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FAST LANE - August 2000
The Centers will be co-located with community colleges in 10 sites and with a local high school at one other location. They will offer a four-semester program to train students to design, build and maintain computer networks. Eventually, the students can be employed in jobs paying $30,000 to $50,000 a year. The partnership will expand a Cisco program that now supports 3,900 academies in 71 countries worldwide. It is intended to generate a work force of trained professionals to meet the growing demand in all industries. According to Greater Louisville, Inc., 2,000 local companies currently employ 17,000 IT workers – and would employ many more if they could find well-trained applicants. The Louisville center will operate in cooperation with Jefferson Community College, while Lexington’s will be located at Central Kentucky Technical College and the Cincinnati-area facility will be at Northern Kentucky Technical College in Highland Heights. LOUISVILLE Three emerging Louisville e-businesses have been recognized for their entrepreneurship, two by a traditional proponent and one by Gov. Paul Patton. And two of Louisville’s new business incubators have announced early successes. Ernst & Young, an accounting organization, has named Kent Oyler, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of High Speed Access Corp., as its Master Entrepreneur of the Year, and Tom Cottingham, President and CEO of Tech Republic, Inc., as its e-Business Entrepreneur of the Year. Oyler’s company, which provides broadband Internet access to residential and commercial accounts, has just purchased Digital Chainsaw, a Web-design and -hosting company, for an undisclosed price. Its operations will move to a new customer-service center in Ormsby Park in East Jefferson County and will eventually employ 500 persons. Cottingham recently sold TechRepublic to the Gartner Group, Inc., while retaining operating independence. It maintains the largest Website devoted exclusively to information technology professionals. David Phelps, president and CEO of MedVenture Technology Corporation, the first tenant of the Louisville Health Sciences and Technology Park, was named Emerging Entrepreneur by Ernst & Young. His company assists designers in creating manufacturing processes for medical devices. Meanwhile, high tech incubator bCatalyst has welcomed its first client company, Louisville Technology Group, which monitors outdoor lighting systems from remote locations with wireless technology. Gov. Patton praised Xodiax, an Internet storage data center, as a business that will be good for Kentucky by persuading high-tech startups to locate in Louisville. LEXINGTON Katherine Tandy Brown – a Lexington-based freelance writer and longtime staff writer for The Lane Report – was recognized with a bronze award for her “Exploring Kentucky” column (see p. 70) at the national conference of the Association of Area Business Publications in Kansas City. Competition judge Daryl Moen, professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, called her writing “superb, both in its style and degree of thoroughness.” The award came in the “Best Recurring Feature – Open” category and was the sixth AABP award earned by The Lane Report in the past decade. The AABP represents 61 regional and local business publications in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico with a combined circulation of 1.1 million business professionals.
LOUISVILLE Cornerstone 2020, which Louisville Mayor David Armstrong called “historic and monumental,” has been adopted by the Louisville-Jefferson County Planning Commission as the first major revision of the area’s comprehensive plan since 1979. The new plan was drafted in response to a citizen participation process that began in 1994. It emphasizes the compatibility of proposed development with the indigenous character, appearance and environment of existing neighborhoods, focusing on land-use concepts, architecture and design elements. The former plan was discarded because it seemed incapable of controlling incompatible growth, especially in the county’s burgeoning East End. At the same time it was adopting the new plan, the Planning Commission faced accusations that it promptly ignored Cornerstone 2020 in approving three new East End developments. First, residents of the Woodcroft area near the Southeast Christian Church apparently have persuaded the congregation to buy the entire site of a proposed condominium development in the shadow of the church complex. The residents, many of whom are Southeast Christian members, called the 46-unit Sommer Place inappropriate for their neighborhood of large, wooded lots. They were supported by the City of Jeffersontown against the Planning Commission. Second, the Commission and Fiscal Court both approved the 600-acre Norton Commons “village” in far eastern Jefferson County despite objections from some that it, too, would be inappropriately dense. Finally, opponents of a large commercial center near Ballard High School plan to carry their objections to Fiscal Court. The group says the Planning Commission overruled its professional staff’s recommendations against the retail project. WESTERN
