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This is Let's Talk Mayfield, a community-focused podcast centered on listening first and learning from local voices. Join Derek Parrott and guests as they explore the issues shaping Mayfield's future. Welcome to Let's Talk Mayfield.
I'm Derek Parrott. Today we'll be talking about one of the most important topics shaping the future of our community, economic development. It's a topic that's important to most of us.
Last time we think about economic development, we think about new jobs, new businesses, but there's more to economic development. Talking about economic development, we're talking about infrastructure, we're talking about housing, we're talking about workforce, also talking about just the quality of life. We're talking about quality of life, not only those who reside in Mayfield, but also those who patronize in Mayfield, visit Mayfield, and invest in Mayfield.
That's important, and today joining us, we have Jason Lembley. He's the President of Economic Development. Jason's been at the forefront of efforts to attract businesses while supporting existing businesses here in our community.
Jason, I'd like to thank you for being with us today. Thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what got you motivated in economic development? Yeah, Derek, thanks for having me today on Let's Talk Mayfield, and to be honest, that was probably one of the best openings for what economic development is.
A lot of people have different definitions and understanding of what it is we do, and over the past several decades, it's really expanded from just industrial development and recruitment to all encompassing the things that you said. So I got started with economic development over 12 years ago. I was in Dallas, Texas, working as a consultant who provided strategic targeted marketing plans and website development programs, as well as site selection services for EDOs and chambers across the country.
Did that for nearly five years and then worked my way into local economic development here in Kentucky, where I began in Bowling Green as a senior project manager, and then in 2021, Briggs County found and hired me to lead the efforts here in our community. Okay, and for those who don't know about economic development, what does it do and how does it serve Mayfield-Briggs County? Yeah, so economic development really encompasses every aspect of every part of every community. When it starts from workforce and training development, as you said, infrastructure, site development, existing business growth, new business growth, and even recently really started to form into commercialization and downtown redevelopment.
But economic development plays a role in every one of these areas as we serve to make the community a better, more competitive area for wages, as well as providing individuals with opportunities that they may not know exist in their given area. Okay, how would you describe the state of Mayfield-Briggs County economy? Yeah, so the economy is a very interesting conversation. And though I am one person, I do have a lot of opinions about the economy and the way that things work and how they are done.
And I would give that to my experience and places I've lived across the country. But Mayfield-Briggs County are at a very interesting point in time where if you look at data regionally and across rural America, we are shrinking in terms of population, in terms of economic output, in terms of growth. And a lot of that has to do with housing needs and unmet needs of residential development.
And also commercial opportunities for people to live and use and go to near their homes and where they wanna be. Mayfield-Briggs County has a strong opportunity to really grow and create a very strong and opportunistic area if we come together and if we start to put together resources to attract new individuals to the area, bring new commercial opportunities to the area, while at the same time, continuing to support and help our existing community members. What are some successes that the community has seen over the past few years that the community might not be aware of? Yeah, and I don't even know if the community may know some of these things or if they've followed our news releases or the things that we do, but Briggs County Economic Development and the Industrial Authority have been heavily involved in economic growth in our county and our downtown city.
We have invested millions of dollars in our industrial parks and into sites and buildings, providing opportunities for new and existing businesses to expand. And more recently in downtown Mayfield, the Industrial Authority that I'm the director of was tasked with buying and redeveloping property in the Tornado area of our community, as well as finding and identifying funds to build a mixed-use entrepreneurial space known as a maker space. But beyond some of those efforts, if you all have children in our local school systems, which many of you do, and you hear the names Community Connections or Power and Partnerships, those are grassroots workforce development programs that Briggs County Economic Development created in partnership with our Mayfield-Briggs County Chamber of Commerce, our Briggs County School System and Mayfield Independent School Systems, as well as the Mayfield-Briggs County Area Technology Center to give students the opportunity to realize that they can find employment here locally and they can find good jobs and that they can stay in this area and that they don't have to leave.
Or when they do leave to go off and obtain degrees, that they can come back home and work here and have a good quality of life. Okay. We're talking about the school districts.
I think preparing our school, our students in our school districts, help them prepare to go straight from education straight into workforce. Tell me, what are some things that our school districts can do to help prepare our students for industry and for life after high school? I know you mentioned Community Connection. I mean, I think that's a great program as well as power and partnership.
