This year has been “one of reflection” for the Golden Triangle Development LINK, CEO Joe Max Higgins said.
June marked the industrial recruiting organization’s 20th anniversary, as it started in Lowndes County and expanded its influence to Clay and Oktibbeha counties over time. In Higgins’ tenure, the LINK has helped create 10,000 jobs.
“The jobs we’re creating are vastly different than the jobs that were here,” Higgins told Starkville Rotary Club members Monday in Georgia Blue. “I don’t want to be hurtful, but we used to make toilet seats. Now we make steel.”
And engines, tires and “helicopters that fly,” he noted. Aluminum will soon be tacked to that list with a $2 billion Aluminum Dynamics plant announcing last year it would locate in Lowndes County.
The LINK has also acquired – via industrial megasites and smaller parcels – more than 10,000 acres, he said.
“Guys and girls, that is an assload of land that has been acquired and put into development,” Higgins said. “… It won’t fit into the back of a pickup truck.”
Higgins on Monday hinted at three industrial announcements coming in the next two weeks, deals he said are done but are waiting on final touches.
He told The Dispatch after the meeting two of those deals will be in Lowndes and one in Oktibbeha, with one bringing a more than $200 million capital investment and the other two between $10 million and $15 million.
“They’re good, solid deals,” he said. “They’re not the rockstar, home run type projects, but they are solid singles.”
He also announced the LINK is finalizing plans to move its offices from Columbus to the Golden Triangle Regional Airport. Higgins told The Dispatch the papers should be signed and approved this week, with designs for the new office completed by December and construction likely to begin next spring.
“That’s going to give us a more central point for all three communities,” Higgins told Rotarians. “It’s kind of common ground, if you will. All three of our counties actually own the airport.”
During the meeting, Higgins touched on progress at NorthStar Industrial Park off Highway 389, where $3.4 million in land improvements are underway. He said the LINK is also negotiating to build another spec building on the near-400-acre site, as well as a 200,000-square-foot pad that could accommodate a large tenant.
As far as the “next big deal in the Golden Triangle,” Higgins said that will likely land at the Cinco megasite the LINK is working to develop on 1,500 acres off Highway 82 west of Columbus. If it comes together, it will be the region’s fifth megasite under the Tennessee Valley Authority program for industrial development, with the first four either occupied or soon to be.
But that doesn’t mean it won’t benefit Oktibbeha County, Higgins said.
Of the 10,000-plus jobs the LINK has helped create, those employees live in 37 counties across two states. The executives, on the other hand, are more often than not moving to Starkville.
After Higgins first arrived in 2003, he said, most executives were living in New Hope. Over time, that evolved to shares in Caledonia, north Columbus and Starkville. Now Starkville and Oktibbeha County are drawing the lion’s share – an encouraging figure for the county as Higgins said about 150 managers and executives would move to the Golden Triangle for Aluminum Dynamics alone.
He gave an example of a company who recently hired its fifth general manager since coming to the region. The first four lived in Lowndes County. The fifth, he said, moved to Oktibbeha last week.
“Something has happened of late that has turned that worm,” Higgins said.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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