Dual Grants Awarded for TN Development

• Author: Jacob Greene
• Posted: 2024-07-20

The state of Tennessee is a southern state in America, and as such most people outside of the area do not hear a lot about it on the news. California, New York, and perhaps larger states like Florida and Texas are the subject of most of the news in America. Though while Tennessee isn't exactly in the news a lot, that in no way means that the state doesn't have a lot of newsworthy things happening. For instance, just this week Tennessee has given two grants, worth over $1 million each, so that businesses can move into their state to provide good jobs for its citizens. Jobs coming back into an American state instead of leaving for Mexico or China is always great news for Americans, even if the mainstream media decides not to speak about it at all.

The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development announced earlier this week that it was planning on handing two large grants out to help facilitate two large businesses moving to the state. The first is a $1.25 million grant for Kaiser Aluminum Investments, which is planning on moving out of California to Franklin, Tennessee. The rate of tax and the many different regulations in California have left Kaiser wanting to move to a new state for quite some time. Tennessee put its hat in the ring and offered the company some grant money to help them relocate, and Kaiser took the opportunity and should be moving in for full-time operations by 2022.

The next grant is even larger, at $2.1 million. This is a grant for Chewy, which is a large online retailer of pet supplies. Similar to Amazon, Chewy needs a lot of fulfillment centers around the nation, so that they can ship out orders in a hurry. While Chewy may be nowhere near as large as Amazon, this is still a few hundred good jobs for the residents of Tennessee. Chewy will have to construct this fulfillment center, so there is no set date on when they plan to open; though they are thrilled to be moving to Tennessee and are grateful that they are getting an incentive of over $2 million to move their center there.

These grants are all about the economic development in Tennessee. They were one of the states most ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Tennessee was quick to shut down its entire economy. While they were also among the first to ease off of those restrictions so that they could open back up, the damage had already been done. Over 80% of businesses were closed in Tennessee, and thousands of them were unable to open again. This has left the state with a high unemployment rate. The thinking here is that these two grants facilitating the move of two large businesses into the state will be just the tip of the iceberg, signaling to large companies in America that they can find a home in Tennessee.

Tennessee's tax rates are a whole lot lower than states like New York and California, so it's really shocking to see that not a lot of companies want to move their businesses to these southern states. Tennessee isn't just a rural state. With huge metro areas like Nashville and Memphis, the state definitely has its share of urban living and busy city life.

Worth the Investment

Among people in Tennessee, these grants are met with a lot of excitement and positive reactions. While a lot of governments giving away over $3 million would cause citizens to get a little suspicious of where that money's going, the residents of Tennessee understand that investment is needed in order to bring in larger companies to their state. While these two companies are going to bring well under 1,000 jobs in total, the mayor, council and the people of Tennessee believe that this is just a starting point.

Some of the state's infrastructure spending will go to create even more jobs in 2022, and the hope is that the state can get back to a bustling, booming economy with a lot of people employed and a lot of businesses operating in the area.

Thankfully for a state like Tennessee, they also bring in a lot of tourism dollars. Though this doesn't spread as far as one might think. The state still needs jobs for its citizens, and moving in billion-dollar companies is a great step in the right direction.