Greene County Partnership President & CEO Jeff Taylor was guest speaker for the Thursday meeting of the Greene County Republican Women.
”First of all, good afternoon. Thank you for having me. It’s always a privilege to be able to talk about all the great things that are occurring in Greene County. And as we know, we live in a very, very special place and a special places don’t come by happenstance , they come by up with good leadership and dedication. “
“ So, on your table, I dropped off an infographic sheet for you. Normally, I have a slideshow because of visually, I think most of us are visual learners and it’s much more interesting to have pictures in color and points just talk about, but also too, I like to leave lots of room and opportunity for you to ask questions because I can talk about a lot of things because there’s a lot of things going on in Greene County. And I want to make sure that I can answer your questions so that you can share all the great news and opportunities that are occurring in Greene County, because we are truly living in a really remarkable era for Greene County.
COMING OUT OF COVID
Most people coming out of COVID, oh, boy, how did COVID five years ago, which is hard to believe. We came out of the gate like the track stars, like the Olympic track team.
We came out fast and hard and sometimes it was great, sometimes we’re, oh, gosh, what’s happening? But at the end of the day, we’ve made a lot of progress. And again, I give the credit to our leadership and obviously, organizations link.
because as we know, when you’re looking at the statistics of when it started to where we are, with ref representation, and both the state and federal level, that’s a lot of hard work and a lot of communication to say, we’ve got the right message to put this country, our state, and our county, on the right track.”
HIGHLIGHTS
So first, we’ll start out with a couple of highlights. So we’re talking about 2024. I’ll run real quickly into 25, So in 2024, it’s a big part of our economy is actually tourism. And so tourism counts. We’re number 22 in the state of Tennessee out of our 95 counties. We are very, very fortunate to be a presidential community. As I say, we love a good impeachment, and that’s because it brings a lot of people to our community, and they spend their dollars. And so right wrong of indifferent, and I’m impeachments do bring folks here from all over the country in the world to hear about President Andrew Johnson, but our secret weapon and I’ll circled back to that is Davy Crockett.
FIRE FLY FESTIVAL
But last year we introduced the Fire Fly Festival. We have synchronous Fireflies, very similar to what we have over in Gatlinburg. There’s another habitat that’s in West Virginia. We partner with the Cherokee National Forest to do a fundraiser, so It’s a lottery admission, there’s only so many spots. We actually had this event up on that on the start of Viking mountain, not at the top. to see these synchronous fireflies. And so there’s online art auctions that folks have donated art pieces, the funding of that, because to the friends of the Cherokees and the they can put out, work on trails, trailheads, information, they’re putting up an info dues, so it’s to help them improve the Cherokee National Force. So that event last year, we had over 4,000 applicants for 100 slots. So they came from all over the country. And so again, with the limited space, every dollar goes back into the forest and it’s going to make it a better place than we already have.
RIBBON CUTTINGS
Last year we had 30 chamber ribbon cuttings. That is new businesses that have come to Greene County, small businesses, that have opened up in comparison, our friends and neighbors in Washington County had four. We’re kicking their tail. in football, they’re in business too, very competitive.
KEEP GREENE BEAUTIFUL
And all of a we rebranded Keep Greene Beautiful. We felt like it needed to be refreshed. Branding is very important in our world, and so very fortunate, I have a great team, that we did this in the house, and so and I’m going to pick Kevin Morrison on the spot here in a minute later on when we talked about sustainability and KGB and that it does.
TOURISM
Next, we had the Greene County tourism, a big note there is, is that our tourism, dollars and economy saved $351 in taxes for every household in Greene County. And that was up again. I was up to a $12 from the year before. So think about that, we saved $351 per household in taxes because of our tourism events. So we love tourism, they come, they spend their money, and they go home. We like that.
PARTNERSHIP MEMBERSHIP
Next, we had 109 new members. It was the second year in a row that we broke the century mark. Do I think we’ll do that this year, I don’t. We’ve seen the economy slow. I came out of the trucking industry. We always know by trucking where the economy stands. It is slower, so we’re having fewer small businesses open up, which’s usually equates to membership for us. We’re right at 35 We’ve still got seven months to go. We’ll see a pickup in the falls we normally do, but do I think we’ll break 100, I don’t. and that’s business today and individual.
PARTNERSHIP MEMBERS NEEDED
So here’s my pitch. If you’re not a member for $50, you can be the individual member and get the coolest newsletter, put out every month to let you know what’s going on in Greene County. So that’s my cheesy pitch to be a member.
