Development along the I-24 corridor and south western Kentucky received strong news Wednesday morning during the “Team Kentucky” update, when Governor Andy Beshear announced a new build-ready site for Marshall County.
The location will include a 120,000-square-foot building pad on 240 acres, and will be zoned and prepared for heavy industrial use. It has four-lane highway access to U.S. Highway 641 due to adjacency, and is two miles from I-69 and 13 miles from I-24.
Beshear noted all utilities, including fiber redundancy, will be available at the site — one powered by the Tennessee Valley Authority, and served by West Kentucky Rural Electric.
With this coming to Benton, Beshear said Kentucky now has 22 active build-ready sites, and 12 of them have already been selected by companies for new location projects.
In 2020, this specific location was selected for funding through the pilot Product Development Initiative, which was established in 2019 — and provided nearly $7 million in state funding for 20 site-and-building projects statewide.
During the 2022 regular session, the Kentucky General Assembly approved $100 million in funding for PDI.
Treston Smith, chairman of the Marshall County Industrial Development Authority, said the new park will be in deep connection with Murray State University, the WKCTC system and the UK College of Engineering in Paducah — all of which create a pool of “talented and skilled individuals readily available.”
To be build-ready-certified, a site must include a pad ready to accommodate a building of 50,000 square feet, with the ability to expand to 100,000 square feet or more, and utilities extending to the site’s edge. Applicants, usually a city, county or economic development group, must have previously filed the necessary permits, as well as preliminary building plans, cost estimates and schedule projections. Applicants also are asked to provide a rendering of a potential building for the site.
