking for homes, particularly in the Vicksburg/Warren County area, the center’s commander said.

“ERDC is about to go through another heyday,” ERDC commander Col. Bryan Green told a group of local officials, business leaders, bankers, real estate developers and building contractors during a meeting Thursday at the Vicksburg-Warren Chamber of Commerce.

“I’m hiring 800 people over the next five years. I’ve already hired 100 this year and they’ve got to have homes. They have to have some place to go.”

His presentation to the group included a description of what ERDC does and a plea to developers and contractors to meet with bankers and make plans to build subdivisions and other housing developments to accommodate the increase of people coming in.

“I hope to give you the confidence in my numbers and the things we do to encourage you all to invest,” he said. “The city can’t do it. The city is focused on lower income issues, trying to clean up the city; they don’t have the capability to spawn that midyear income.

“It’s got to be a profit-based decision. I’m trying to hopefully give you the demographics so both you and your banker and your investors will look and say, ‘Look, here’s an opportunity here, 800 new people.’ Find a way. You’re bringing in a 2 percent increase in the population, and that’s just the one person, I’m not counting the families and that’s not going to include (government) contractors (working for ERDC).

“Everybody says everybody comes here to work at ERDC and the Corps of Engineers and they all go to live in Clinton and Madison and Flora. That’s not the case,” he said, showing a graphic indicating 901 of the 1,700 ERDC employees live within 10-minutes from the center.

“We do have some migrating out, and some are new employees, but in reality the people migrating out are those thinking about retiring or empty nesters,” he said.

The school system, he said, is not the problem, pointing out the Vicksburg-Warren School District does a good job educating children. “The schools here are doing as well as anybody else,” he said.

“A very few move for school reasons, but not very many,” Green said. “The real reason people are migrating is we don’t have the housing here in Vicksburg.”

And while there are homes and apartments available, there is a lack of quality apartments and start-up homes, and the prices on some are not properties are not what incoming employees, especially the younger millennials, are looking for.

“The starting point of the conversation for a brand new person is ‘where do I live when I come to Vicksburg, and what my options are,” he said, adding most science and research employees start with an average income of from $60,000 to $80,000.

“While there is a housing glut on the market, it’s not the thing millennials are looking for. They haven’t vested themselves in Vicksburg yet, they haven’t vested themselves with the government, and they haven’t vested themselves with ERDC.

“They’re looking for the starter home. They’re looking for something they can move into, have low maintenance, and reminds them of wherever it is they just graduated from or just came from. They want it simple and they want it easy, because they don’t know how long they’re going to be here. The (young) researchers want to show up, do some research and have a good quality of life, travel and explore the state, try good food and experience the hospitality.

Green said ERDC has a pay for performance system that allows employees to move up the pay scale quickly, meaning they could be looking to move to a larger home within five years.

“Neighboring areas are going through growth spurts, and I’ve got 800 people coming here looking for a place to live,” he said. “My demographics say my retirees are not leaving Vicksburg for the most part, and the very few who have, have made their move.

“We actually keep a lot of folks here, and we can continue to keep them here, because convenience and location tend to outweigh the other factors.”

ERDC, Green said, presently has a payroll of almost $200 million with $89 million going out to contractors and students.

“ERDC’s basic job is to take science and transform it into reality,” he said. “ERDC takes today’s problems as identified to either by government or by other folks, and we enter into research mode and we come up with an applied solution, And when I’m done with that, I try to hand it off to industry to try and commercialize it and get out in the field.”

Green said about $2 billion in research activities for the nation are done through ERDC, with $1 billion of that done in-house by scientists and researchers who turn them into experiments and projects.

“We put out about $790 million in research contracts annually nationwide,” he said. “Anyone can bid in them; Mississippi bids about $24 million of that $790 million, and of that $24 million, about half of it goes to the five universities here in Mississippi, and the others do some minor work on the station. That’s something I want to change.”

The reason for the lack of in-state contractors having so small a piece of the pie, he said, “I think it’s because we don’t communicate well enough the opportunities right there at ERDC to be one of the centers of gravity of commerce in the town. The more (work) stays in the state, the stronger the state gets; the more the state becomes a tech base for the country. “

One of those areas is ERDC’s information technology lab.

“The information technology lab is one of our business,” he said, “And by the way, the cool thing about that stuff they do there, if you’re interested in that type of thing, you’ve probably got a start-up. If you’ve got a computer, you’ve got pretty good program skills, you can probably bid on a job that comes out of the information technology lab.”

ERDC and the community have always had a good relationship, Green said.

“Chamber helped the Corps in 1928 acquire that property on Halls Ferry that became the Waterways Experiment Station, now ERDC,” he said.

“There’s always been a partnership with the community. (But) 911 changed the conversation we had in this town. We put the fence up and at that point we kind of slid off the face of the Vicksburg landscape.

“Our folks are still out in the community, our kids still go to school here, but in some ways, we kind of lost track of that ERDC does, and in some ways, it got harder for us to communicate and share our capabilities with you, and we’re trying to change that.”

Part of that change is plans for an open campus concept and a research park outside ERDC’s gates.

“Vicksburg is not only the key to the south, it is the bridge to the technical corridor of the south,” he said. “This is the technical city on the river. You have the port, which serves the area, Mississippi State University, Ole Miss and ERDC in the middle. Monroe, La., says they want to be a tech corridor.

“You’ve got a tech corridor moving along (Interstate) 20 from Dallas to Atlanta, and Vicksburg is right in the middle of it and it owns the bridge and owns a research development center. How can you lose?”