# Council Economic Development COW - April 23, 2013 > Auto-transcribed civic record · April 23, 2013 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/2963 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/2963?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2013-04-23 - **Last revised**: July 16, 2026 - **Length**: 2,740 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Special Economic Development Committee of the Whole met on April 23, 2013, at 2:00 p.m., with Beard presiding. The committee addressed five agenda items during the session, including approval of the Committee Summary from March 7, 2013, and four informational presentations. One motion was voted on during the meeting, and one public comment was heard. The committee received updates on food truck regulations from Akers, discussed median salary data presented by Kay, and heard a quarterly report from Stinnett on behalf of Commerce Lexington. The committee also reviewed 40 items that had been referred to the committee for consideration. ## Attendance **Present:** Beard, Stinnett, Gorton, Ellinger, Kay, Ford, Akers, Lawless, Scutchfield, Mossotti, Clarke, Henson, and Lane **Absent:** Myers and Farmer **Late:** None ## Votes and Decisions The meeting included one vote on the formation of a new Agricultural Commission. **Approval of Agricultural Commission Concept** A motion to approve the concept of forming an Agricultural Commission was made by Gorton and seconded by Mossotti [timestamp: 0:02:09]. The motion passed unanimously with no abstentions or opposing votes. ## Public Comment Ralph Ruschell addressed the board regarding agricultural economic impact [timestamp: 0:02:09]. Ruschell disputed the findings of a study presented to the board, asserting that agriculture contributes no more than 5% to Fayette County's economy. He also discussed rural crime statistics as part of his remarks on the topic. ## Contested Items **Agricultural Commission Formation** The formation of an Agricultural Commission was approved unanimously by the body. However, the path to this approval revealed underlying disagreements among participants regarding the economic role of agriculture. During earlier discussions, members debated the findings presented in a study related to agricultural economics. These discussions also encompassed differing perspectives on the potential impacts of agritourism and hemp production on the local agricultural sector. Despite these divergent views on specific agricultural issues and economic priorities, the disagreement did not prevent the commission's establishment. The unanimous approval of the Agricultural Commission formation indicates that while participants held different positions on certain agricultural matters, they reached consensus on the need for the commission itself. ## Committee Summary 3.7.13 (1-3) The summary of the March 7, 2013 meeting was presented to the committee [timestamp: 00:00:00]. Following the presentation, the committee voted on approval of the summary. **Outcome** The summary was approved unanimously. The approval was made on a motion by Gorton and a second by Mossotti. ## Food Truck Update — Akers [timestamp: 00:15:26] Akers provided an update on the food truck initiative during this agenda item. Council Member Hanson referenced a visit to Northwest Christian, where he observed a large crowd in attendance. No action was taken on this item, and the discussion remained informational in nature. ## Median Salary Discussion — Kay [timestamp: 02:09] Kay raised a request for the inclusion of median hourly wage and average total hourly compensation data in incentive program reports. Stinnett addressed this request, confirming that Commerce Lexington would collect this data independently. Stinnett noted that the state does not currently provide median salary information, making it necessary for Commerce Lexington to gather the data themselves to fulfill the reporting requirement. The discussion concluded as informational, with no further action items identified. The outcome confirmed that the requested data would be made available through Commerce Lexington's independent collection efforts. ## Commerce Lexington Quarterly Report — Stinnett [timestamp: 03:49] Stinnett presented the first quarter 2013 report for Commerce Lexington, highlighting several positive developments for the organization. **Key Highlights** The report noted strong growth in client visits during the quarter. Stinnett announced several new business commitments to the region: - Bingham McCutcheon - Transposagen - Smuckers - Hummingbird Nano **Upcoming Activities** The presentation included information about upcoming trade shows that Commerce Lexington plans to participate in during the coming months. **Discussion Items** Jenna Greathouse participated in the discussion alongside Stinnett. The team addressed two substantive matters: - Updating the economic impact model to reflect current conditions and projections - Land constraints affecting development in Bluegrass Business Park **Outcome** This agenda item was presented as informational, providing the body with an update on Commerce Lexington's quarterly activities and current business development efforts. ## Items Referred to Committee (40) [timestamp: 00:15:26] During this agenda item, the committee engaged in an informational discussion regarding matters that had been referred to committee. Council Member Hanson participated in the discussion. The committee addressed two primary topics: the food truck situation and the housing trust fund. Council Member Hanson referenced a large turnout at a community event during the discussion, indicating significant public interest in these matters. No formal action was taken on these items during this portion of the meeting. The discussion remained informational in nature, allowing the committee to review and consider the referred items without proceeding to a vote or formal resolution at this time. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed: Approval of the concept of forming an Agricultural Commission --- ## Full transcript Does anybody have any questions of Council Member? You can go right ahead, Vice Mayor. Sorry, I don't think we have the ability to get in there to register. But I did have a conversation with Council Member Akers about the zoning ordinance text amendment. And I know that it's not, you know, what's on our docket right now is an update. and I really appreciate that you've been working hard and that your committee has. I don't know if there's anybody from planning here, or maybe somebody could be at the work session just to talk a little bit about the motion you're going to make to walk on. Sure. It's a little unusual in that I think it isn't coming from any committee or as an official motion. is just an item, and I kind of wanted to hear from planning what their take on it is, since I think they wrote it, right? They did, yes. So anyway, thank you for working on this issue, and we'll look forward to hearing more. It has definitely, I'll add, it has definitely been a lesson in compromise and in trying to navigate opposing viewpoints and competing constituencies. So as has been certainly the theme of the last four months, I have learned a great deal by jumping into chairing this work group. So thank you. Thank you, Council Member Akers. Council Member Kaye, we're going to have a discussion on salary and wages and such. Thank you, Chair. This will be, I think, very brief. I want to thank Jenna Greathouse and Kevin Atkins for getting on this issue. I had requested, if possible, to change the amount of information that we got on these incentive programs to include the median hourly wage as well as the average total hour compensation. And my understanding, if that's not right, let me know, my understanding is that for Fayette County projects, that information will be provided to us by the state and will be reported to us when they come forward, but that the state is not modifying its form or the way in which they report to other counties, constituencies, whatever. But in any event, I appreciate the work on that, and this reflects what I was interested in. So thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Kay. It was brief. We have Commerce Lexington's quarterly report that Janet Grayhouse is going to place it with. Can I make a comment back to the median salary? The only thing that we'll be asking for the median salary, the state won't do it. They don't care. So for us, we worked with Hall. We took the state's application and added our own little line to it. So Commerce Lexington, when we're working with the clients, we're going to do our best to get it from them. The state, we just basically recreated their application, one piece of it, and added medium wage. So we're going to do it. We'll do our best. Is that okay? Okay, so you've got your quarterly report, and I'm not going to walk through the whole thing. and then I've got just a couple comments on just where we are right now. So the key thing I want everybody to remember, so this week, last week we had two big announcements. We had our grand opening of Bingham McCutcheon and also Transposagen. So Bingham is complete in terms of those projects, and we have moved. We're moving through on to the next thing, so we're not resting on our laurels on that project, and we are moving forward. A couple things. If you have your report in front of you, you might note site visits for us. January and February were a little bit slow, and we were a little concerned at first when we weren't seeing as many projects come through the front door. February and March turned around and has just been very impressive months for us in terms of client visits, projects that are calling us for requests for real estate, requests for workforce data, requests for site visits. It's just amazing what has happened. The only thing that I would point out negative in the quarterly report, we are on goal for everything except existing business visits. And the reason behind that is because we've had so much new business projects. We've had to take part of Margaret Ridley's time and assign her to new companies coming to town, and it's just slowed us down a little bit. Since this report, the existing business visits showed 15 as of March 31st. We have made up eight appointments in two weeks. Kimberly's on one right now, and we are going to do our best to