What's some things we can do in the school district that maybe we haven't thought of that can help put our students in a position to be more successful? Oh, I love that question, though it is a loaded question. And so as I look to respond to that, when I respond to questions that may be different in terms of direction or thoughts that might be unusual to areas in which I visit or come from, that's only because I see the true power in making change to better our students in our areas. And I think the schools are doing a good job of partnering to allow students the opportunity to visit local businesses and giving them the opportunity to do career shadowing.
But I also believe that we could always do more. I think that investing in our Area Technology Center or our vocational school, expanding that facility and expanding those programs is something we need to really look into in terms of creating the employment needs of our community. With manufacturing and industry employing 2,700 people, which is roughly 17% of our workforce, we've gotta start to figure out ways to fill the high-paying positions of our community with our local individuals.
Like I said, talent relocation is a challenge with residential housing being an issue, but the schools focusing on how we can best serve those programs while at the same time providing the students who are wanting to go to college with their opportunities is really something that I think focusing on and looking at different strategies on helping to grow and expand those areas would be huge. Okay, I know that education, hospital, machinery, that's three of our larger sectors as far as income and just job opportunities. Is there any other areas or any other sectors you feel like we can build on where there is a high demand in our community? Yeah, we need to build on all of those.
Those are our strongest employment sectors, like we said, education, healthcare, manufacturing, as well as commercial too, right, professional services. You know, we have a lot of good businesses here that provide professional services. Retail is a huge employment sector, but I look at retail maybe a little differently than some, and I look at retail as a stepping stone or a position in which people can grow and learn how to manage and provide different levels of expertise while building their capacity to serve in larger roles to the local community.
And I don't mean that to sound offensive or for people to take that personally, but I do believe that working in those opportunities should give you the ability to work on, you know, your communication skills, your management skills, delegation skills, customer service skills, and then applying that to improve your quality of life. I think it's a huge thing that, you know, if we start to do that, we'll create even more successful stories here in our community. What makes Mayfield and Graves County competitive compared to other communities in our area? Yeah, Mayfield and Graves County in terms of competitiveness, part of the reason I located here is the resiliency, right? Mayfield and Graves County have been hit time and time again with tough challenges and brutal losses to businesses.
And time and time again, they come out and they succeed. But beyond that, we have a very heavily educated and strong workforce, meaning we have a lot of individuals that are very talented and very knowledgeable that seek employment outside of our area because we have jobs that don't meet their pay requirements or elements like that. In addition to that, you know, logistically, and this is said a lot of places in Kentucky, but we're within 70% of a day's drive of the entire country.
We're very close to river ports and inland waterways, which is critical for industrial transportation, as well as logistics for other business and industry. But on top of that, you know, our community provides a very low tax policy in terms of operating and running businesses, which is huge for our whole. With income tax and where that stands in some of the surrounding states, having none or us with reciprocating agreements with them, it can be a challenge to bring business to the area.
What are some of the challenges when we're trying to attract new businesses? Yeah. Challenges in terms of attracting new businesses, you know, when you look at what companies are trying to do when they try to select or expand their new locations, they're trying to eliminate communities. They're not trying to work with everyone.
They're trying to find the one that best fits for them. And the way to do that is by eliminating ones in which don't fit well with you. And a lot of those requirements start with information related to location and proximity to international airports or location to metropolitan areas with certain population densities.
And those limiting factors itself make it challenging, but, you know, beyond some of those things, some of the things that we here can do locally is build capacity. And what I mean by that is infrastructure. You know, we have a lot of partners in our community who are working on plans to provide additional capacity for some of our utility systems, and then others who choose to do something differently.
And everyone can do what they want differently and run the business the way that they want. But ultimately, some of those factors eliminate our opportunity to bring good companies to the area. Additionally, the most important thing that I can tell on this podcast is the way we talk about our community.
You know, there's stories I could share with this group about, you know, when I came here before I was hired and, you know, having conversations with local community members and the negativity they put out to me and some of the calls for concern that they provided me before making the decision to come here. We all do our part in how we address and talk about the community. So despite what people think or don't think about how things are being run, managed, or not being done in public or on social media, we have to do a better job of promoting our community because that's where it all starts.
My business starts online and in the news. You know, if people don't see the positivity about a community and they hear us complaining or whining or attacking individuals or attacking one another, they don't wanna be there. They don't wanna be a part of that.
They wanna be a part of a community who's forward-thinking, progressive, and willing to accept them and help them be successful. So make sure that when you're talking about Mayfield and Greatest County as a whole, we are talking complimentary about them, not negatively about them. And with you saying that, I do understand.
