Georgetown_web

GEORGETOWN, KENTUCKY BVM: You say that you have a lot to do. Can you talk about some of the projects on your agenda? Goodwin: “This year,we’re undertaking Phase II and Phase III of our Lanes Run Busi- ness Park expansion. In 2003,Toyota Manu- facturing and the City of Georgetown split the cost to purchase about 600 acres of property. It’s going to be zoned BP-1,which is a light industrial, business-type transition area, to try and bring in light manufacturing, production, prototype facilities, research and develop- ment, and professional training facilities.Most of the infrastructure from Phase I has been in for awhile,andwe have a number of private industries out there,already.We are running out of space and this project will allowus to contin- ue supporting the growthwe are seeing. “One key project that just finished construc- tion, this past year,was the Bluegrass Commu- nity and Technical College (BCTC).They built a Bluegrass Advanced Manufacturing Center that was a collaboration between Toyota and BCTC.What they’re trying to do is develop the expertise in the growing population for jobs at Toyota and its secondary and tertiary sup- port industries.Toyota takes up about a fifth to a quarter of the land mass of Georgetown, and it’s our primary economic driver, so that’s a pretty important project. “We just hired an engineer to plan out Phases II and III of this business park, and right now,we’re looking at about a $7million project to spend on streets, infrastructure,water and sewer, electrical - the whole nine yards - and that’s going to expand the park,which is prettymuch built out with the industries and offices that are already in that area. The engineer is HDR Incorporated, and we just signed a contract with them, so we should be hav- ing preliminarymeetings coming up, shortly.” BVM: Any other economic drivers on the hori- zon? Goodwin: “Something that recently has been coming back to Georgetown is brewing and distill- ing.You know, Georgetown claims–and I’m fully behind that claim- that we’re the birthplace of bourbon.We have a distiller trying to get in here, downtown, to produce bourbon. It takes awhile for that to get set up, so they’re not quite in place to do that yet. But we have Country Boy Brewing– they just opened their second brewery out in the business park.They’ve got a tasting bar, and I think they’re actually going to be growing their hops, out there. So, that’s interesting.” I would say we’re on the cusp. Our downtown is not a big one, but there’s plenty of area for redevelopment, and what’s been happening recently is we’ve had more restaurants come downtown – non-chain restaurants. So, we’ve seen an increase in pedestrian and vehicular traffic. KYLE GOODWIN GEORGETOWN’S CITY ENGINEER