Today, economic competition for the jobs that support families, create wealth and strengthen communities is focused on talent—skilled workers of every type. To lock in successes that are gaining momentum, leaders in Central Kentucky are employing a regional strategy to build a better understanding in the Bluegrass of its collective strengths and quality of life.
The goal is to make the region’s residents—whose skills and work ethic are a reason companies love being here—potential recruiters as well.
Cooperation and buy-in is growing because the public and private sectors both understand how essential it is to nurture, attract and keep talent— and it will only be more important moving forward.
Good jobs and workforce are mutually attractive, but talent is the trump card in today’s global competition. Regional leaders in the Bluegrass like the cards they’re holding and are using a multicounty collaboration to play their hand to greatest advantage.
They’re in the early stages of unfurling a strategic plan developed with guidance from Economic Leadership LLC, a Raleigh, N.C.-based data, strategy and policy firm that works with private and public clients to analyze competitiveness, develop strategy, support leadership and reimagine the future.
“We’re going way beyond where we’ve ever been before and we have a very specific plan,” said Bob Quick, president/CEO of Commerce Lexington. “It’s very simplistic in its nature, but it’s also very complicated when you get a lot of people involved.”
Every resident plays a role
The strategy being developed includes growing the workforce, business investment, wages and gross domestic product (GDP); attracting more state and federal money; developing better tax policy; creating multicounty site-development strategies, including a mega-site of at least 1,000 acres; and improving key leaders’ understanding of economic development needs and post-pandemic competitive realities.
But perhaps most importantly, every resident in the region has a potential role in the strategy.
Better branding of the Bluegrass will be one central step to reach the plan’s goals. Surveys find the region’s image is indistinct, not only to outsiders but to lifelong residents as well. But this shortcoming presents an opportunity.
Planning experts expect that when Central Kentuckians really consider aspects of life in the Bluegrass that they often take for granted and talk more about the unique quality of life they enjoy, the authentic pride that results will create a virtuous cycle for economic development, for existing business and even for residents themselves. It in turn helps guide and leverage marketing to nonresidents.
The goal is to generate “an elevator pitch” about the Bluegrass region, one locals can recount with little to no prompting. “Rooted, refined and rising” is one catchphrase being considered to express the positive aspects of the Bluegrass region’s quality of life.
Major projects in the works
As of late 2023, the nine-county region Commerce Lexington tracks had formally logged just over $1 billion in private-sector business investment creating more than 600 jobs. There is much more coming, especially in healthcare, one of the region’s economic linchpins.
The largest business announcement by far came from Toyota, the giant Japanese vehicle-maker, which is investing another $591 million dollars at its 9 million-s.f. plant in Georgetown, its largest in the world. The 9,700 workers there assembled 445,000 Camrys, RAV4 Hybrids and Lexus ES 350s in 2022.
Meanwhile, the University of Kentucky broke ground Oct. 27 on a $380 million, 500,000-s.f. health education building that will be the largest structure on campus when it opens in 2026. It will become the expanded home of UK’s College of Medicine, College of Public Health, College of Health Sciences and the College of Nursing. To meet the needs of the healthcare sector, those colleges will increase their enrollment to train 45% more physicians, twice as many nurses, 30% more students in health sciences such as physical therapy, and 30% more public health students.
Healthcare education is already a central focus at UK, which is a hub for addressing the commonwealth’s most serious maladies such as diabetes, cancer and heart health problems.
As the state’s flagship university with 34,000 students, UK has projects even larger than the Health Education Building that are either already underway or beginning. Those include a new $650 million cancer treatment and research center and a $1.3 billion project that will add another 300-bed tower to Chandler Medical Center.
In 2022, the university bought 27 acres east of Lexington at the junction of I-75 and I-64 for yet another major medical campus that will offer easy access to Kentucky residents who have to travel into Lexington-Fayette County for treatment and services.
Eric Monday, executive vice president for finance and administration and co-executive vice president for UK HealthCare, said that beyond growth of the medical student body, university officials expect to need to hire another 3,000-plus healthcare provider employees in the next several years.
Regional center for healthcare
Lexington is a regional center of advanced healthcare, and UK is not alone in making major investments.
Baptist Health is nearing completion of an entirely new $250 million Baptist Health Hamburg campus that opens in April 2024. The campus will offer an emergency department, diagnostic imaging, a retail pharmacy, cardiology testing, a surgery center and physician offices. Coming online in June is a cancer outpatient treatment center. Future plans for the campus call for a 60-bed inpatient hospital.
This will augment Baptist Health Lexington, a 434-bed tertiary care facility that is a major medical research and education center in its own right. Established in 1954, Baptist Health Lexington is recognized for excellence in heart care and cancer care, both areas in which it conducts groundbreaking research.
Lexington Clinic, another major healthcare organization with 350-plus providers in 30 specialties, opened a $30 million, 116,000-s.f. main medical services building in 2021 on South Broadway, and has another $29 million, 53,000-s.f. building under construction next door.
A few blocks from there is the headquarters of CHI Saint Joseph Health, a Kentucky provider system with five hospitals and five procedure centers. It just added six operating rooms and six procedure rooms during renovation of its outpatient surgery center across the street from Saint Joseph Hospital.
