By Charles Romans
Carter County Times
Amanda Clark was the guest speaker at the Grayson Chamber of Commerce meeting on February 18 and shared some insights into economic growth. Clark, who is the Economic and Business Development Manager for Kentucky Power and serves on the Kentucky Association for Economic Development Executive Committee as well as being the Vice Chair of the Northeast Kentucky Economic Development Authority, offered a lot of pointed observations on economic growth and stability.
“So, my life is all things economic development,” Clark told the chamber. “All day, every day. But it is fun, and I enjoy it.”
“Kentucky Power sees itself as a leader in economic development in Eastern Kentucky,” Clark said. “And that’s simply because we have the trained staff and the resources to handle that. We want to work in lockstep with our communities for their economic development priorities.”
One way they can do that is by helping identify industrial sites.
“One of the major things on my list of things to do this year is to identify and bring to market new industrial properties. And as far as Carter County or Grayson goes, I know there is some interest in industrial properties at East Park,” Clark said. “But I’d like to identify addition properties in Carter County and Grayson.”
Clark said one of the challenges currently is the limitation of both available land as well as existing buildings.
“We get requests for buildings all of the time. But we simply can’t meet that request because we don’t have them. And we at Kentucky Power are trying to fix that,” Clark said.
Clark continued by asking the chamber members pointed questions.
“Why do you think Kentucky Power would even be interested in economic development? And why do we put all of these resources out there for economic development?”
The first and most obvious answer from chamber members was the belief that Kentucky Power wanted more customers who would pay for their services.
“Sort of,” Clark countered. “But what we know and what we have felt in Eastern Kentucky is that Kentucky Power and even your co-ops have fixed costs for providing electricity. And all the customers together pay for that fixed cost; so, what happens when the number of customers goes down? Everyone else’s cost goes up,” she said.
The fixed costs, Clark explained, never go away. There is still the cost for transmission lines, the company still has to maintain the distribution lines, and if there are less people paying for that service then the cost per customer has to increase.
“For us,” Clark said, “Our interest is essentially for you. We want to make sure that we stabilize that rate base and make sure that you are not subsidizing power for everyone else.”
Clark said Kentucky Power has over 161,000 customers for their 20-county service area from Lewis County in the north to Perry County in the south, as well as Rowan County to the west.
“And what I have noticed in a lot of our counties is that the state maintains a website of all available industrial properties. Outside of East Park there are no other industrial properties available. And Carter County is not the only county that does not have industrial properties listed. About twelve of the twenty counties we serve also do not have industrial properties listed.”
“If we don’t have anything on the market, and if we don’t have anything for me to market when I go to trade shows or targeted recruitment trips – last year I was in Canada and South Korea – if I don’t have product to show them, we lose,” Clark said. “We’re not even in the game.”
Clark told the chamber that the inability to attract business due to lack of suitable property and buildings is why it is a big priority to Kentucky Power.
“So, I encourage you through the Chamber that if you are aware of possible industrial properties – and again we have the resources to say yes this is a viable industrial property and have the ability to score those properties.”
Kentucky Power’s resources, she said, can help property owners determine what would be the best fit of business to property.
“What we are seeing right now is that there is no middle ground,” Clark said of the requests she has heard for industrial properties. “What we hear for projects is that they need a thirty to fifty thousand square foot building, or I need an eight hundred thousand square foot building. So, it’s very difficult to build buildings on speculation.”
The alternative to building on ‘spec,’ Clark said, is what some Kentucky counties are doing by listing all of their properties on a website so that a potential business can look at what is available then communicate what size building they need as well as other requirements.
“They have partnered with an engineering and construction company that can tell you how much it will cost to build on that site. And it seems to be working well for them.”
Clark told the chamber that a good place to start is by working with Kentucky Power to identify potential industrial locations so that when the state requests information about what sites the county has available it will be ready to provide it. Other factors come into play in the ‘scoring’ of a potential site such as water supply, potential transportation access and other factors. By identifying all these factors and making that information readily available, Carter County and Grayson will be better able to avoid missed opportunities in the future.
Contact the writer at charles@cartercountytimes.com