KENTUCKY The market for mined and crushed limestone continues to be strong for area quarries. At the Fredonia quarry, an agent of Martin Marietta Aggregates, installation of the Fredonia Valley Railroad (also owned by Martin Marietta) and increased river traffic are expected to help boost production by up to 300 percent in the near future, according to the company’s area production manager Darin Matson, quoted in the Princeton Times-Leader. Just north, near Marion, Bill Frazer has entered into an agreement with his brother Bohn, Yukon Valley Minerals Inc. and GotRocks Inc., to immediately open a 125-acre quarry operation named Paragon Rock. According to Yukon Valley vice president of operations Randy Campbell, quoted in the Crittenden Press, the operation could yield up to 250,000 tons of limestone per year and reserves are expected to last for at least 20 years. Among the uses for various grades of crushed limestone are agricultural applications, asphalt and concrete. Fine-crushed material finds its way into such products as rubber, roofing materials and toothpaste. Crushed stone accounts for more than half the value of all nonfuel mineral materials in Kentucky, and six percent of the value of total material production in the state, both fuel and nonfuel. According to the Atlas of Kentucky, the state ranked seventh nationally in the value of crushed stone production in 1992. WESTERN
KENTUCKY The region has acquired a reputation for its giant hog farms, but according to an investigative report by the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer, Kentucky’s poultry production increased from 1.5 million broiler chickens in 1990 to close to 200 million expected from the area’s four plants this year. An estimated 900 chicken houses – each capable of holding 25,000 birds – supply companies like Perdue Farms and Tyson Foods with a steady stream of chickens. The companies have benefited from $165 million in state and local tax incentives. Catfish farming is also catching the attention of farmers looking to diversify their crops. The Purchase Area Aquaculture Cooperative has installed 30 acres of ponds for a hatchery, which will supply the growing area industry. Current numbers stand at about 100 acres of catfish farms, with announced plans for 250 more acres of ponds to be dug by this fall. A processing plant that would eventually fillet a million pounds of fish annually is under construction. LOUISVILLE Louisville’s giant Philip Morris cigarette factory, a mainstay in the city’s West End, has closed. Except for a few decommissioning personnel and 160 others who will remain at the included paper perforation plant for another two years, the facility will be quiet. The facility once employed 4,000 workers, with as many as 1,400 active when the closing announcement was made one eyar ago. Most manufacturing operations have been transferred to Philp Morris plants in Richmond, Virginia, and Cabarrus County, North Carolina. Soon after Philip Morris announced the eventual closure, Mayor David Armstrong asked the company to donate the site so that it could be recycled under the city’s “brownfields” reclamation program. The company has made no public offer since, but the Mayor’s spokeswoman, Alicia Sells, told local media recently that the city administration “has continued to have discussions with Philip Morris” about the site and that the Mayor “feels it’s a viable” issue. One obstacle the city would face if it should acquire the site is the failure of the General Assembly to pass legislation that would have facilitated brownfields projects. The VERA (Voluntary Environmental Remediation) Act that Mayor Armstrong proposed would have protected both sellers and buyers of environmentally damaged property from potentially ruinous liability claims. Because liability is now unlimited, many brownfields reclamations are actually made by quasi-governmental or not-for-profit groups, such as the sites for Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium, Slugger Field or the Home for the Innocents. However, the Mayor has stressed that he would like to utilize the Philip Morris plant for commercial enterprises that would begin to replace its recent $63 million payroll, much of it earned by residents of the neighboring West End. LOUISVILLE Ford Motor Co, the University of Louisville and the U.S. Army have formed a design partnership to produce light weight trucks for military use. The project, announced last fall, is being supported by a $6 million Congressional appropriation with an additional $5 million anticipated, according to U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell. Known by the acronym IMPACT (Improved Materials and Powertrain Architecture for Trucks) , the project is one element of an Army plan to create a new generation of combat vehicles using light weight steel. It was originally promoted by the American Iron & Steel Institute as an alternative to the use of aluminum or composite materials. Ford engineers are consulting with U of L’s Speed Scientific School to develop a prototype design. Ultimately, military designs could have civilian counterparts which could be manufactured at Ford’s Louisville Truck Plant. LOUISVILLE
