NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Debra Teufel with the Hutchinson/Reno County Chamber of Commerce acknowledges the lack of large lots that the current industrial park in Hutchinson has, but her goal is to both find more space and fill what is already there at the same time. There have been 23 RFPs to cross her desk so far this year.
"The more times you get in front of business opportunities, the higher chance you're going to have to land one of them," Teufel said. "You're not ever going to land them all, but we want to increase our odds. Last year, in the year, we had 22 RFPs. In the course of the last six months, we have seen twice the project activity that we had a year ago, which is a great thing for Kansas."
In recent weeks, three of those RFP submitters have come to Hutchinson for site visits.
"One is in the sector of building advanced complex systems to serve, maybe a local company that is already here with a particular product," Teufel said. "It might be in the realm of making a composite product that goes into the supply chain for a local company. Those might be fiberglass, they may be plastics, they may be metallic materials that go into aviation components. The other two were more in the chemical side of things. That could be anywhere from a processing of an oil to the processing of a chemical that goes into something further downstream."
Hutchinson is proud of its economic diversification and Teufel sees these projects as enhancing that.
"One of them pointed out that we don't currently have very many companies that do much in the way of refining a chemical for a particular process," Teufel said. "We have a company GEOChem that is currently growing on what was the former Consolidated site. Beyond GEOChem, we have some smaller companies that are doing things with certain chemicals, but it is not a large employment sector for us at this point. I think that would be a great diversification of our employment."
Teufel acknowledges somewhat the chicken or the egg nature of economic development, which is that people who specialize in areas that don't have jobs here don't already live here, so getting a workforce in place to start a new sector can be challenging, even if the infrastructure like water and power is already in place. That's why economic development professionals prefer to look at skillsets more regionally rather than locally, especially when large scale projects, like the new Panasonic battery plant near Kansas City, go searching for sites.
"The key ingredient for every single business project is workforce," Teufel said. "Certainly, if we had the land assembled for a project like the Panasonic project, I think we could have been in the running for it, because we have all of those other boxes checked. Could we absorb 4000 new jobs in south central Kansas? I think, absolutely yes, because that's where the power of regionalism comes into play and we are definitely in a shared regional economy with the Wichita metro area."
Right now, though, Hutchinson has no plots of land that are even as large as the 300 acres Panasonic's plant will sit on that are both under city control and have the infrastructure ready to go. That's why the Chamber is looking at a site south of South Hutchinson to hopefully create a new industrial park in future years, but the water needs of that site must be addressed along with any land purchases necessary, so we'd be talking about years before that potential place would be shovel-ready.