The City of Pikeville is moving forward with its original plans for the Kentucky Enterprise Industrial Park.
City Manager Philip Elswick said the city commission petitioned the state to release $5.7 million in funding that was originally appropriated for the park when EnerBlü had plans to locate its facility in Pikeville. The funding, which allows the city to construct a speculative building at the park, was approved by the state and accepted by the city during its commission meeting last week.
Elswick said the new speculative building is a way to bring manufacturing companies into the region.
“The importance of having this building in our park can’t be overstated,” Elswick said.
The plans for the spec building are a callback to the original idea for the industrial park before EnerBlü – which decided not to locate in Pikeville before filing bankruptcy earlier this year – was on the city’s radar.
“So, having more businesses there, as opposed to having one huge business, like EnerBlü would have been, we feel like it’s a much more sustainable situation,” said Elswick.
He said EnerBlü was a hit to the city, but the idea was too good to pass up.
“That was a huge project and created a large number of jobs – very high-paying jobs,” he said. “You can’t not chase that. You have to try to land that project. And, unfortunately, it didn’t happen.”
But he believes the original plan of constructing a spec building is the right way to bring in more jobs for people across the region.
“If you have the building for them that they can then move directly into, it reduces their capital expenditure and makes it much easier to attract them to your town,” Elwick said.
He said SilverLiner – the manufacturing company that operates at the industrial park – is a perfect example of that. The company was already on-board to locate in Pikeville before the building was constructed.
“We identified a tenant before that building was really even designed,” he said. “So, we hope the same thing will happen here.”
The building design is almost complete and construction is expected to begin early next year.