A federal construction event to be held Thursday at the Wilmington Convention Center will welcome an “unprecedented” number of federal agencies, according to Scott Dorney, executive director of the N.C. Military Business Center, which organizes the annual expo.

Dorney, along with U.S. Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Cape Fear Community College president Ted Spring will kick off the 2014 N.C. Federal Construction, Infrastructure and Environmental (FEDCON) Summit at 8 a.m.

The one-day expo has traditionally targeted companies in the building trades. This year, however, agency representatives will also want to talk to companies about their capabilities in renovation and facility maintenance, as well as construction and maintenance of roads and waterways. That means that many more companies could potentially snag federal contracts as a result of FEDCON attendance, Dorney said Wednesday.

The expo has attracted a much broader range of agencies than in prior years, he added.

“It’s always been called federal, but the DOD [Department of Defense] always took a leading role. This year we have all area bases represented, plus Shaw Air Force Base and the Naval Facilities Engineering Command from out of state,” Dorney said. “But we also have the VA, the EPA and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which maintains quite a few facilities. Plus we have the U.S. Forest Service, which is a big deal because there are a lot of national forests in North Carolina,  and they need road and waterway maintenance.”

Dorney said the director of contracting for the National Park Service was scheduled to attend, as well as four representatives from the Atlanta regional office of GSA's Public Buildings Service, which oversees many federal buildings, including post offices and federal buildings.

“It’s a huge landlord,” Dorney said of the agency.

About 20 Wilmington-area businesses will be among roughly 600 companies in attendance, Dorney said.

With sequestration in abeyance during fiscal years 2014 and 2015, this year’s FEDCON event comes at a good time for those seeking federal contracts, he said.

The two-year federal budget for FY 2014 and 2015 has money to address needed projects that went unfunded during the sequestration, as well as projects that should be funded before the axe of sequestration falls again in FY 2016, as it is supposed to, Dorney said.

The event gets underway Wednesday afternoon with a site visit to the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers’ new fish passage system at Rock Arch Rapids, Lock and Dam 1 on the Cape Fear River.

The visit includes a briefing on the design, construction and operation of the system, which Dorney said is the Corps’ first such project on the East Coast. The river’s lock and dam projects had made it difficult for fish to swim upstream, harming the fish reproductive cycle as well as depressing the fishing in locations upriver.

While online registration for FEDCON has closed, walk-in registrants are welcome, Dorney said. Click here for more information about the expo.