Comprehensive Plan – Transportation
Let’s review each mode of transportation in Mason County
- The Ohio River is excellent for bulk transport. However, river facilities will require significant capital when new shippers are recruited.
- Mason County has one active East/West mainline rail corridor and one North/South corridor that is impassible and unused. The next Comprehensive Plan should:
- Work to keep CSX interested in Mason County.
- Develop a hiking and bike path along what was the TTI corridor to Paris, KY, if we truly want to develop tourism,
- Fleming Mason Airport and our local aviation training can play a key role in our future — if we create a local tax base to support them.
- Only with substantial capital investment, can Mason County deliver sufficient natural gas to support large-scale industrial customers such as substantial electric generation or gas-fired steel mills.
- In recent decades KY Department of Highways built the excellent AA east/west highway and upgraded the roads to Flemingsburg and Lexington. However, our other county and state roads have mostly stayed the same since the 1960s, even though farm machinery is bigger and new housing has increased traffic.
- Local generating stations have built an extensive electric transmission network in Mason County. Unlike other forms of local transportation, no public capital investment is needed for new enterprises to use this capacity.
After construction, large-scale solar arrays will place little to no load on roads and other public services. 6,000 acres will pay $15.4 million more taxes over 30 years than current land uses. (6000 acres is only 54% of the soybean acres Mason County harvested in 2021.)
The next comprehensive plan should encourage enterprises that form a solid tax base that will fund upgrading our public services. It must balance future generations’ living standards and prosperity with current residents’ preferences by reducing artificial barriers that increase the land needed to produce the same value.
