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New developments, new companies, new jobs.

It's all in a day's work for the team at the Greater Jackson Chamber.

Hello, I'm Peter Noll.

On this edition of Tennessee is Talking, the topic is all the great things happening right here in Jackson from the latest on the Great Wolf Lodge to when the new Dixie plant will open, so let the conversation begin That's so cool.

Then that's when I said that-- The problem with that idea is-.

Wow, that was amazing.

Then I came up with a solution.

What was that about?

Here's what I think about it.

Now we're talking.

West Tennessee PBS presents Tennessee is Talking.

Let the conversation begin.

Thanks for joining today's discussion.

I'm Peter Noll.

Today, we're talking about the many new d.. in Jackson with the president and CEO of the Greater Jackson Chamber, Kyle Spurgeon, and their Chief Community Development Officer, Kyle Barron.

Welcome, both of you, to the program.

-Thank you.

-Thank you for having us.

2023 was such an incredible year.

You're building on that.

Let's vote some of these highlights.

I think the challenge for Kyle and I today is to match your excitement.

Absolutely.

I will tell you, 2023, you should be excited about it.

Everyone in West Tennessee should be.

We had a great year.

We've got a great team at the chamber.

We got over 1150 members.

We are the Greater Jackson Chamber, which means that we work in surrounding counties also.

Just so many great things happened.

What people are starting to see is, when Blue Oval City announced a couple of years ago all this growth is coming, well, Jackson had already started growing a little bit.

The Georgia Pacific project Dixie, we'll talk about that in a minute, that was already on the books.

It was ready to be announced when Ford announced.

We started seeing all these things start coming to fruition and ground being broken, new companies announcing, new housing developments being announced, apartments.

If you drive around Jackson now, you cannot miss seeing all the apartments that are under construction.

2023 was a great year, and we look forward to discussing some of the specifics of that here this afternoon.

Kyle, how do you build on that?

I think one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that we are building on something that's already been going well for so long.

Reinvesting and redeveloping in areas that have maybe been neglected or looked aside, but giving an opportunity to breathe new life into them.

I think one of the things that we're probably most excited about is re-breathing life into downtown, right?

That's done through small businesses, which is huge, right?

What gets companies to come to town is rooftops and small businesses.

That's the culture and the feel of a community.

They don't want to be the only larger business in town.

They want to have something to go do on the weekends.

Our small businesses have really picked that mantle up and run with it.

To that extent, more than 80% of our membership is small business How do you juggle that?

If you follow you guys on Facebook and everyone should be following them on Facebook, there's ribbon-cuttings for small businesses all the time, but you're juggling that with bringing in major Fortune 500 companies.

How do you juggle that?

It all goes together .. a big piece of this economy in Jackson and West Tennessee.

I often tell people is, when you look at recessions-- I wish I had coined this phrase, but Curtis Mansfield helped me figure it out.

He said Jackson is, unfortunately when a recession happens, Jackson is one of the last ones in and the first one out.

The reason for that is because our economy is so broad-based.

You have so many different sectors.

Manufacturing is obviously part of that, but small businesses.

Look at health care in our community.

Retail, entertainment.

Just in manufacturing, if you look at the diversity in the manufacturing sector, food processing, and obviously housing with companies like Owens Corning Delta Faucet, then you look at the automotive side, everybody for two years has been talking about Ford.

Toyota's been here 20 years.

Then there are six other Japanese automotive suppliers.

It's a balance we have to strike.

If we had 1000 employees, we couldn't do enough for our small businesses.

That is a challenge because all their needs are different.

Kyle, it is-- I'm not going to say it's a struggle.

He works very hard at it, but every day a small business has got a new question, and how can we facilitate it best.

You're doing a contest or something I saw.

We are, yes.

With all the snow that came through in t.. we realized that a small business can be shut down for a week, and that can be detrimental to them.

We're trying to do something, just something small on our social media to celebrate small businesses.

Right now, in the month of February, we are showing love and shopping small, right?

You can go on to our Facebook page and you can take a picture in front of a small business that you are a big fan of.

Probably one that you're a neighbor with or you know the neighbor is the owner and celebrate them and what they contribute to the community.

Put it up on our Facebook page and then we'll do a drawing for a $100 gift card to one of our members.

If they're not a member yet, that's okay, too.

It gives us a chance to tell them that the community loves them and we'd love for them to join Jackson Chamber, the Greater Jackson Chamber.

