Incentive policies in place to boost interest in industrial park

Four lots remain up for grabs at the Holton Industrial Park north of the city, but finding buyers for those lots has been no easy task for the city despite a recently-created incentive policy that encourages new business and industry to come to Holton, bringing property and sales tax revenue and jobs.

“People from Topeka will drive up here,” Holton Mayor Robert Dieckmann said. “We may not be big enough to make Goodyear tires, but we’re big enough to make dog food… Hiawatha’s hitting a home run with the dog food industry.”

Industries such as the Parkville, Mo.-based Crosswind Industries, which has plants in Sabetha and Hiawatha, could be a good fit for the last nine or so acres at Holton’s industrial park, but Dieckmann said he didn’t know why “light manufacturing” industries couldn’t come to Holton. But the City of Holton does have a policy in place that could be used to draw such businesses to the industrial park — and elsewhere in the city.

In the fall of 2013, Holton City Manager Bret Bauer introduced an “economic development incentive policy” to the Holton City Commission for review, including possible property tax abatements and the issuance of industrial revenue bonds for new industries interested in locating in Holton. After some adjustments, commissioners approved the policy that November.

Following the policy’s approval, commissioners said they would like to see Jackson County officials review the policy and draft something similar. “We’d like to see if the county can come on board, or maybe they can adopt something different,” Commissioner Tim Morris said in November 2013.

Commissioners had also, in recent years, been discussing replacement of deteriorating chip-and-seal roads at the industrial park. Recently, the city approved a $910,000 proposal from King Engineering of Holton to rebuild the roads, and with both new roads and the economic development incentives policy in place, the city is hoping to sell the industrial park’s last four lots.

But while the city has a set of economic development incentives in place, the county does not, according to Janet Zwonitzer, a former Holton city commissioner now serving on the Jackson County Commission. 

“We don’t have anything right now that’s organized on a county level, like we did when we had the Jackson County Development Corporation,” Zwonitzer said of the now-defunct economic development entity. “It is my hope that in the upcoming year, we can make a new plan with incentives that are spelled out and get an economic development plan back in action.”

Providing funding for economic development at the county level had been the focus of a 0.4-percent county sales tax initially put into place in 2005, with revenues split between JCDC, the county’s road and bridge department and the county’s nine cities. But when the sales tax was renewed by voters seven years later, JCDC had been disbanded and the revenues from the tax were to be split between the roads and the cities.

Since joining the county commission, Zwonitzer said the county has been able to put away $100,000 for economic development, but the county still needs some kind of written plan to attract business and industry into the county.

“We have nothing that would be a go-to plan,” she said. “We’re going to have to get creative on that.”

Holton city and Jackson County officials also met in 2014 to discuss strengthining their ties in the area of economic development, possibly through the creation of a position that could serve both entities at the suggestion of a Kansas Department of Commerce representative. But as Bauer and Zwonitzer both noted, that suggestion has yet to be realized. 

According to the city’s economic development incentives policy, a business must be engaged in one or more of the following activities in order to qualify for public incentives: manufacturing, service sector, research and development, warehousing and distribution, corporate headquarters, transportation, commercial redevelopment, tourism, housing and medical services.

The policy also states that incentives should not be granted if doing so would create “an unfair advantage for one business over another competing business within the City,” and that such incentives must make a difference in that a business’ establishment or expansion within the city would not have otherwise been established or expanded if not for the policy’s availability.

How the different aspects of the incentives policy would affect businesses applying for such incentives would depend on the businesses themselves, it was noted. But in the case of the industrial park, interested businesses seeking one or more of the last four lots have other things to keep in mind.

“The lots that are left may need a lot of dirt work and a lot of site work to bring them to grade,” Zwonitzer said.

Repairing the road, however, is a step in the right direction.

“That road has been taking a beating from those heavy trucks,” she said. “Chip-and-seal roads just can’t hold up to these industrial-size trucks.”

Justin Wensel of Tonganoxie-based KHC Inc., the contractor working with King Engineering on the industrial park road reconstruction project, said work on rebuilding the roads is likely to begin next week and take about two months to complete. The reconstruction work will be done in phases, Wensel added, to allow traffic to continue to move through the industrial park.

But even with a new road in place, commissioners are still concerned with how to sell the last four lots. At the most recent commission meeting, it was suggested that the city enlist the services of a real estate agent to sell the lots.

“The commission can consider any viable option they see fit,” Bauer said of the suggestion. “I would definitely not rule it out.”