A military business incubator will not be located at Festival Plaza as first planned, but instead will be set up in a new office building on Ramsey Street.
The incubator will be located at Williamsburg on Ramsey, a two-story brick building at 455 Ramsey St., officials said Wednesday.
The inside of the building is being upgraded, and officials hope to occupy it by Oct. 16.
The 15,000-square-foot incubator, technically called the Defense and Security Technology Accelerator, will accommodate 12 to 15 startup companies that hope to develop defense or security technology that the military can use.
The Cumberland County Business Council formed the Partnership for Defense Innovation last year to administer the program and use a $2 million state grant to get the incubator off the ground.
The Business Council, a private, nonprofit agency charged with recruiting new industry, had planned to put the incubator on the second floor of Festival Plaza at Festival Park in downtown Fayetteville.
The Business Council is a one-third owner of the plaza building.
Clarence Briggs, president and principal owner of Advanced Internet Technologies, offered a runner-up bid to lease to the incubator at his nearby AIT building on Maiden Lane. He accused the Business Council of conflict of interest in its decision to locate the incubator at the plaza.
After Briggs’ complaints, the Business Council and the partnership board each set aside $100,000 in legal fees in case the issue winds up in court.
The decision to move to Festival Plaza came from a consultant’s recommendation. Festival Plaza, Wachovia and AIT were finalists among the bids considered for a five-year lease.
Scott Perry, general manager of the incubator, said that, a week after he started his job June 15, other owners of Festival Plaza demanded that a lease for the incubator be signed immediately because they had another prospect interested in occupying the second floor.
"We could not proceed that fast," Perry said Wednesday.
Lawyers still hadn’t ironed out the details of an incubator lease, Perry said, so officials opted to abandon Festival Plaza and look for an alternate location. He said controversy over the location had slowed the process to make the deal final.
Instead, the incubator will occupy the newly built Williamsburg at Ramsey, which, like Festival Plaza, is considered to be a class A — or premium quality — office space, Perry said.
The lease is for five years. The terms were not available Wednesday afternoon.