One of the questions I know you guys get, we hear from people always talking, Great Wolf Lodge.

I remember sitting at the chamber when it was announced.

It was like, I want to say right before COVID.

I want to say, a month later, everything's shutting down.

The town was just on fire, so excited, and then pandemic happened.

-What's the latest?

-Yes.

I will start back in, projects, some of them go quick, some of them take a while.

The mega site took 17 years before Ford announced.

We are now into year five of the Great Wolf Lodge project.

That is a good thing because there's been two times this project could have died.

I'll give thanks to the state of Tennessee, our local teams at the chamber, the city, the county, the Industrial Development Board have kept that project alive because COVID almost killed it.

The state had to pull back a 20 million dollar incentive package because, naturally, they didn't know what was going to happen with state revenues during and after COVID.

COVID relaxed, the money was put back in.

Then the equity markets tightened up.

Interest rates go up.

That obviously impacts Great Wolf Lodge's decision.

Right now, there was just a meeting this morning to finalize some of the design opportunities that they've got and have been presented to the community.

The state, I think, has got one more document to sign.

It's literally dotting an I and crossing a T to get that done.

Great Wolf has until December 31st of this year to break ground or the project will not happen.

If they break ground before then, it will.

I'm still very optimistic that's going to happen.

Tourism numbers in Jackson are a half million a year.

500,000 people visit Jackson.

That one project 500,000 people a year, so it doubles tourism in West Tennessee and in Jackson.

Where is it going to go again?

An easy way to look at it, if you're out at the ballpark at Jackson and you're going in but you turn around and look back up over the hill past Ridgecrest, it's 40 acres back in there that they have under contract Talk to me about if somebody has never heard or been to a Great Wolf Lodge.

What is it?

Yes.

I often get, "Hey, that's goi..

It'd be just like the one up in the Smoky Mountains."

I don't know the name of the place up in the Smoky Mountains.

If Great Wolf Lodge is in the major leagues, that's like a double-A facility.

Great Wolf Lodge is more Disney-like.

I think there are now 20 or 21 Great Wolf Lodges open around the country.

It's hard for me to describe, so I'd just ask you to go to the website and look at it.

Google Great Wolf Lodge.

It'll surprise you if you've not done it.

Their target market is families with kids from 4 to 12.

They have a capture area of four and a half to five hours.

That's why Jackson's attractive.

We're right in the middle.

If you look, you can drive from Nash.. from Memphis, from Little Rock, St. Louis, Birmingham, Tupelo, all these .. Jackson's right in the middle of that.

We're still extremely optimistic.

I get it.

There are people who are like, "Gosh, I'm tired of hearing about Great Wolf Lodge."

I get that, but don't let the delays impact your understanding of what a great project it is We're still at the table.

Hopefully, it'll be announced later this year that they're breaking ground.

Very rarely does anything great come quick or easy.

Yes, that's right.

Good point.

The other big project is, and I know we've been hearing about it, is the Dixie plant -Yes.

-Tell us about that.

Another thing, go out there and look.

It's 900,000 square feet.

They are moving equipment in now.

The facility will be opening later this year.

They have not pinpointed an exact date, but they have hired employees.

I think 40 of those employees were up in Bowling Green in the last couple of weeks training at a Georgia Pacific facility there.

What is so great, and I hope folks realize this, we don't just recruit any company to come to Jackson They've got to fit our culture.

What we're specifically after now is high capital expenditures, lower employment count, high wage.

Also, part of that is getting involved in the community.

Georgia Pacific, Dixie, has absolutely done that.

You're already seeing them active in Jackson supporting nonprofits.

You see their name in a lot of places.

Those are the types of companies that we recruit.

When you look at our existing industry base, they match that.

How do you go about attracting those types of companies?

Being selective.

In the economic development business, just a quick elevator pitch on how it works is, first of all, your community's got to be attractive.

You've got to have sites that companies can build on, and you take as many things related to timing out of it as possible.

We've got great sites here.

The state of Tennessee's Economic and Community Development Department and TVA's Economic Development Departments are two of the best in the country.

Most of the big projects contact them first.

Our primary thing is to have good relationships with the project managers for both of those organizations.

On top of that, then we also build relationships with site selection consultants.

If you had Peter Knoll Industries, you had 500 employees, you wanted to open up a new facility in the south, you'd probably hire a consultant to help you with that.

