Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Economic Development topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Fulton County staff seeks local matches for rail, grocery and manufacturing projects
Summary
County staff requested local matching funds and incentives for three economic development projects: a rail upgrade into Hickman, equipment for a Hickman grocery store and an expansion by Kaiser that would add machinery and jobs.
County staff presented three separate requests for local economic-development funding at the Fulton County Commission meeting, asking commissioners to provide matching or incentive dollars for a rail improvement, grocery-store equipment purchases and a private manufacturing expansion.
Mark (staff member) said the funding comes from locally administered TDA/Kentucky pilot funds and related RDAP accounts. He asked the commission to endorse using $86,000 from RDAP funds as the local match for a rail improvement project administered by 10 10 Railway. The rail grant covers upgrades from Dyersburg to the Kentucky–Tennessee border and was extended to include rail into Hickman; that Hickman rail is owned by HRCDC, and HRCDC had already committed $86,000 toward the match.
Mark also requested $150,000 from the county’s development funds to pay for equipment for the retail portion of a planned Hickman grocery store. He said the state had approved the project and that the equipment would belong to the project’s property.
Finally, Mark said a private firm identified as Kaiser applied for local incentive money — $125,000 — to help purchase a storage silo as part of an expansion that would add injection-molding capacity and build additional manufacturing and warehouse space on-site. Mark said the expansion is expected to create roughly 20 to 30 additional jobs.
Commissioners asked procedural questions about the account balances and when future fiscal-year funds would be available; Mark said FY24 and FY25 funds remain unused and FY26 funds would be accessible in September. No vote record for these requests was recorded in the transcript excerpt; the items were presented as formal funding requests to the board.
The requests tie to a long-standing county approach of using state-administered and locally held economic-development funds to leverage private and regional grants for infrastructure and business expansion. The transcript does not record final approval language or vote tallies for each of the three requests.