But we do retain 98% of our numbers, which is that normally high, that is due to some groups within the chamber that we have, we have our ambassadors that used to be called the Greencoat Ambassadors. Somewhere we lost the greencoats, so we just call them Ambassadors, but I’ve got 25 folks that volunteer their time. They come out, they support our new members, they come out to the Ribbon cuttings. If we’re having like Iris festival, which I’m about to talk about, they help volunteer there. They are basically our goodwill ambassadors, and so they welcome our members to stay in touch when we’ve broken 600 members. When I started, we were less than 400 So I’ve got a great team where we’re creating, we’re retaining, and we’re engaging, which is very important.
IRIS FESTIVAL
Next, we had the 29th annual Iris Festival last year and the Sundown at Depot Car Show. Fun fact about the car show, every dollar that they race to their car registrations, Every dollar goes back into the community. This year, they will take the proceeds to fund historically, that’s gone to Holston home. This year, they’ve chosen to donate every dollar out of the car show back to AIDNET to continue building that so in case we have another horrible, natural disaster or some type of cataclysmic event that we need to rebuild homes. The funding is there, so they will be donating there and then they also they have a board member that has a grandchild that unfortunately has a rare form of cancer, and so part of the proceeds are going to cancer research as well. So again, they take all that money and recycle it, which is really phenomenal. We’re expecting over 700 cars this year. It is next weekend, but last year, even with the rain, we had roughly 13,000 people in two days in downtown Greeneville, and that equates to $1.3 million to our local economy. And those are from the Department of Tourism. As you see, we love tourists.
BROADBAND
Next, the partnership impact. So one of the biggest, probably Jennifer Keller, who as president at First Horizon Bank. She was my first board chair. I literally started the day the Governor closed the state of Tennessee down, so within 20 minutes, I had a phone call saying, Jeff, you need to get on a phone call, and oh, by the way, we’re shutting the state down due to COVID.
Soon thereafter, Jennifer called me and said, “I have a project for you and’s a sure, what can I do?” she said, “We need broadband.” I went, “Oh, let’s just go down to the next Dollar General and buy that.” So, Greene County did not have Greenville Energy Authority at the time. Greenville light power was not in the broadband business. Come to find out we were the only county north of Knoxville that our power provider was not involved in broadband. So thus, Comcast basically had a monopoly in this county. We all suffered through it, and if you’re still a Comcast customer, I’m sorry.. They were not good to me, I’m sorry.. So I went to Chuck Bolin. and said, Chuck, here’s my research. I’d like to talk to you because he was very big in Chattanooga and bringing Chattanooga into the broadband business. And so we talked and I said, you know, I’d like to go before your board and talk about broadband 101.” So I went, my PowerPoint presentation, stood before a very stern, very conservative, thankfully they watched their dollars. It’s talk about broadband and why we needed it. And so we really found out how bad we needed it when COVID did hit, and so all of our school children are online, a lot of us had to go remote, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, it was interesting to me was that when we finally this is where a picture’s worth $14 million, when they saw the black hole, which was Greene County, and then they saw the rates that we were paying relative to everybody in East Tennessee. We had the second highest broadband rates in East Tennessee. Think about that. We even paid more than Knoxville and Chattanooga, but we’re number two in expense, and we have to have broadband. We have to have the Internet for Teladoc, for education, for just doing business. See we get this pass, so year to today, they have already installed 2.1 million feet in fiber optic cable. And I would say this, not because he’s sitting here, and not because I’m about to go May 29th and ask for more funding for the Greene County government. But Kevin and his team, Nathan, stood up, fought hard, and helped , and of course David Hawk to get Broadband fixed funding to rural America. rural Greene County. Without that funding, without that fight, we may not be where we want. I will say this about our community as well. Then I gets a special place, and I use this pitch, I was down in Nashville. If you ever sat in a room with a bunch of techie people, so if anybody’s really tech, I’m sorry about to say this, it’s the worst than me going back through an economics class, they were all talking about gigabytes and megabytes and all these things, you, it was next to Rebecca Alexander one of David’s counterparts. And I said, do you understand what they’re talking about? She said, all I know is, is we need more money for broadband in Tennessee. And I said, you’re exactly right.” I said, Bit. I said, representative Alexander, let me tell you a great story about Greene County. This is how bad we need it. We have from the seventh largest landing county in the state of Tennessee, seventh largest, largest on this side of the state. I said,It’s great when you’re from West Tennessee and that every acre of land over there is as wide as this floor, because you put up cell tower, you do whatever everybody can communicate that aren’t our top autography used very different. That’s it. I came out of a meeting at Chuckey Doak High School, and David