get to 150 by the end of the year. So snapshots of what we're doing right now. I'm just kind of giving you all an update in generalities of what we're doing. If there's something specific you would like to hear, I'd be happy to work with you guys to figure out how you want some things presented. So I'm just kind of winging it on my own. So I wanted you to know. So the snapshots of where we are. Margaret Ridley, she's at a biotech trade show this week. I brought a piece of our marketing materials. We're there with the state of Kentucky and other communities working to recruit biotech companies, which is one of our strategic targets. So I'm just going to leave these here so you can see some of the stuff that we do. It's one of our strategic targets. I came back from Advanced Manufacturing and Life Sciences trade show back in February. It's called the Medical Device and Manufacturing. Kimberly was in Northern California calling on consultants and companies as part of our Kentucky United initiative. So she and I were both in two different places at two different times. After that, Kimberly went to what is called the Industrial Asset Management Council. So you hear us talk a lot about focusing on consultants. Industrial Asset Management Council is a blend. So you're at a conference where the consultants are there, but the companies are there. So you have the opportunity to meet with the consultants in one location, but CEOs and real estate people from these companies participate in Industrial Asset Management Council. Another one of our strategic targets is computers and IT, and within that strategic target there's a niche of gaming. So you probably saw where we sent a note to you guys. The BBDP sponsored a group of local game development companies and helped get them to Boston to showcase what's actually starting to grow in Lexington. So there were three different companies. There were probably 20 people there. Warren Nash, who heads up the ICC for our office, and that would be the Innovation and Commercialization Center, but part of that BBDP, he participated and kind of chaperoned the whole thing to make sure everything went off good, put up the booth, the mega booth. They had a great trip up there. I think people were really surprised to know what's happening in Lexington. Venture Club, you got your brochures. It was great. We had 90 companies that received $83 million in VC, angel investment, other grant money. So those are the key things from the report. And then I wanted to, again, I've already told you where we are. January and February felt a little slow. March and April are kicking us in the rear end. We're doing really good in terms of the quality of the leads that we're seeing and the RFPs that are now coming in the door. May 15th through 17th, we will be traveling to Dallas. We means Kimberly on this trip. I'll be right back on the heels from Omaha, but she'll be doing several site selection companies and business visits as well, calling on companies that fit within our strategic niche. We have an agency that helps us do this, so we tell them the types of companies we want to meet with. They set the appointments up, and so we will usually have anywhere from 10 to 20 appointments while she's there. When we turn in our reports for you and when we are doing the local portion of KBI, you'll see the economic impact sheets that we run that we had a model done for us by the University of Louisville several years ago. And we are underway right now having that model updated. So hopefully soon in the next, I think it will probably be eight weeks before we see the changes, but you'll have more data, more up-to-date data on companies and what their economic impact is to Lexington and to the region. So even if a company that we work with locates in Madison County, and sometimes that happens, not often, but sometimes it does, we'll be able to more effectively show you that. It's pretty good now, but we wanted to go ahead and have it updated. We've started talking talks with business leaders, planning, and some of our investors about what happens when Commerce Lexington runs out of land in the Bluegrass Business Park. So we've had several meetings to figure out what's next. We've got 10 acres left, which gets to a couple other things. We've got a couple announcements this week in the park, but we're underway trying to identify pieces of property. Again, we had several announcements this last quarter, total quality logistics. They're expanding in Lexington. We'll be coming back for that one later. The second one, of course, was Smuckers. We are delighted that they chose to stay here. They had other options, and we worked very hard to keep them. And then Hummingbird Nano. So I appreciate so many of you all who came and were able to participate. It means a lot to the company to see our local officials there. So if you can make the effort, sometimes it's wonderful to see you there. They really, really appreciate it. But those are my key updates. If there are specific questions that you might want to ask, I'm willing to answer them if I can. And we have Tyrone from our staff here, Tyrone Tyra and Elena Stevens. I don't know that many of you have met