An aerial view of the Kansas City National Security Campus near Botts Road and Hwy 150 which has doubled its workforce. Courtesy Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies.
Honeywell considers expansion
By Jill Draper
In the past few years the Department of Energy’s Kansas City National Security Campus has doubled its workforce of engineers, IT professionals and machine and tool laborers from 2,500 to 5,000. Administrators recently announced they are gathering market research to look at adding one or more sites for office and manufacturing space.
The majority of employees work on a 185-acre campus at 14520 Botts Road near Highway 150. The four-building campus is managed by Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies to produce non-nuclear parts for nuclear weapons for the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Two approaches are being considered for extra space—either an annex in the immediate area of the Botts Road campus or a new campus somewhere in the metro area.
According to Tanya Snyder, Honeywell communications manager, three off-campus office buildings are currently being leased in Kansas City and Overland Park, and a long-term facility expansion strategy to support future nuclear modernization needs is being evaluated.
Nuclear modernization in the U.S. has been ongoing, and in February the Trump administration’s fiscal 2021 budget requested $19.8 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration, an almost 20 percent increase from fiscal 2020 numbers.
The Botts Road campus was designed in 2008-2010, a timeframe when workload forecasts and the number of employees were lower, Snyder said. Burns & McDonnell served as the engineer, and describes the campus on its website as 1.5 million square feet of built space, including 900,000 square feet of manufacturing space, labs, clean rooms, sensitive instrument areas and electrical assembly areas, plus 600,000 square feet of office, warehouse and support space.