Hale informs court of recent economic development numbers
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Melinda J. Overstreet / Glasgow Daily Times David Dickerson, acting secretary of the Kentucky Labor Cabinet, speaks at Tuesday morning’s Barren County Fiscal Court meeting. Behind him to the far right is his portrait as a former Barren County judge-executive. His brother, Carl Dickerson, is a member of the court as the magistrate for District 3.
GLASGOW – The acting secretary of the Kentucky Labor Cabinet urged members of his home county’s fiscal court to remember that they have friends in surrounding counties and in Frankfort who are there to help.
David Dickerson, a former Barren County judge-executive himself, that in the five “really, really good years” he spent in that role, “I think we were able to accomplish a good deal of things for the community with regard to industrial development.”
He said he wanted to emphasize that “service and technology jobs will make you a living. The only way you make an economy is with manufacturing. You have to build something. You have to add value.”
A recent new company here and an expanding one, though, were both good examples of combining those two types of industry, with production of technical products, he said.
In two and a half years, he said, the Bevin administration has recruited $16.7 billion in new industry with 45,791 new jobs.
“In 2017, we had a $9 billion year,” said Dickerson, who has been acting secretary of the cabinet since June 12, having previously served as secretary of the Public Protection Cabinet for the prior two and a half years. “That’s an all-time record. That’s more than any other two years prior combined, from any administration.”
He named a few examples of companies that have been recruited in Kentucky landed, and in one case, Brady Industries, he said it took five counties’ and every single level of government working together to bring it to Greenup County.
“No single county can expect to develop on its own anymore,” Dickerson said. “It just is almost impossible to do.”
He said Barren County has colleagues in the area that are in the same position of wanting more manufacturing facilities, and some have been more successful and Barren County could learn from their recruitment playbooks to get it done here.
“I will promise you that once you’ve got a fish on the hook, that anybody at the Economic Development Cabinet will help you set that hook and drag that fish on in …,” Dickerson said. “Don’t try to do it by yourselves; you have friends that want to help you.”
He said that doesn’t mean Barren County would get everything it asks for, “but it means if we work cooperatively together, we have a lot better chance of getting where you want to be.”
Dickerson said part of his cabinet’s job is to make it better for people to come to and operate in Kentucky and let them know the educational and training opportunities they have with Kentucky Occupational Safety and Health.
“KYSafe is going to be the focus of the Kentucky Labor Cabinet over the tenure that I have, however long that may be,” he said. “We’re going to talk to our industries about how make a safe workplace, how to keep their workers safe, thereby keeping people on the job, eliminating the need to train new workers in the case of an injury. … In the long run, that benefits every industry in the commonwealth; it benefits every worker in the commonwealth.”
He said the focus will be more on prevention on the front end to avoid the need for punitive measures for noncompliance, but compliance rules are still necessary because “there are bad actors.”
Dickerson said he likes to cut red tape.
“It’s one of the things that we’re all about in Frankfort,” he said. “We’ve cut over 20 percent of the regulations that were on the books in PPC the first two and a half years we’ve been there. [It] lets Kentuckians live their lives more freely, lets them operate without the heavy yoke of government intervention in a lot of cases. So that’s something we focus on all the time.”
He said he anticipates an announcement in the next few days about some new software technology coming up that will allow cabinet staff to “more speedily review and eliminate regulations that aren’t appropriate.”
One of his favorite examples, he said, was one that said “any purveyor of alcoholic beverages who had a license could to go any express or freight depot with their cart, wagon or truck and pick up their alcohol to take back to their establishment. Well, I don’t know a lot of people that haul on carts, wagons and trucks anymore, unless it’s the tobacco wagons that I met coming into town today, which is still a big part of Barren County’s life and Barren County’s history. … “We got rid of that [regulation]. It just didn’t make sense for that to take up ink and paper in a book.”
Dickerson’s speech followed a presentation by current Barren County Judge-Executive Micheal Hale with a Barren County economic- and workforce-development update, in which he provided numbers about new jobs over the past couple of years or so.
Dickerson said he saw in a report that Barren County had lost more than 500 manufacturing jobs in the 2010-2017 span.
“That jumped right off the page to me, because it was shocking to see that, because I know, in the past, Barren County has made that a focus to develop its manufacturing base,” he said.
He had then requested specific information about industry announcements for Barren County for the fiscal year between July 1, 2017, through June 30, 2018, which he had brought with him, but he acknowledged that Hale’s presentation had some more recent information.
Hale had said he was providing the information to the court, because “I truly don’t think that word is actually getting out in our community on exactly our growth in Barren County.”
Hale said he was discussing projects with which he’s personally had some level of involvement.
He shared lists of expanding and new companies, chatting briefly about each business. The expanding companies were Federal-Mogul Motorparts, D&B Trucks and Equipment, Lynx Labeling Inc., Amneal Pharmaceuticals, BR Tire, Froedge Machine and Supply and QMS Inc. The total new investments in the respective projects by those companies was more than $20.6 million, Hale said, with at least 201 new jobs anticipated.
New companies he named were Express Logistics Inc.; My Visual Package LLC; Hobdy, Dye & Read; and Alliant Technologies, with total investments of more than $4 million and another 83 new jobs expected.
Alliant Technologies is a “partner company,” Hale said. It currently occupies space within the SpanTech facility. Alliant makes electrical boxes for conveyer equipment, and SpanTech manufactures conveyers. It has added 12 jobs, he said, and made an investment of nearly $7.7 million.
3A Composites USA Inc. purchased $8.4 million in new equipment, he said, and created two more jobs.
Together, Hale said, the investments total nearly $41 million and nearly 300 jobs are to be created with salary wages between $14 and $28 per hour.
He also showed the fiscal court an aerial view of the Highland Glen Industrial Park, pointing to each occupant or future occupant’s location.
“As you can see, we’re basically out of land [in that park],” Hale said. “Basically, that industrial park has filled up since 2015.”
In Cave City, however, the Chapatcha Industrial Park, with three tentative tracts identified within 50 acres that were contributed by the Gaunce family, is open, with construction on the roadway entrance underway.
His presentation also touched on the opening of the new career and college technology center, the Barren County Innovation Zone, on the Barren County High School/Barren County Area Technology Center campus as well as the Interapt Skills training program for coding related to computer applications.