Those people that specialize in that, we build relationships.

Bottom line, our business is a relationship business.

We do business with people we know, and trust.

Those consultants do the same thing.

Let's switch gears and go back to small businesses.

How are small businesses doing in Jackson?

They're doing great.

There's another one open, and it see.. That is something that it's because of the community that they have the ability to open their doors.

They get through the process easily with the city, which is huge.

Not every city has that worked out that well.

Our city's done a great job of making that a streamlined process for them.

Then once they open their doors, they're met with a lot of love.

We've taken that community feel to the next level when it comes to a grand opening of a small business, and how we get involved with small businesses in general.

Just the showing love and shopping small.

Everything we're trying to do with it is intentional to make sure that we prepare that small business for the greatest success that we can.

What is the Greater Jackson Chamber doing?

What resources do you have for small businesses?

We partner a lot with other resources.

I think one of the things that we're really good at is our network of..

Working collaboratively with the Co. to make sure that if somebody comes to us and says, "Hey, we want to start a brand-new small business," I'm not going to come inside them and say, "Hey, let me walk you through that step-by-step.

I'm going to tell them about Co. starters and get them connected with the Co.

They can go through the Co. Starter program, learn from the best in the city on it, and then work their way through that.

Briefly, what is the Co.

Program, for those that don't know?

The Co. is an entrepreneurial - It was started under Governor Haslam.

He launched entrepreneur centers across the state.

I think at that time there were nine of them when you were still living in Texas-.

Yes, it was.

when he did that.

The entrepreneur centers were launched.

They are a place that you can go if you've got a business idea.

Something that really occurred to me, or I heard someone at the Co. say, if you've got a hobby, a lot of people have a hobby, they want to turn it into a business.

Just think about it, they will take you through the steps.

It's like, can I actually monetize what I like to do?

Some people may be great cooks.

That don't mean they'll be great at opening and running a restaurant.

A lot of times, people that go through the Co.'s programs may not end up doing the business that they thought that they should and was going to make them a lot of money because they find out that's probably just not best for you to take to the market.

Most of the time they do, though.

The team out at the Co. is exceptional with that.

Kyle is exactly right.

Small business is, if you call us today and you have an issue or you have a question about how can my small business be more profitable, we may or may not have the answer.

We're going to help you find the answer.

That's where we provide the most resources because some of those answers may be with the federal government.

Some of them could be with state government.

Some of them could be with another chamber member that needs someone to supply something that they're already doing.

Again, just if you hear me say relationship once today, I hope it's ten times because that's all.

What we do is relationship-driven, and we facilitate those relationships.

I think it's great, too, whenever we bring in a large industry as well and they partner with a small business.

I was at the turntable, got a cup of coffee, and it said Dixie on the side.

It was a great day, right?

It's a perfect marrying of two new neighbors.

Are they making Dixie cups at the Dixie plant or Dixie plates or all of it?

They're going to make cups, plates, and platters.

Wow.

For the whole country?

Yes.

Now, I can't tell you.

There's other facilities that are already doing that.

COVID increased demand for their products, and then they're going to have a new product.

It's like a disposable cutting board.

They're going to have to tell you how that works because it's got to be pretty good.

I can't wait, but I love it.

Yes, that's right.

That's the stuff that's coming to Jackson.

When you tour these plants, it's advanced technology.

It's advanced manufacturing.

We're seeing a resurgence of people.

We went through a period of time in this country where you don't want to work in manufacturing because it's dirty, it's not safe.

It is just the opposite.

I encourage any parents that are listening, if their kids aren't sure what they want to do, they don't have to go to a four-year school.

For many kids, that's exactly what you need to do.

Go to Jackson State Community College.

Go to TCAT.

Get involved in programs where you get certificates.

An example is that you can go, an 18-year-old can graduate high school.

His background is education, so he knows this too, is that you can graduate high school, go to TCAT, get enrolled in a tool and dye program, hook on with someone like Toyota.

By the time you're 22, 23 years old, you're going to have zero debt and probably making anywhere from $80,000 to $100,000 a year.

-Sign me up.

-That's pretty attractive.

Sign me up.

Speaking of high-tech things, I've been reading about 6K Energy.

Tell me about that.

Yes.

What do you understand about it?

I know very little.

I know very little.

That project, I think we announced last March.

Prior to that, we visited their facilities up near Boston.

It is a process that heats rare earth minerals.