McLain and began great leadership again here. Stood up there and said, “We have a problem. We can’t get access. Our students cannot get access to broadband. We cannot educate our students during COVID right now because we can’t connect with them. I helped write a Grant with the Greenleaf, which is the Green School Systems Education Foundation. We got $25,000 to buy MA, we guify. If you don’t have a cell tower, my five don’t work either. So we still can’t married. He stood up there, and he had 22 small churches throughout this county, and said, “I need your help.” He said, “I’ve got to find broadband, I’ve got to find connectivity for our students.” And those ministers said, “Bring them.” And I thought it was brilliant. Whoever thought that our churches all had broadband. It’s the center point of our communities, right? And yet again, like in hurricane, Len, it was our faith based in this county that came to the rescue. So immediately, the one thing I asked was, can you block the porn? They were like, wee can do that. I promise. And so immediately we started dispatching children and families to parking lots, and then that was the next question. So I said, I don’t care what they said. We’re going to feed them too.Cause a lot of times, a lot of these students were on food subsidies where they weren’t at school, they couldn’t get food. So our churches has stepped up gettingM. And I will tell you, I share that story more than once about how special it is, and I work to get this privilege to do what I do. But we live in a special place. Yes, we do. So you go back to thst fiber, is that we have seen growth because we had the connectivity to bring our businesses.
GLOBAL ECONOMY
We live in a global economy. I usually have a slide up here that shows the flag of Germany, Japan, Switzerland, France, Great Britain. Those are the countries that have companies in our community. We’re a global economy right here in Greeneville, Tennessee. We have seen unprecedented growth, but also investment, and so you will see since 2021, our GDP has increased 25%, which has equates to the next thing, $140 million last year, $149 million were invested. That’s TVA investing in property. That is the new disability and aging facility. That’s a new TCAT, that’s MECO putting in 307 million dollars worth of new equipment. That’s Walmart putting in $84 million worth of robotics. That’s investment, and I will tell you from economic development, I’d much rather have a local existing business investing than I would a new one because you know what you got. And that means they’re dedicated, they’re committed to our people here with a new company, we love them, just not as much, but you don’t know, exactly where they are. At least we’re tried and true with the Walmart, D.C. We’re tried and true with MECO . We know what American Greetings is doing. That right there, it to see $149 million in the investment, that’s transformational for us.
INSIDE THE NUMBERS
We still have 15% of our population that lives in poverty, over 20% of our children are in poverty. So bringing new higher paying jobs, I will be glad to tell you that we now are third in Northeast Tennessee and average wage is that $18.62 when I started, where we’re at $15.25. It’s still not enough, but we’re starting to pay our people what they deserve for a livable wage, not in home wage, and there’s a big difference. I can days about that.
3-STAR AWARD
The governor’s three-star Award. We were one of the first communities. This is a program sponsored by the Tennessee. economic community development, which that even works very closely with with us to get funding. That, award, we were one of the first communities to get certified now on 95 counties are, but without this designation, we are not eligible for a lot of the grants like with Mayor Morrison goes against state funding, there’s either a match. This is very important that we check that box, but it also is a program that pushes us to have goals and strategic plans of how to better improve. And let me add our mission, our mission statement, at the partnership is to improve the quality of the life for all of Greene County. And so this right here helps us do that because we’re using other people’s money to invest in our county, which is always a good thing. My children take, they love to spend my money, but not their own. Community innovation, we were one of gosh, one of 11 communities out of the entire TVA Valley of the Tennessee Valley Network, selected to participate in this. And what occurred was this goes back to Broadband, our initiative was Broadband. And so through this, we received $50,000 So granted $50,000, out of $14 million. you know, that doesn’t move the needle a lot, but I’ll take 50 any day. We were reported $50,000 because of our initiative, our strategic planner, and our partnerships that we created within the community to get brought in. TVA sustainability, this is where I put Mayor Morrison on the spot all the time.
RECYCLING
Mayor, would you talk about our record for recycling and what and then I’ll back into why this is so forth.
Kevin Morrison – “Greene County recycles is about four and a half million pounds of recyclables a year. That equates to approximately 50050 to $600,000 in revenue that goes directly to our solid waste department to buy equipment for, again, holding garbage or handling our waste. Very important. Greene County in and of itself alone in the eight counties of northeast Tennessee has a 56% diversion rate from the landfill. We lead the region by double of any other county in northeast Tennessee, which raises our region, they really appreciate Greene County because it raises our region to a status where everyone is rewarded for their recycling efforts.
