The 35-acre Vancouver Island Technology Park adjacent to Camosun College’s Interurban campus is pursuing its first expansion since the land's early 2000s transformation from the Glendale Lodge care home into a tech hub.

 

 

The District of Saanich is reviewing plans for a two-storey high-tech manufacturing facility eyed for a parcel currently occupied by a surface parking lot immediately east of the tech park’s main building along the 4400-block of Markham Street.

 

Tech park owner UVic Properties, which acquired the land and buildings shortly after the land's inception as a technology park in 2001, has also unveiled plans for a new 200-plus stall surface parking lot that will be constructed to the north of the existing tech park buildings.

 

The upcoming manufacturing building will mark the first phase of expansion at the tech park following a 2007 master planning process that anticipated construction over the medium term. Those plans, however, failed to materialize and few changes have occurred since. That master plan, now 13-years-old, will be amended in order to accommodate UVic Properties' new proposals.

 

Current tech park tenants include the UVic Genome BC Proteomics Centre, Aurinia Pharmaceuticals (which recently saw its valuation rise following a successful clinical trial), Jasco Applied Sciences and software firm JEA, among others.

 

UVic Properties owns multiple real-estate assets throughout the Capital Region, including numerous buildings in downtown Victoria such as the Swans Hotel complex on lower Pandora Avenue and the Duck’s Building on Broad Street (currently part of a proposal to bring a new hotel to the city centre). C

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