Making sure Pulaski County’s economic development goals continue to meet the needs of the community as a whole is a current focus for the Community Development Commission.
Executive Director Nathan Origer told the county commissioners Monday the CDC is reviewing the county’s economic development plan. “The current economic development strategic plan dates to 2010,” he explained. “It was done with the grant funding, an outside consultant. Some aspects of it are no longer relevant, given changes in demographics and concerns for the county. Some of it, we’ve checked off the list. Some of it is still alive.”
At this point, Origer says the CDC isn’t creating an entirely new plan. Instead, he and a few CDC members are working to refocus the organization’s efforts. “We’re just going through the current document, looking at how [Project Coordinator] Krysten [Hinkle] and I spend our time, looking at what the CDC priority is right now, and hoping we come up with a finished product that will help us to make sure that what we’re doing and how much time we’re allotting to individual projects is in focus what we feel and what the community feels is in their best interest for the community.”
One of the biggest challenges is dealing with Pulaski County’s declining population, “How it impacts county finances and how it impacts whether we continue looking at that West Side [Industrial Park] project – if we kill it, if we put it on the back-burner, whether we say, ‘We don’t have the workforce for that. We need to kill it,’ or ‘We don’t have the workforce for it, but that’s a way to potentially increase property tax revenues without increasing rates,’ that sort of thing,” Origer explained.
At the same time, Origer said he’s working with Building Inspector Doug Hoover and the county’s plan commission to continue updating the zoning ordinance. “We didn’t have county zoning until 2012, and the first ordinance was pretty rough,” he said. “It was all done with minimal cost to the county, so it was a lot of copy and paste. We updated it for 2016 implementation to a new document that, well, to be frank, is less likely to get us sued, but also was more flexible. That original ordinance, in a lot of ways, lived up to every potential criticism that could come of zoning.”
He feels that updates do a better job of balancing the needs of property owners with those of the broader community, while also recognizing the desire to preserve agricultural land.