But that largely falls due to Greene County, which we’re, I know, the keep beautiful program, Jesse Beth, Jennifer Wilder before her did an excellent job. Our Solid Waste Committee does an excellent job, or solid waste department. We have a great partnership with the town of Greeneville to manage the waste and we get a lot of money. We’re doing the right thing.”
Jeff – “For doing the right thing. We were one of the first small communities in the state of Tennessee to have a full time keeper beautiful employee, and it started with Jennifer Wilder and then Jennifer went to the Boys and Girls Club, which Scott. He had to thank me, but he has to thank we hired Jesse Beth, Jesse Bath, 17 years in the Greene County School system, and she’s bringing her innovation as well in,
YARD OF THE MONTH
By the way, the Yard of the month has just started, so if you’ve got a beautiful yard, if you’ve got a neighbor that’s got a beautiful yard, at least submit them, it’s worth a $50 gift card from the Royals, and that’s a part of the key Green Beautiful initiative.
SUSTAINABILITY
But what’s important what Kevin also added is that we’re one of 17 communities in all of TVA that has a silver status for sustainability. And why is that important? So when you have France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and England in your community, who are much greener, much more about recycling. That’s really important as we’re trying to recruit and continue to ask and to invest, expand their business in our communities, is that we have this designation. And it says, “green means green. We’re not perfect, but we’re late, we’re ahead of our friends in Sullivan County He’s got that global company called Eastman that for rural County, have a full time employee, and also to be awarded one of 17 in the Tennessee Valley that says, “We’re serious about taking care of where we live, but also trying to still provide those jobs that allow us to do both, which is very important to do.
And then lastly, very proud of this gold shovel. That shovel means that we have we have one side in our county, which right now is hard an industrial park that has been certified by the state of Tennessee that it is ready to go for a new company. Now, we’re working on two at the same time, which is really kind of unprecedented, which has a lot from help with represent Senator Sutherland Hall to help get us in front of to Tennessee ECD and TVA.
That call me. Millions of dollars worth of grants for allows us to prepare sites. Because here’s the thing. Kevin and I talk about this a a lot. . You gotta be ready, not get ready. If Kevin and I talked about this a lot, you got to be ready to get ready. So when everybody talks to me and asks, hey, Jeff Taylor, what does a Morristown have? Because they were ready unlike us, we were not ready. And so if you want a new business or a new manufacturing or a new restaurant or a new, whatever, you got to have it ready for them to come here, not wait for them to come and say, “Oh, we’ll build it for you,” because guess what? Everybody else is doing it. They’re there. We’re sitting over here going, “Well, let me go find a shovel.” They already had the shovel. They’ve already laid the pad. They’ve already put in the utilities, and they’re saying we’re ready to go. And so for us to have the investment from TVA in the state of Tennessee to develop Greene Valley, and also hard Snapps Ferry and prior to that, Hardin Industrial says a lot. They believe in what we’re doing. They’ve seen that when we say we’re gonna do it, we do it. We have a long history of manufacturing here, but we’ve now jumped in the gang. And so we’re very excited about what’s happening, that we are working through final contracts with Eternal Water out at Greene Valley. It made been short listed, which means it’s like, it’s Iris Festival and I just talked to the lady from the Miss Tennessee Pageant called last night. You know, you got 50 contestants and they get you down to 10.
PROSPECTIVE INDUSTRY
Well, we were on the list of the short three for the state of Tennessee for our Snapps Ferry site. So it’s already got a lot of interest. We did have a company from Germany come. They’d been on site. We’re still talking to them. So already without the first pound of dirt being moved, we’re making progress. So we’re very excited about that.
Now we’ll circle back to this last piece right here, and then I’m going to open it up for questions and I expect questions, because there’s a lot going on. Very excited what’s going on.
DAVID CROCKETT BIRTHPLACE STATE PARK
This piece right here, there’s a QR code. I really need you to participate and share this with your friends. As you know, David Crockett State Park wiped off the map. tragically, because David Crockett actually is internationally known he’s kind of a cool dude. He’s would say. And we’ve got to rebuild it. And the state of Tennessee is committed to rebuilding it.
