Commissioners 6-30-2026 [2:05-7:05]

Morning. Good morning. Morning. Commissioners, thanks. Thanks for having us here today. My name is Ron Walker. I'm president of workforce housing LLC and CFC properties, both of which are cook group companies and we're here today to talk about a housing development project we've been envisioning for quite a while here in Lawrence County and I want to talk with you about that and let you know what we're hoping to do here in your community. I also want to introduce Jimmy McElroy in the back row right here with me. Jimmy is our construction manager with Cook. He's with Cook Architecture and Engineering and he's worked with us on our past projects as well. So I'm hoping I think I see it. You have a presentation that we gave you to the auditors office staff last week. I was just going to kind of go through that a little bit and then be available to answer any questions that you might have. But we're part of Cook Medical. This is a Cook Medical project. As you may know, Cook Medical is headquartered in Bloomington, Indiana, but we are all around the globe. We do a lot of things. Cook owns West Baden in French Lix, CFC properties, Cook Aviation, Cook Polymer, a plastics company, but they are most known for medical devices and that has been the driver for many years. What they are also known for is historic renovation and rehabilitation of many many buildings in our region and it's that real estate experience and community philanthropy that is what has brought workforce housing to the forefront in this region. You'll see a slide there that talks about why is it a problem and we're talking about housing. A few years ago, the leaders of Cook primarily in Orange County realized that there was a struggle among our employees in this region to find adequate housing. We were hearing about it from our staff. We were seeing it and our history in real estate management and real estate development led us to the decision that we need to help build homes in the region. When we are trying to hire, when we're seeing our community struggle with workers finding affordable housing, we realize we needed to take a step towards that direction and work with the community, work with local government, work with economic development partners to see if we could create more inventory, essentially, in the community. That's what we essentially tried to do. We looked at our employee feedback. We looked at the stability of our workforce. We looked at student population in the public schools and realized we think we can help, but we can't do it alone. We started building in Orange County. There's a slide there that says, let's build houses. You can imagine the incredible staff infrastructure we would have when we have two full-service resorts, over 1,000 people at peak times working there, commuting in many cases from long distances. When we're essentially at an employment rate, where the unemployment rate is very, very low, it is hard to attract and retain employees. Orange County had not had a new subdivision since the 1960s. We purchased some property and we started to build homes. Interestingly, this was right around the time of the pandemic and the resorts had to close for a little while, but we had a team of people there that take care of historic properties and they were able to help us get started building. We built some of these with our own teams. Initially, what we did is we started building what you might think of traditionally as starter homes. They are homes that are three-bedroom, two-bath homes with a two-car garage. Our goal was to build houses and then offer them in Orange County. We would offer one house to resort employees first and then one house to anybody who worked in Orange County. We would offer that home at our price of construction. There was zero profit for cooking this. We were simply trying to build homes and get people into them. We did that and we sold our first 12 homes pretty smoothly. We would do an open house and then people would submit names and names would be drawn and then you'd get a chance to close on a house. We sold all 12 of those. We then moved into Owen County, Spencer, Indiana. The reason we did that is Cook has a medical device facility there. In Owen County and Spencer had researched an area that they wanted for housing and we began working with them. They