This is part of a series by the staff of The Vicksburg Post looking back at the top stories of 2020.

 

A vision outlined three years ago by a group of developers for a multi-floor regional innovation and tech transfer center will soon be entering its third phase.

The Board of Mayor and Aldermen Dec. 20 received a $6.4 million bid from Clinton contractor Shane Ormon Construction Management and Design to handle Phase 3 of the Thad Cochran Mississippi Center for Information and Technology project, also known as MCITy. A contract has not been awarded.

A ceremony in February officially named the facility in honor of Cochran, the former U.S. Senator from Mississippi who died in May 2019.

The MCITy project is the conversion of the old Mississippi Hardware building into a regional technology center. The project has been developed in phases, starting with enlarging the building’s parking lot and renovating its exterior.

Pablo Diaz, Vicksburg Warren Economic Development Partnership president and CEO, said Phase 3 is the completion of the building’s interior.

“This would finish the inside of the building and whatever accommodations are needed for the first new tenants,” Diaz said after the bid was received. “Those (companies) that have said they intend to move into the building have been working with the architects to design those spaces.”

Diaz said in a September article on the project that MCITy is seen as a measured project for the Warren County area and the beginning of growing a new type of economic model for the state.