8/26/2025 Council Meeting [26:56-29:39]

Well I just wanted to give Jeff a quick shout-out and thank you because we started this process I think there was a little bit of turnover with the existing economic development professionals for Lawrence County so Jeff's real stepped up and held a small piece of process so I'm happy to talk more about the company what they do you know locally here it's it's an administrative ballot or you know American FiberTech it's it's the parent company KSM, my team what we do is we work with companies that are growing and expanding across the country and we help them kind of select where they would like to continue to grow and then we hope to negotiate many sort of tax credits or incentives to help make that help ease that burden of the upfront investment kind of on a short-term or long-term operational cost help them phase in property taxes pursue grants things like that I would just like to mention to I've got two folks here representing the company Jason Rainey is here he's the controller trope down from Latvia and Leslie Stax is here she's the plant manager like you know I'm happy to go through more information if you'd like and I'm just kind of talk through the evapment and the numbers we're kind of leaving it up to you guys how I want to so industrial talent does a lot of logging so it's a lot of sawmill type equipment that they have out of the facility the equipment that they're bringing in is just that to that nature in the sawmill but it's more automated more technical it will have better throughput for them better product output so hopefully being able to use the same amount of employees having a I won't give a percentage but a better output as far as product they're producing there this mostly goes into wooden pallet manufacturing and they have a facility up here Latvia as well so this a payment what it really does is it helps offset some of these up front property taxes that they would pay on the new equipment it would protect you that those dollars that would be used for property taxes will be spent on creating these as a workforce and work on the new equipment and I even mentioned as well as a result of that training on the new equipment that's going to result in payments as well and software