After they've been microwaved, it heats them up to about 6,000 degrees.

Yukon Outfitters, the cups that they make and sell here in .. if you envision one of those that's about two stories tall.

They shoot a 6,000 degree plasma beam up through that, manipulate those materials.

What comes out on the other side are materials that will go into EV batteries.

In the facility in Jackson, I think it's either 20 or 40.

I think it's 40 of those reactors.

They're called reactors.

They're not nuclear reactors.

They're plasma reactors.

That is the most advanced company we've ever recruited on the front end.

I'm not saying there's not other facilities in Jackson, West Tennessee, that do some things that are just as advanced.

Sure.

For a startup like this to be in the EV sp.. that's a real feather in our hat.

How did you get that?

How did we get it?

That process-.

-Relationships?

-Yes, through relationships.

The state and TVA got a request from a consultant, and that consultant then looked at Jackson.

A little bit deeper into that process is that COVID helped us shorten or make it easier for companies to choose sites because now you do virtual site visits to start.

Those virtual site visits might be 20 communities that the company's looking at.

From that, they'll narrow it down to 5 or 10 that they visit.

From there, it's usually narrowed down to three for a second or third visit.

This is such a great story.

We were down to Jackson, a community in Alabama, and I think one in North Carolina.

We were all invited to go to Boston to meet the senior leadership team at different times.

I can still remember this dinner.

It was at an Italian restaurant right outside of Boston.

There was 20 of us around the table.

The 6K team told us, "I want you to sit here, you to sit here," because they wanted to see our team interact with everyone.

When we won the project, they later told us that dinner is what won it for you because the other two communities were close in terms of how everything looked financially for them.

You guys made us feel like when we located in Jackson, we're going to have a great relationship with your team.

Again, relationships and the team killed it.

A good dinner matters.

-It did.

That's right.

-Yes.

I think that's one of the things that excited me the most on the community side.

We're taking that same approach in economic and applying it into the community when we're doing the One Vision Jackson plan and looking at how we create space for housing.

We know that growth is coming, but we can be intentional with it, and the One Vision Jackson plan is doing just that.

By working through those four different areas, identifying where the opportunities are, and then making it so that a new housing developer can come to town very quickly, pick up some documents that see, okay, here's the look-feel that they're going for.

Then we get to help guide that process, and we're doing the same thing on that side and the community development side.

Speaking of coming and visit Jackson, what's the latest with t.. We've been having a lot of fun conversations out at the airport lately, and we've been involved with them here for the last year really pretty intensely, trying to help take a 10 year master plan, 10 plus year master plan, and condense it down to 2, 3, 4 years.

We've done it.

We've applied for a .. both at the federal and at the state level, to see what might be available in that space for funding.

Probably what's most exciting is our central air service is up for bid right now.

Currently, we've got four different bids.

It's an open process, so you can go and look and see who they are and what they what they do.

What I can share is, two of them are jet.

One of them is jet to Chicago.

That's a 30 seater jet.

That's very different than the current plane that we've ..

There's a lot of excitement building around the airport.

It's exciting to see that's the first thing that somebody sees when they fly to our community, to decide if they're going to invest in our community.

It's also the last thing they see when they leave out.

It is literally your first and your lasting impression.

This is an opportunity for us to take 1942 infrastructure.

We're working together to get the funding to be able to upgrade that to 2024, all at the same time adding on jet service.

-That is exciting.

-It is very exciting.

If we can fly to Chicago and Detroit, that's a great day.

I can hit two more baseball towns and knock out some things, but it's good.

With all these plants opening, do we have enough places for all the people to live?

I know you guys do a lot of studies when it comes to housing.

It's not like, "Oh, let's build some houses."

You're going to be planning years ahead of time.

What's the latest on the housing side?

I'm going to answer the question and then let Kyle tell you what we're doing.

The answer is, no we don't.

As a result, we did we conducted a study about a year ago.

What it showed is that we could expect anywhere from 11, 13% growth.

Well, we're a town of 100,000 people basically, so that's 11,000 13,000 new residents.

We do not have the housing for it.

We're making relationships and connections across the state and across the nation to try and help encourage that growth here locally.

The rooftops absolutely matter.

Trying to make sure that we work with the city collaboratively to identify those spaces in that one vision Jackson plan, to then also make sure that we've got ideas, plans, construction goals and how do we work through that process with the fastest ability?