Elena. You know Tyrone. Tyrone is our Community and Minority Business Development VP. And Elena is our Director of Research. So she knows everything. So I don't think you all have had a chance to meet Elena, so I wanted to bring her down. Somebody craft a question or we'll have to go away. I guess that's not a bad thing. And I'm available if anybody has questions later to call. So one thing I do want to go back to, I put on here a couple announcements coming up. So Bertley Industrial Processing, that again is the first Chinese manufacturer to locate in the state of Kentucky, in Urals Industrial Park, so please try to be there on April 29th at 10 a.m. And I am very hopeful today that we will close a deal this afternoon, and there may be a project announcement Thursday, so you'll be the first one to know when it comes. But details will be coming soon if they haven't already hit your inbox yet. So that could be this Thursday at 10.30, so just put something on your calendar. Yeah. Berkeley is April 29th, and we also have a new staff person, Annie Linton-Smith, and so she's sending these out. Sometimes they come from Kimberly or me, but we're really trying to use Annie. She's our new marketing and administrative assistant, so you all can get familiar with someone new. So Thursday, April 29th at 10 a.m. at 2333 Innovation Drive. And again, that's Berkeley Industrial Processing. So they produce coal processing equipment. There will be several people from China here, so if people can be there, it would be great. It's in the Bluegrass Business Park. And then a possible announcement, assuming we get our job done today, Thursday, this Thursday. So the 25th at 1030. I'm very hopeful that that will happen. But if it doesn't, you can't be there. Council Member Hanson, did you have a question for Jenna? Yeah, I was just thinking, Jenna, about the Toyota expansion. That was a big one. Yeah, and how that might affect us. I think it will have a big effect on us, particularly with our local Japanese companies in the region to help anticipate their growth. So we're already seeing signs of that. That's part of our existing business program, too. So we try to call on all our manufacturers, as do my counterparts in the surrounding counties. So you'll see the same folks. There are more Japanese facilities in the surrounding counties than there are here. I just thought I'd bring it up. I think that's a big plus to the region. It's a huge plus. It's a huge plus. It was very good to see it happen. Does anybody have any other questions for Jenna? That's it. Thank you. Thanks. Let me know if there's anything specific that I can do. I had a question for you real quickly. How are you all doing on the Omaha trip as far as numbers are concerned? 185. So we've sold the plane out, and there are people now that are making their own way to be there. So 185. It's shaping up to be a really fun agenda for us. I have one thing. Several of you participated in our ED 101 maybe two years ago where we did kind of an economic development simulation. so some people could be companies and some people could be cities, and we walked you through the process. Would you all have an interest in us running another simulation? We have to have at least 20 people do it, but if we opened it up to our board of directors and perhaps you all as council members and new council members and staff, would you have an interest in doing it? Because I have to have 20 to make it right, to make it feel good. You really do get in and compete, but I've got to have a good number of folks to do it. What's the time frame? How long does it take? Two hours. Maybe two and a half. It's quick. Some of you did it. I think Paul did it. Did you do it? Jennifer did it. Kevin did it. You'll do it. So hold your hand up so I can just get a feel. Five or six? Yeah. We would work around you all. Okay. I'll try to work on it. Okay. Thank you. Next to your last page, page 40, has got the food truck situation, the housing trust fund, which maybe Council Member Hanson could tell us about the visit out to Northwest Christian. Excuse me, Chair. I said, weren't you there at the Northwest Christian? I didn't hear it. Build? Build? Build? At the Nehemiah? Yeah. I was. Big crowd? Huge crowd. So I guess we'll be bringing that up again soon. No, there's nothing on here that we want to get rid of right now. I will. If anybody really has a nerve to ask to shut this down, we'd be glad to do it. Motion adjourned. Good. All in favor? Any opposed? No. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'll keep a place for you Somewhere deep inside So hold on my heart Please tell her to be patient Because there has never been a time Hey golfers, this is it. Lexington Parks and Recreation Golf Courses now have new affordable golf rates. Check them out now. Play Kearney Hill Golf Links, Lakeside, Tate's Creek, and the Gay Brewer Junior Course at Picadome. And we haven't forgotten about the students. Check out the new golf rates and discounts for UK and Transy students. And don't forget about our fully stocked and awesome gift shops, too. From tees to drivers and shoes to hats, we have it all. 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