LEEDS TRIBUNE THE ONLY SOURCE FOR LEEDS NEWS www.LeedsTribune.com
February 28, 2019 | Volume 4, Issue 9
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Leeds Tribune: Growing to better serve Leeds BY CINDY FISHER
Publisher I believe a community is better when it’s served
by a community newspaper. Since my company, Kingfisher Media LLC, purchased the Leeds Tribune in September 2018, my staff and I have worked hard to bring Leeds news, features and advertising messages that help keep the community connected, in print and online. This week, we unveil our new look, a full-size newspaper that has more room
for impactful stories, features, photos and announcements that are important to you, our readers. This new design also gives our advertisers more choices and more visibility to reach their customers. Inside, you will find sections for News, Education, Community, Lifestyle and Sports. You will continue to enjoy our standing
features: Local Heroes of the Month, our Business Spotlight and Leeds High School Athlete of the Week. And of course, Leeds resident Andrew Armstrong heads up our Lifestyle page with his popular recipe column that shares the page with puzzles and a calendar of upcoming events. Don’t forget that we have
a strong online presence. We share top stories at LeedsTribune.com, keeping you informed about news in Leeds in real time. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you want to keep in touch with your community, enjoy our paper at home every week with a subscription for only $26 a year. Visit leedstribune.com/about to sign up or
mail a check to P.O. Box 340, Leeds, AL 35094. You can also pick up copies for 50 cents each at Leeds Jane Culbreth Library, Mills Pharmacy Leeds and the Leeds Area Chamber of Commerce. We’d love to hear from you. Email me at publisher@ leedstribune.com and send newstips and story ideas to news@leedstribune.com.
Tech park by Leeds to bring 1,200 jobs, $85M impact BY CINDY FISHER
Leeds Tribune Staff Leeds is set to reap major benefits from the new Grand River Technology Park that Gov. Kay Ivey announced is coming last week. The park sits on the border of Leeds and the city of Birmingham, which means much of the economic ripple effect will spread to the City of Valor as this and other projects in that area grow. The tech park and relocation of the Southern Museum of Flight to the property off Barber Motorsports Parkway are estimated to bring 1,200
jobs and an economic impact of $85 million to the Birmingham area. The park is a partnership with the Alabama Department of Labor’s Abandoned Mine Land Program, U.S. Steel, the City of Birmingham, Southern Museum of Flight, Jefferson County and the City of Leeds. U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby secured federal funding for the pilot program. “This reclamation project has the potential to bring millions of dollars in economic impact, and hundreds of jobs to the Greater Birmingham area,” Ivey said in a statement. “The new Grand River
Technology Park will be a regional nexus for research and development, tourism, and light manufacturing. This project will bring positive improvements to the citizens who call this community home.” In 2018, U.S. Steel and its community partners were given approval for a $6 million grant by the ADOL AML Pilot Program toward the development of its Grand River Technology Park. The Grand River Technology Park represents a multiphase opportunity to reclaim and transform about 105 acres of undeveloped land surrounding and
including several pre-1977 abandoned coal mine lands in east Jefferson County. The governor’s office explained that dangerous abandoned mine land has been reclaimed on the property included many portals and vertical openings connected with Red Diamond Mines as well as the former Tennessee Coal and Iron Mine, all of which ceased operations in 1948. After the closure of the underground mines, a major portion of proposed development was strip-mined for coal
See TECH PARK, Page 5
Leeds wins with new location of Southern Museum of Flight
Brian Barsanti looks forward to the move to land on the outskirts of Leeds. BY MEREDITH CUMMINGS
Special to the Leeds Tribune The Southern Museum of Flight hopes to help lead the way to create new jobs in the area, and in Alabama, when the Grand River Technology Park on the outskirts of Leeds is complete. The museum will move to the new tech park from its current home adjacent to the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. The museum has big plans for expansion, not just physically – it will increase from the current five acres to 24 acres
– but also with a long-term view of how it can help transform industry in Alabama, said executive director Brian Barsanti. The majority of people who visit the museum are children in K-12 schools, and those visits help hit Alabama course of study standards, which helps teachers. Yet those visits serve as much more than school-day fun. Barsanti said that those children tap into the future of aviation and other industries in Alabama. “When it comes to the cornerstone of our mission being education and what we do, we do
education really well,” Barsanti said. “One thing that we identify, though, within this industry, is a need to bridge the gap between the K-12 world and the aviation industry in and of itself.” To bridge that gap, the museum’s board of directors has a plan to help serve the industry. Airbus broke ground on a new manufacturing facility in Mobile last month. Huntsville has Boeing. In addition, with other jet engine manufacturers in the state, Alabama is ripe for more aviation-related jobs. To fill this need, Barsanti said, more focus needs to be on civilians. Military, he
said, have a good tradition of already “setting people up for success and entering this industry.” “But for civilians it can be a difficult road to navigate. What we fail to do on the civilian side is to provide 12th graders who want to get into this industry, into aviation – whether it be maintenance, as a mechanic, as an engineer, as a pilot – how do you get them to that point? And how do you navigate the educational road to get there?” In addition to big plans to expand its educational outreach in its new location, the museum faces challenges in
its current location, including being in a flood pane and surrounded by homes, which make expansion difficult. A quarter of the museum’s collection is down the road from the main museum building, and the museum has slowly started to add other modes of transportation, such as cars and bicycles (the Wright brothers, Barsanti pointed out, worked on bikes before they started flying). “We are relocating is because we’ve simply run out of space,” Barsanti said. “Our museum’s collection has grown over the last several decades and I think that our founders back in the 1960s probably had no idea that we would grow to the size that we’ve become to include over 100 aircraft now.” By some estimates, the tech park project will bring 1,200 jobs and an economic impact of $85 million to the Birmingham area. The park is a partnership with the Alabama Department of Labor’s Abandoned Mine Land Program, U.S. Steel, the City of Birmingham, Southern Museum of Flight, Jefferson County and the City of Leeds. “When this opportunity came … where industrial manufacturing engineering tech firms are going to be recruited, we see this as an opportunity to help in furthering that part of our mission and bridging that gap in setting young students, who leave the 12th grade, up for success and getting into the industry. We would like to see this museum become more and more of a teaching institution.” In the museum’s three-phase plan, the first phase would move museum collections, which span over 100 years, to the new location, which would have equivalent space to the current square footage. Phases two and three involve growing the collections over many years. Barsanti envisions a future
for the museum as a careertech, teaching facility that partners with the community college system and local schools to provide educational routes to into the industry. In addition to traditional programming, certification might be offered. While “the aviation industry is booming,” Barsanti said many aviation skills transfer to other industries gaining traction in Alabama, such as the automotive industry. “So not only are you getting well equipped to serve the aviation industry, but you’re also equipping yourself to serve multiple industries within the state,” Barsanti said “The synergy that will exist between the museum, the Barber Motorsports Park, the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum, and the other organizations that are going to eventually build and provide jobs in this area. But we want to be a multiplier when it comes to those jobs, because we want to be more of a teaching institution as we want to supply the Alabama workforce with certified candidates to fill vacancies that are going to exist, and that exist now, within this industry and in other industries.” Barsanti hopes the museum will have a hand in to help curb the shortage of pilots in the aviation industry, as well as those jobs that support pilots and airplanes. “We really want to do our part to help identify them,” he said. “One job opportunity multiplies and creates eight additional jobs for every one that they create. [Grand River Technology Park] is a nexus of tourism and engineering and manufacturing. They are all coming together in this one area of the eastern side of Birmingham and it’s a great thing. I think that we are fortunate to be a part of it.”