Merger Brings Louisville Into The Top Tier

After failing three times before, the effort to merge the city of Louisville with Jefferson County finally succeeded in last year's elections, bringing the Greater Louisville area from the 60th in population in the country into one of the top 25 cities in the United States.
        "If you look at what mergers have done for cities like Indianapolis and Nashville," governor Paul Patton told statewide business publication, The Lane Report, "you can expect that the Louisville-Jefferson County merger will expand economic development in Louisville, and therefore Kentucky."
        Even before the merger, Louisville had sprung from 74th nationally to 16th in the past five years in the Cognetics Entreprenurial Hot Spots listing, which is published by Cognetics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based demographics research firm. The city is home to an abundance of new technology companies, logistics firms and a robust medical community, not to mention community pillars like Brown-Forman Corp. and Tricon Global Restaurants.
        Of equal stature to Toyota in Kentucky economic development lore was the landing of United Parcel Service's hub, which has evolved into the UPS Hub 2000 project.
        Phase One of the UPS project, a 494,000 sq. ft. (46,000 sq. m.) facility employing 415 part-time workers and 80 full-time employees, moved its first packages in late September 2000. By the time the full, three-part site is completed in May 2002, sorting capacity will have climbed from the current 215,000 packages per hour to 300,000. The logistics operation will now expand to a 400,000 sq. ft. (37,000 sq. m.) UPS e-Logistics warehousing and distribution center in Elizabethtown, which Kentuckians were calling E-town way before e-commerce came around. The facility is the first of five planned across the country.
        Meanwhile, the company continues to receive accolades for its minority employment, benefits and workforce development efforts, topped by its "Metropolitan University" program. The company is spending over $1 million this school year to facilitate higher education for employees at both the Univ. of Louisville and Jefferson Community Technical College.
        Just as significant in the big city are the small players, like MedVenture Technology, which speeds medical device prototypes to market.
        "UPS helps with distribution," says co-founder Kevin Bramer. "People can call us at the end of the day, we can finish building a rapid prototype, get it to UPS late at night, and have it there in the morning. We're one of the few places in the country where you can do that."
        Louisville in turn is fast becoming one of the places in the country where the quality and moderate pace of life -- combined with the quality and fast pace of technological innovation -- are earning high marks.