Here’s the fun fact of the day. Everybody think it’s Andrew Johnson, gets the most visitors. It’s actually David Crockett. It by a significant margin. Davy Crockett’s State Park out there, almost to Washington County, gets 100 to 150,000 visitors a year. That’s a big money to us, because they stay three to four days. I don’t count, don’t want to camp, but I know they camp and they come in, they buy their groceries, they go get their ice, they come back, they buy their beer, they go back, they do whatever they do, they buy the fishing, d. That’s big money to us. That’s over a million dollars to our economy at that one park. So, please take this, literally, it should take you three minutes to take a survey on what you think. You may not have participated out there, but you might if they had the right facilities, because as I said to them, I like outdoors, I like the water. I don’t like to camp. I want to watch, or own own cabins, so I put that down as my priority. So I’ll ask you your priorities. Share this, because it’s very important. The state’s committed to rebuilding, which we’re thrilled about, because again, it’s worth another million dollars star economy that we don’t have to find somewhere else’s Share that with that. at this time, hopefully give me some a lot of positives that are going on at Greene County
UNEMPLOYMENT RATE
Our unemployment rate is at 4.2. We’re continuing to see our work force climb back up. We’re at over 28,000 work force. It is not at the pre Magnavox-tobacco era of 1999-2000, where we had over 35,000 people that were in our labor force. We are not back to the 30,000 that we were pre COVID. We know that 20% workforce dropped out during COVID. They were female, and they were mothers, because we had a gap in our child care. It’s either too expensive or we don’t have enough. We only have 33 registered child care facilities in Greene County, and that’s not nearly enough, as we know. And it costs too much.
HOUSING
And so when I can give you another data slot about that, how the cost is upside down, relative to the wages, very similar to housing. when we have a housing crisis as well, but part of the housing crisis is we have 189 registered AIRBNBS. Those normally are rental homes, and now they’ become rental vacation homes, so that’s park created part of that gap and housing. But all the good news is we’ve got folks looking to help rectify, trying to figure out how to build. How was that Century 21 last Friday night asked me to speak. They had a group of builders there. Unfortunately, housing devices, the main main. That’s a rich house listing in Green County right now is $330,000. That is not affordable. That’s mean. So we know that there’s a gap, we’ve got folks looking at it and trying to figure out that part of it is because we’ve got too many Airbnb. We’ve got to But that’s tourism. So there’s, you know, crisis there.
Anyway, how can I answer your questions? Because I am here today, like many of you that serve publicly, I’m here to serve you. Again, it’s an honor to be in this position. I tell people I’ve got the best product in the world to represent. That’s Spring County, blessed with amazing leadership. We’re not perfect. There are days we fight like cats and dogs, but in a crisis, we come together and we showed that, and we I’ve been on several panels regarding Th. And again, the conversation was, what did y’all do in Greene County? I said, we hit the ground running, we didn’t wait on anybody, we had great leadership. And our people came through, and if you don’t believe the power of your faith based community, that’s who showed up and showed out. Again, it’s a privilege and an honor to do what I do. So how can I answer your questions? Because I know you’ve got some. Yes, my mother in law is playing bridges out here, so I’t she’s not here.
BROADBAND QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE
My question is broad would take a house like? We don’t even have options to come on. And it’s awful. You can’t be on the Internet. So the strategic plan for broadband was to build it in the density, which would be green mole because there’s 17,000 people that lived there. And so by building it out there, say, I already had an existing network. It was the fastest, quickest, and also creates the cash flow. so that it allows it to expand out. They have they’re literally going after a low hanging fruit, so down the 114 door to the west end. They’ already had a lot of fiber that way that they could branch off. So eventually they will get to Camp Creek. I just don’t know if it’s in five years or less. It could be somewhere in a lot of it, too, is accord and put the spot on data here, how much the state continues to help fund expansion, but between the number of folks that enroll with GEA to help fund that and then also continually investment from the state and federal dollars that allows it to be expedited. But the goal is to bring Broadband as far out to every point as we can. Now on top of Viking Mountain, probably not gonna happen, but Camp Creek, obviously has a population out there that eventually we need to get to. Make sure you get. Foxford Road. Well, I’ve got a run called Church Street. I wish they’d pave. But it’s a great question. Have you tried Skyink? No. I would check into that. Okay, I’ve tried to use that and it was awful. Yeah, I try Sky Link. Obviously, that’s Elon Musk product, but I can tell you that we’ve got friends because we lived in Montana six years and that it’s been very good up there. And then Whitney Winter, who is president of Mexico, and also my fourth year this year, she’s got Skylink.