Reflecting the regional cooperation Bluegrass leaders are emphasizing, Saint Joseph Health and Lexington Clinic recently announced a partnership to share physician staffing for emergency rooms and ambulatory care.
Lexington is also the headquarters for Appalachia Regional Health, a system with 14 hospitals in southeastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, a network of primary and specialty clinics, home health services, rehabilitation services, pharmacies and a reference lab.
Healthcare was already a leader in demand for talent before the current and planned expansions were announced. Growing, recruiting and retaining providers and specialty support services workforce will be a prime focus for the coming years.
New projects add another layer of excitement
Talent attraction and retention has become a factor in nearly every big undertaking across the Bluegrass region, including a $350 million multiuse development about to break ground in central Lexington across the street from newly renovated Rupp Arena and Central Bank Center.
Dudley Webb is chairman of The Webb Companies, the local development partner with Dallas-based Lincoln Properties for the 18-acre site.
“Keeping our young people, that’s one of the major reasons we did this,” Webb said.
The development will include 800 apartments; a top-tier national supermarket; a 4,000- to 5,000-seat entertainment/event venue; a major hotel; 1,400 parking spaces; and lots of retail at ground level. Preliminary plans include a pedway connecting to Rupp Arena and Central Bank Center, and the north corner will be a main entrance to 10-acre Town Branch Park, a $39 million injection of green space being developed in the urban core. The park is slated to be completed in 2025 and will connect to 22 miles of trails.
The first phase of the multiuse project will be a parking structure. Construction of that will begin in spring 2024 at the conclusion of the UK men’s basketball season. UK basketball has a passionate fan following and regularly fills 20,000-seat Rupp Arena, making it an icon for sports fans all over the nation.
Central Bank Center and Rupp are themselves only two years from cutting the ribbon on a $350 million expansion that re-energized the 45-year-old regional landmarks to make them more interactive with the downtown spaces around them.
Also adjoining the High Street project is the 90,000-s.f. LexLive entertainment complex that opened in 2021 with 10 movie screens, a 500-seat sports bar, 13 bowling lanes, an arcade and event space.
Building on natural beauty
There are ample numbers of young adults and students coming of age and coming into the Bluegrass, but not enough staying and sinking roots for key growth years. This is what the strategic plan now unfolding aims to change.
Central Kentucky and the Bluegrass region have always had eye-popping beauty. Its 10 universities and colleges bestow 20,000 degrees and certificates annually. In addition to advanced healthcare and nearly half a billion dollars annually in research, global leader Toyota keeps expanding its largest facility on the planet and there is also an entire community of creative farm-to-table restaurateurs.
The region includes Frankfort, the seat of a state government that is lowering taxes, attracting cutting-edge and record-smashing business investment, and setting revenue records that are bringing reinvestment in infrastructure, education and public services.
Lexington-Fayette has been a gigabit city for five-plus years, and the statewide fiber network is bringing last-mile connectivity and productivity not only to Main Street but to neighborhoods, businesses, schools, farms, and even adventure-recreation sites.
And of course, the landscape of the Lexington-Bluegrass region is the epitome of the natural beauty the commonwealth is known for: Thoroughbreds in fence-framed pastures, historic distilleries crafting bourbons sought out around the world, the Palisades cliffs of the Kentucky River, and the outdoor wonderlands of the Red River Gorge.
As a result, the region is a cornerstone of Kentucky’s $13 billion tourism industry. Fayette County alone has more than 9,000 hotel rooms after a post-pandemic return to growth mode.
“Over the past 12 months, a lot of those hotels that were in the supply pipeline prior to the pandemic…have come online,” said Mary Quinn Ramer, president/CEO of VisitLEX. “In the last three years we’ve added 1,000 rooms to the city.”
The newest is the $38 million Manchester Hotel in Lexington’s Distillery District on the west end of downtown. The seven-story 125-room boutique facility mixes the modern with an heirloom feel. There is a 140-seat restaurant and a rooftop bar highlighted by intricate brickwork, wood and leather.
“Lexington is a really attractive market to hotel developers,” Ramer said.
Rebounding from the pandemic slowdown, occupancy in 2022 was 61% and is on pace to hit the 65% industry benchmark in 2023, Ramer said. Room-rate figures are rebounding also, boosting the revenue for tourism support.
The Webb Companies’ High Street project across from Central Bank Center and Rupp Arena will also include a hotel.
“We have this new state-of-the-art, beautiful campus there at the Central Bank Center and we’re able to accommodate much larger meetings than we’ve been able to in the past,” Ramer said. “With that, though, comes the need for additional sleeping rooms, particularly within walking distance. We oftentimes find ourselves trying to balance the need for additional rooms for these larger conventions and recognizing we don’t have enough sleeping rooms in our downtown, so (VisitLEX is) super excited about the hotels that are slated for that lot.”
A united effort
Bluegrass tourism industry members understand the connection their operations have to economic development. Those working in the hospitality sector have a prime opportunity to interact with guests and convert them from visitors to residents or business investors.
The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government is fully behind the effort to get local residents to act as economic ambassadors, said Kevin Adkins, chief development officer in the administration of Mayor Linda Gorton. Nearly anyone should be able to “do a quick elevator pitch, because you never know who you’re talking to. They might be the CEO of a $100 million company looking for a place to locate.”
