Department of Commerce grant will allow FISTA Innovation Park to continue its expansion

A partnership with the City of Lawton has netted a $9.6 million grant that will allow the FISTA Innovation Park to continue some of its projects.

FISTA Development Trust Authority members met in special session Wednesday to approve the application for a Public-Private Partnership Military Pooled Finance incentive grant from the Oklahoma Department of Commerce. FISTA President/CEO Krista Ratliff said the funding is designed to support communities that, in turn, support their military installations as well as military-associated personnel who live off installation. In Lawton’s case, the grant also illustrates the supportive relationship the City of Lawton has with the military and with FISTA Innovation Park, which was created to support the military defense contractors who work with Fort Sill.

That is illustrated by the variety of projects the grant is going to support when the funding is released in the first quarter of 2024.

Ratliff said the grant will allocate $2 million for road lighting for Rogers Lane near Interstate 44, a project being done in direct partnership with the City of Lawton; $2 million to expand FISTA’s conference center, something the Department of Commerce itself said needed to be done; $2.2 million to work on administrative space within FISTA; $2.8 million for support of STEM initiatives, to include a new manufacturing area (those funds will be matched with America Rescue Plan Act funding already approved for FISTA); and $600,000 to support small business with creation of an incubator (another project being funded through ARPA).

The agreement documentation will be presented to the FISTA Development Trust Authority at its January meeting.

Ratliff and FISTA Development Trust Authority Chairman Mark Brace said the Department of Commerce funding was something “that wasn’t even on FISTA’s radar” before Lawton Mayor Stan Booker began advocating for it.

“He put the bug in our ear,” Brace said, of a funding application process that quickly came together.

Brace said the newest funding illustrates the support FISTA Innovation Park is receiving from local, state and federal sources. While the City of Lawton has put $7 million into the project, more than $30 million has come from other sources, Brace said.

Booker said that is why the Department of Commerce funding is important, and he credited FISTA staff for completing the documentation that got it done.

“I may have found it, but Krista and the FISTA team made it happen,” Booker said of the successful grant application, adding the Department of Commerce also is eager to support the project because the agency is “always trying to find a way to help us.”

Booker said the innovation park is important, both for the support it provides to Fort Sill and its missions, and for the economic impact it will have on Lawton-Fort Sill. That impact is calculated today at $80 million over the next decade, but local officials said they expect the impact to double when project expansions are calculated in next year.

“The FISTA is working,” he said.

Ratliff said the grant shows the partnership that continues to grow between FISTA and the City of Lawton, which owns the commercial complex (Central Plaza) where FISTA is converting vacant retail space to use by entities associated with FISTA. She said the effects will reach beyond military defense contractors, noting the funding support for initiatives such as STEM classrooms for youth and the small business incubator. The impact will be felt across the community, she said.

Under the terms of the grant, neither FISTA nor local officials have to provide matching funds, although Ratliff said FISTA will be responsible for covering any cost above what the Department of Commerce awarded to the community in each category.