Tuesday afternoon, the upstairs board room at the Golden Triangle Development LINK was crowded with city and county officials, state legislators, economic development leaders and Atmos Energy executives.
They were there to hear Brandon Presley, president of the state’s Public Service Commission, give the PSC’s official blessing to a pilot program by Atmos Energy that will provide a combined $16.7 million for natural gas pipelines to industrial park sites in Lowndes and Oktibbeha counties.
The plan calls for $3.4 million to add 28,800 feet of natural gas pipeline to the planed Infinity Megasite near Lowndes County’s industrial park off Highway 82 and $13.3 million for a 12-mile natural gas line from the main transmission line to the Oktibbeha County site known as the Innovation District — a 300-plus acre parcel near the Highway 25 and Highway 182 bypass.
“Today, I feel like we climbed a pretty big mountain,” Presley said in announcing the three-member PSC board had voted unanimously to approve the program. “We want to make sure we do everything we can do to build out our infrastructure, to make sure we are shovel-ready when companies come in. With this program, we’ll be able to provide natural gas infrastructure faster than a company can build a facility. In years to come, I think we’ll look back on this a day that we really made a difference.”
David Gates, president of the Mississippi Division of Atmos Energy, said he lobbied hard with corporate headquarters in Dallas to secure the funding for the program.
“I did have to beat on the table a little bit, but not too much,” Gates said. “Corporate understands how important this pilot program is to economic development in this area and what it means to our company.
“Economic development today is a world-wide competition, and you have to have your stuff together,” he added. “People don’t often think about infrastructure. You think about acquiring land, having the workforce, a lot of things. You don’t see infrastructure. It’s underground. But infrastructure is just as vital to recruiting as almost any other factor.”
Project impact
While Presley and Gates were looking forward to what the investment will mean to economic development in the area, the man in charge of recruiting that development could not resist looking back to the summer, when the fate of the Innovation District industrial park seemed to have reached an impasse.
While Joe Max Higgins, CEO of the Golden Triangle Development LINK, said the project faced issues concerning electricity access, potential cultural artifacts on the site and access to natural gas. Higgins said 4-County Electric solved the electricity issue, agreeing to cover the cost of providing 60-megawatts of electricity to the site, and latest reports on cultural mitigation indicate that won’t be cost-prohibitive.
That left the issue of natural gas access.
“It reached a point where it looked like we had an unsolvable problem,” Higgins said. “We were all just about ready to throw our hands up. But (Starkville Mayor) Parker Wiseman got on the phone to Brandon Presley, and from the minute Brandon came on board, our problem was his problem. Within two or three days, Brandon had talked to the people at Atmos and we were all at the table, working as a team to get this solved.”
Higgins said the Atmos funding will also be a huge boost to the Infinity Megasite in Lowndes County.
“This is a bell-cow site, supplying jobs for two states and 35 counties in Mississippi,” Higgins said. “That’s a big deal.”
Gates said work on the two projects will begin immediately, primarily in engineering, surveying and acquiring easements.
Installing the pipelines won’t begin until tenants for the sites have been chosen, Gates said.
“The practical reason is that we don’t want to run a 4-inch pipeline, when the company may need a 6-inch or 8-inch line,” Gates said. “We can build those pipelines in six to seven months, which is faster than a company can build a plant. We’re confident we can have our work completed in a time-frame that will insure that we can supply the natural gas as soon as they need it.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 41 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.