RSS Feed
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Editor's Notes
The question was in reference to the 38,000 to 52,000 indirect jobs expected as a result of the new $3.7 billion ThyssenKrupp steel mill that will be built on the Mobile- Washington County line at Calvert. It was posed by Leigh Perry Herndon, an executive with the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce to a sparse group gathered a couple of weeks ago for the Grove Hill Area Chamber of Commerce's annual meeting. It is a good question, a valid question. I'm not sure Grove Hill can give a good answer to the question. Areas and municipalities that seek and work for a share of the economic boom that is expected from ThyssenKrupp will benefit. Those that just sit by and wait on something to come their way won't realize anything- or only meager morsels, if that. Some moan and groan that Jackson and Thomasville have gotten too far ahead of Grove Hill for the county seat to ever catch up and ever be a contender for business and industry. I disagree. While I laud Jackson's and Thomasville's successes and I'm proud for them, I think Grove Hill has a lot to offer too. We are at the intersection of two major U.S. highways- 43 and 84. No other community in Clarke County can claim such an infastructure asset. I think the ThyssenKrupp mill will in time mean that monies will be devoted to these routes for improvements. Highway 43 should be four-laned northward to Interstate 59-20 to aid ThyssenKrupp truck shipments bound for the central USA. Highway 84 needs attention, at least immediately from 43 at Grove Hill to Interstate 65 at Evergreen. If you look at a map, a logical route for truck shipments bound for the eastern seaboard would be up 43 and east to Interstate 65 and northward. It would be far less miles than going southward to pick up I-65 at Creola and then turning northward. We need to be beating the drums and blowing the bugles to get this message out to our elected officials and state Department of Transportation folks. I heard another lamentation at the chamber meeting- that Grove Hill doesn't have an industrial park. No, we don't. But the county owns about 50 acres near the airport. Liberty Building Products has a manufacturing plant in the old Hamilton Veneer building and is doing well. The county wants to develop the adjacent acreage for small industries. Why can't Grove Hill help promote that? This is a good situation to be in- available property within the Grove Hill town limits that the town doesn't have to pay for to help develop but that we can benefit from if it is developed! Grove Hill needs to get with the county and offer to help promote and develop this property. Even though there is available county property, it seems that we aren't concentrating enough on the Highway 43 and 84 bypass through Grove Hill. Business and industry often looks for a building already in place to develop. Grants and low interest loans are available for "spec" buildings- hulls that can be built and finished out later to a tenant's specifications. Thomasville lured Thompson Tractor from Grove Hill with a spec building in its industrial park that had been there a long time. While Thompson had only a modest parts house here in Grove Hill, a huge spec building in Thomasville was turned into a full parts and service store that employs a lot of people and pulls in good tax dollars for Thomasville. Thomasville might not have gotten Thompson if it had not had that spec building to offer. The town should try and work out a deal with some property owners along the bypass so that a spec building can be built and promoted. I think if there was a building visible from the highly traveled highway with a sign promoting its availability, it would be snatched up. In other areas, Mayor Lamar Hudson is working on "quality of life" issues and he correctly believes that we need to rebuild our residential base. If more people lived here, the retailing base that we have lost may return in time. I applaud local developers who are developing residential properties in and around Grove Hill. All of my comments are just that- talk and speculation. Talk is cheap and any armchair coach can speculate. What we really need in Grove Hill is to lose our defeatist attitude and to gain more involvement from our citizens. Instead of a majority of folks sitting around grumbling about what happens elsewhere and not in the county seat, we need more citizens actively working to make something happen. "What do we do about it in Grove Hill?" It is a good question. It deserves a good answer.
Jim Cox is editor and publisher of The Clarke County Democrat.
|
for larger version       |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