STATE
In Louisville, Commonwealth Industries Inc. is pursuing a similar course of action, announcing that subsidiary Commonwealth Aluminum Sales Corporation will partner with MetalSpectrum, a virtual marketplace for specialty metals expected to go online in September. Eight other major manufacturers will also be on the site, and MetalSpectrum’s CEO will be none other than Alcoa director of E-business Robert Wetherbee. LOUISVILLE Where Sage and Smith checked out, maybe Sheraton can occupy the executive suite. Buoyed by a preliminary approval of critical state sales tax credits, local developers of a hotel-entertainment project at the former downtown YWCA have announced that they also have a tentative agreement with a major hotel chain to own and operate a 247-room Sheraton hotel. The arrangement with Starwood Hotels & Resorts, if completed, would supersede previous arrangements with Sage, of Denver, and Carl Smith, of Knoxville, that were never consummated, delaying the project for two years. Starwood is one of the world’s largest hotel companies, with more than 700 downtown facilities worldwide. The tax credits would rebate a maximum of $9.5 million over 10 years, with the exact amount dependent upon actual sales tax revenues remitted. That amount – 25 percent of the sales tax receipts– was called “crucial” to the project’s success by local partner David Barhorst last year. The General Assembly approved special enabling legislation this year to permit this project, and other historic hotel projects, to take advantage of the credits that are also extended to other businesses that generate tourist revenues. If the project is completed as originally planned, the hotel would include a swimming pool, ballroom and major restaurant. Eventually, an attached entertainment center would be built along Fourth Street, just one block south of the to-be-remodeled Galleria. Barhorst said the center could contain a Churchill Downs betting parlor and Kentucky Bourbon Museum. The former YWCA was a major hotel – at one time the Henry Clay – af |
Cisco
Systems, Inc., the worldwide leader in Internet
networking systems, and the Kentucky Community and
Technical College System will develop 11 regional Cisco
Networking Academies to train thousands of incoming
information technology workers.
The U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers is rebuilding the McAlpine Lock
and Dam to accommodate longer barge tows and will
allocate $1.5 million to help restore the Marine Hospital
and the nearby Portland Wharf. The Corps will cooperate
with the Jefferson County Board of Health, which owns the
hospital, and the City of Louisville, which plans to
convert the remains of the wharf into a 56-acre park.
Closer to downtown Louisville, Mayor David Armstrong has
budgeted $300,000 to lower West Main Street under the
K&I Railroad overpass to improve truck access to the
Shippingport Centre Industrial project. Meanwhile, two
public groups are proposing projects to improve
recreational and environmental uses of the river at both
ends of the city. The Beckham Bird Club wants to convert
Eva Bandman Park at the far eastern terminus of
Waterfront Park into the Beargrass Wildlife Sanctuary.
The 90-acre site would be opposite Towhead Island, which
the city is in the process of buying for use as a nature
preserve. The Metropolitan Sewer District has allocated
$435,000 to build a greenways walking trail from the
county-owned Farnsley-Moreman Landing at the southwestern
edge of the city to the Greenwood Road boat ramp four
miles north. Eventually, it would serve as the final link
in a walkway that would stretch to Prospect.
Two major
players in the metals industry will begin selling their
products online. Newport’s NS Group, Inc.will sell
some of its special bar quality and coil products in a
venture with MetalSite, a premier Internet marketplace
for the metals industry (www.metalsite.net). “This
is one of many opportunities we are pursuing to offer our
products via the Internet,” said NS Group’s
president and CEO RenČ Robichaud. “We are not
changing the way we do business, we are simply making it
easier and more convenient for our customers.”