In order for Mayfield to grow and thrive and move forward, we need everyone in the community working to help move Mayfield forward. I mean, we need the community, neighborhoods in the community. You know, we need to make sure we're strengthening our neighborhoods because we know neighborhoods build strong families, build strong communities, you know, and we have to make sure that we're all working together.
Let me say, make sure that we're positive about the community and we're all in this together. And we talk about supporting existing businesses. We all know that existing business is a backbone of the community.
I mean, they support our school district, they support our non-profits, they support our neighborhoods. That's very important. So tell me how supporting existing businesses versus attracting new businesses.
You tell me the difference with that and the importance of it. Yeah, so my primary goal when I arrived was to meet with every existing business in our community within 90 days. Because like you said, that is where our growth comes from.
They say that 90% of a community's growth comes from existing business. I would say in rural America, that number is far higher. And where we focus our attention and effort is making sure that our existing companies have the support and services they need to expand, grow, hire, develop, or build.
Because they're the ones who are creating the positive impact in the tax base. We get a new opportunity here every couple of years and when we do that, we're blessed and thankful for it. But one of the cool things about Mayfield & Griggs County that I found is out of all the existing business and industry, which I would call that about 44 companies that I would classify as manufacturers or businesses who are within that targeted sector, only a handful are not from the area.
And what that shows is that there's incredible entrepreneurial spirit and creativity in this area. Because all of these businesses were founded, formed, and grown here locally, which means they have a passion for this area and making sure that they're taken care of is critical for our success and has been for the past several years. But at the same time, we need to make sure that we have the ability to attract new businesses.
And so the past several years, we've made it a mission to build speculative buildings and expand our industrial park and build out infrastructure in the anticipation for new industry to come to the area. And people can say what they want about business attraction. You don't need to have fully developed sites or that a corn field or a bean field is what moves businesses to your area.
But that's just not the case anymore. Speed to market is the case. If you don't have product or you don't have something that they can see or physically put their hands or stand on, you're almost out of the game every single time.
And so those two opportunities, I feel in the past several years, we've made great strides to make sure that those things are taken care of. And as long as I'm here and in charge of economic development, existing businesses will always be the people in which call upon me first and that I go to make sure are taken care of. Because if we eliminate their ability to grow and expand by bringing in too many new businesses, and we're killing the economy, we can't be doing that.
Thank you, Jason. As we close out, Jason, I'd like to thank you for joining us with sharing your insights on the future of economic development in Mayfield, Greggs County. I appreciate the work you're doing to help us grow and thrive.
And I'd also like to thank everyone for listening to Let's Talk Mayfield. I want everyone to stay informed, stay engaged. And it's important that Mayfield, Greggs County, we all work together.
We're partnering because in order for us to move forward, we need to work together. And also, as Jason mentioned, we need strong neighborhoods, strong neighborhoods, build strong families, strong families build strong communities, and strong communities is what help us to attract existing businesses. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, you can find me on social media.
You can call me, text me, email. Thank you for joining us. Thank you.
And one more thing before we close out. Yeah, thanks, Derek. So I just wanted to say, you know, when I look at Mayfield and after living here for several years, I would like to think that Mayfield's pride is in their ability to execute on the field, right? Would you say that's fair? Mayfield cares about their football and they're incredible at it.
And for decades, it's been a dominant force in this community. And the reason I would say that is pride, right? Pride is what we all have towards the things that we most love and are compassionate about. And what I'd like to end on is if we all add as much pride as we have towards our Mayfield Cardinals football team, who's a dominating force in the state championships almost every year, when we apply some of that passion to our local community, imagine all the things that we could get done.
You know, it can be applied at every single stage of every single facet of our lives. You know, you really hit home on the neighborhoods and the community and coming together, right? If we all took that pride and passion we have towards football and applied that towards our daily life and our daily opportunities in this community, we can truly transform and build Mayfield to something that's never seen before. Totally agree with that.
That's it. Thank you, Jason, for joining us today, giving us insight. And together, we all work together with the different spectrums that we got, different entities, school district, neighborhoods, like I said, I feel like we all work together.
We can move Mayfield forward. Thank you all for listening to us today. Have a great day.
Thank you. Thanks for listening and for caring about Mayfield's future. Keep the conversation going.
Meet you right back here next time.
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