Chapter Three:
Next Up for Owensboro and Daviess County: A New Narrative That Stokes the Fires of Innovation
by Keith Schneider
October 17, 2011
Owensboro Takes A Different Path
Great communities are distinguished by their ability to instill value-based incentives, which reward hard work and provide favorable conditions for people to succeed in places like Kentucky BioProcessing, which produces genetically modified tobacco plants for plant-based pharmaceuticals.
Owensboro has always regarded itself as a kind of Heartland island difficult to reach, distinctive in its habits, and parochial in its choices. That may explain why in the first decade of the century the city and county resisted the corrosive effects of retrenchment. Whatever the reason, it’s paying off.
These are some of the measures of Owensboro’s achievements:
- Revenues from Owensboro’s occupational tax rose 7.8 percent last year, the highest on record. City finance officials predict that because of new job growth downtown and at the Owensboro Medical Health System hospital under construction east of town, revenue will continue to grow 5 percent annually for the foreseeable future.
- For seven straight years city government has ended the fiscal year with surpluses, most recently with $1.1 million in its accounts at the end of the 2010/2011 fiscal year. The city, in fact, has $10.8 million in reserve in its general fund and $2.2 million in interest income in its Sanitation Fund.
- Daviess County, meanwhile, established a $1 million economic development fund earlier this year to encourage entrepreneurs.
- Airline service is growing, and the Owensboro-Daviess County Regional Airport this year received $2.1 million in state loans and a state grant to expand the passenger terminal.
- Daviess County’s unemployment rate has fallen to 7.7 percent, well below the national rate of 9.1 percent. For two years in a row Daviess County produced more new jobs, 2,400, than any other city in Kentucky.