Comprehensive Plan – Community Facilities
Ohio River transportation and the “National Road” brought a cotton mill to Maysville in 1834. Transportation improved with a railroad’s arrival, highway bridges across the Ohio River, and an airport. This market access created a virtuous cycle drawing new businesses that supported improved local community facilities, including services and infrastructure.
. Over the decades, Mason County gained and lost prosperous cotton, brick, milk, and tobacco processing plants and nearby electric generation stations. We also gained and lost plow, underwear, auto seat, shoe, mechanical power transmission manufacturing plants, and an auto parts logistic center. Each helped fund local community facilities.
Our lack of direct access to an Interstate highway reduced Mason County’s transportation competitive advantage. Now our community facilities need significant capital investments to repair and bring them to modern standards.
These issues and other economic changes made maintaining our virtuous cycle of recruiting new businesses to support local community facilities harder.
Some say our need for capital investment is a chicken or egg problem. They say we need income from new businesses to afford significant capital investments in local community facilities. But add, we will only land new business when modern community facilities are already in place and up to date.
The next comprehensive plan should adopt a different solution. It should adopt policies that will help recruit industries that:
- add little to no long-term burden on our local community facilities, including services and infrastructure,
- Increase the real estate tax base to support local services.
- protects our topsoil for future generations.
- Reduces chemical pollution in local watersheds.
- Helps replace the $64 million of lost tobacco and dairy income
- Increase the number of local high-value job opportunities.