More importantly, making sure that we're not just putting up sticks.

We're building community.

It is important to us that whoever it is that comes in and builds houses, and we have a lot of local developers as well, local builders as well.

They've built everything here.

You don't see a lot of the national names, but we need so many houses so quickly that we may have to have some new names to town.

We want to make sure that whenever we bring those new names that they come and they bring community.

They don't just put up buildings.

That's something that we're really priding ourself on and having those conversations trying to help identify and really help guide that process just like we do on the economic development front.

I think, until someone proves me wrong, we are the only chamber in the state that's managing potential housing development like we manage recruiting new industry.

Again, that word again, relationship.

That's what Kyle is doing is forming relationships both locally, statewide, nationally.

Locally, you may have seen the announcement last year the crossings at X someplace that 600 new homes is coming, and it's a community.

It's not just a subdivision.

It's a community.

Speaking of new communities, new developments, I saw photos going all over Facebook about those new developments, artists' renderings of where the service merchandise is, the Airways Boulevard, Lane, and North Highland.

Tell me about some of these.

Are those all in the works?

Are those just pie-in-the-sky dreams?

Those are three of the four sub-areas, the fourth one being West Jackson.

Four sub-areas that were identified in the One Vision Jackson plan.

I encourage everybody to go on to the city's web page under the residents tab and click on One Vision Jackson.

It is some of the coolest things that I've seen happen in our community in the time I've been here.

With Omen and Lane in that area, it's how do you redevelop that space while honoring the history that's there?

They took that concept.

We had a steering committee that guided that conversation.

We had local community committees that helped inform that conversation.

Then we've partnered with Looney Rick's Kiss to develop the ultimate plan that shows how do you go into that area, honor that heritage, but also bring it back to life, breathe life into it in a new way.

That's something where each of the areas looks a little bit different.

Omen and Lane, it's taking any of the abandoned lots an.. How do you unearth the creek that actually starts at Omen and goes all the way through the lift?

There is an opportunity in that space as well.

For downtown, it starts on bypass and airways and goes all the way to Royal.

Within that space, they identified five different potential neighborhoods.

How do you build community in that space in a way that encourages investment, encourages opportunity, encourages business, and also has residency along that path?

The one that I think probably gets the most questions is Jackson Plaza and the idea and the concept behind having an arena.

What would it look like for a town our size to add an arena to it that can have a seating capacity of 7,500 people potential for basketball or hockey and all of the unique opportunities that come with that space?

We've really tried to be intentional by not-- We can't prescribe or require certain things but we can give guidelines.

That is to give the guidelines for future investment and how we would love to see our community grow -It is exciting.

I encourage everyone to check those out.

Before our time's up, I do want to find out the latest on the state games.

That's a big coup for the city.

-That is-.

-Huge.

That's huge.

The state-.

There are people that have been in the state games, got kids going to play them, grandkids.

Tell me, what's the latest?

It'll be in 2025.

We've got 18 months to plan for it.

Lindsey Dawkins on our team is managing that.

Lindsey went out and got it.

It's one of those great situations where you've got someone on your team and she said, "Hey, you mind if I pursue this?"

I'm like.

"Yes, go get it."

In a matter of like three or four weeks, she had it.

Jackson was awarded the state games.

You'll see thousands of people here next year.

Throughout '24, they'll be announcing the specific games that will be played.

I think there's probably close to 100 different types of sports that you can host in your community.

You choose which ones are best.

5-10 years from now, you'll be seeing tens of thousands of people in Jackson at different times for those games filling up our hotels filling up our restaurants.

You think about what goes on at the sportsplex and then elevate that by two or three times on from one of their best weekends, so it's exciting.

I think it's a big win for West Tennessee, too.

-That's right.

-There's an opportunity, if you have a venue and another surrounding neighborhood or county, that makes a lot of sense, you get to partner with them and work that.

Jackson becomes the host city, the hub city, but they can partner along that space.

It's really great for all of West Tennessee.

Thank you so much.

-Thank you.

-There is an energy in the city.

I feel it.

People from out of state, out of town, come to Jackson li.. you guys have got a lot of stuff going on."

I know that's doing part largely to you and your team, so thank you.

That's all our time for this Tennessee is Talking.

We want to thank you guys both for joining us, and your team for doing all their great work.

You can stream today's show and all local shows on the PBS app and on West TN PBS.org.

Thanks for watching.

Have a great day.

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