August/September Business View Magazine

190 191 HOPKINSVILLE, KENTUCKY Hopkinsville,”he begins.“We’re also renovating the Pennyroyal Area Museum and it will open about this time, next year.Those two projects total roughly $3 million of capital investment in the downtown community.And we’re very excited about what that’s going to do for our downtown area.” We’re also about to break ground on the exten- sion of our greenway system,”Hendricks con- tinues.“We’re currently wrapping up the design phase of that project and look to break ground in August or early September.We believe that will be an eight-month build-out, once we break ground. So, in the latter part of the spring, or early part of the summer in 2019, our greenway will be extended to the south part of our community, roughly doubling its size. “We’re also building a 54,000-square-foot, multi-purpose sporting facility, referred to as the Sportsplex.This is being built on our convention center campus (the James E. Bruce Convention Center), in the south end of our community; it’s a $5.56 million project. It will allow us to play host to weekend sports tournaments. So,we’re really tapping into the sports tourismmarket with this facility,which will complement some of our outdoor parks that we already have and that do a great job for us. But we’re looking forward to being able to host large-scale bas- ketball, volleyball, archery, and soccer tourna- ments that will bring in hundreds of thousands of people on the weekends. It’s currently under construction and we anticipate it being open in late October of this year.Also on that cam- pus,we’re expanding our convention center -adding some additional ballroom space- and we’re also about to break ground for a new, hundred-bedroom,Holiday Inn Hotel that will complement the expansion of our convention center and the development of our Sportsplex. “We’re currently implementing our sidewalk and parks plan.We’ve got a number of new sidewalk projects throughout our community that are providing safer routes to schools, as well as greater connectivity to our greenway system for a more walkable Hopkinsville.We also have one new neighborhood park that we’re currently building and another in the design phase.We expect both of those parks to be up and operational within the next 12 months, or so.The sidewalk plan is a rolling implementation; it will take us about four years to completely build out our sidewalk plan. “We are also in the process of converting all of our halogen street lights to LED, both from an energy efficiency perspective, as well as for better lighting for safer streets.And we