Strengthening Our Future: Progress on the Greater LEX Regional Competitiveness Plan

​Commerce Lexington is excited to share updates on our collaborative efforts to enhance the competitiveness of the Bluegrass Region. Since its inception, this strategic initiative aims to align businesses, community leaders, and local governments across our nine-county Greater Lex region — Bourbon, Clark, Fayette, Franklin, Jessamine, Madison, Montgomery, Scott, and Woodford – toward a common goal: to attract and retain jobs and talent in a rapidly evolving economic landscape.  

​The Need for Regional Collaboration - We are better together.

Faced with shifting economic conditions and national and global competition for jobs and people, regions like Greater Lexington must work together to remain competitive with larger cities.  This plan helps leverage each community’s unique assets (regional workforce, housing, job sites, and quality of place) through elevated marketing efforts to better position Greater LEX for economic growth and talent attraction. This initiative, led by our team at Commerce Lexington creates a unified economic vision and coordinated strategy to drive our region forward through Economic Development, Workforce/Talent Attraction and Retention, and Policy Advocacy.

History & Context

For many years, Commerce Lexington has worked within a 9-county region for job recruitment and retention activities (Bluegrass Alliance), public policy advocacy (Regional Policy Group), and leadership development (Leadership Central KY).  In 2021, regional leaders recognized the need to reposition to remain competitive and address common challenges, creating the first-ever Regional Competitiveness Plan.  The plan was established through a collaborative process led by Ted Abernathy with Economic Leadership LLC and Development Counsellors International.  Based on extensive data analysis and stakeholder input, regional leaders agreed to work together on key goals to increase regional jobs, GDP, median wages and workforce growth to the national average over 5 years through the execution of 7 key action items.  Working in partnership with regional leaders, Commerce Lexington is organizational backbone for the plan and is tasked with ensuring the successful implementation of the goals and action items. Since 2021, enormous strides have been made toward the execution of the Regional Competitiveness Plan, including securing adequate financial resources for both government and business partners, and creating a new regional brand identity – Greater LEX.

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​For an overview of the Regional Competitiveness Plan, check out this video or the Executive Summary.  

 Key Action Items for the Regional Competitiveness Plan

1. Creating a unified regional brand identity
2. Elevating economic development marketing to job creators and site selectors in key sectors
3. Educating regional leaders about what is needed to be competitive and increasing partnerships
4. Deploying a talent attraction and retention marketing campaign
5. Increasing internships and work experiences for students with businesses
6. Investing in regional business parks and infrastructure
7. Advocating for government policies and investments to improve the business climate, housing affordability and meet infrastructure needs.

Over the next five years, the primary goal is to align the regional strategies with these action items, leveraging the power of key partnerships and collaboration between counties and private businesses to ultimately increase jobs, wages, and GDP to national averages and grow our labor force by 1,500 annually.

Progress Updates: Building Momentum

Talent attraction campaign

​A new regional talent attraction website, www.LookAtLex.com, is live now, featuring resources for potential residents and highlighting the quality of life in Greater LEX. We invite you to visit the website, but get a sneak peek of it's unique features here:

A digital marketing campaign is also set to commence, targeting alumni and tourists to promote job opportunities and quality of life advantages on October 1. To support this effort, please like and follow Greater LEX on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Jobs website refresh

​We’ve refreshed our regional job attraction website, www.locateinlexington.com, to better serve site selectors and businesses interested in moving to the region. This updated platform is designed to facilitate access to critical data, including workforce demographics, available business sites, and community resources that businesses need when choosing a place to locate or expand.

Economic Development & Leadership Events

​Commerce Lexington hosted two educational events for regional leaders to provide practical skills and valuable insights into economic development best practices to help better position each community for job attraction.  The Regional Summit on November 20 is the annual convening of regional leaders for benchmarking updates and thought leadership around trends in economic development, workforce and public policy. 

Site selector and key sector engagement initiatives

Commerce Lexington’s team attended numerous industry conferences and hosted site selector engagement events to increase awareness of the Greater Lex as a destination for business across key sector targets such as advanced manufacturing, ag and bio-tech, business and professional services, life sciences, and logistics, Additional targeted business outreach and site selectors engagement is ongoing.  

Advocacy efforts

​In July, regional leaders participated in a Washington, D.C. Fly-In, advocating for policies to enhance our regional competitiveness. More than 40 regional business and community leaders attended. We are actively working with state legislative taskforces to support workforce attraction initiatives and housing affordability solutions.

Learn more and get engaged at the 2024 Regional Summit:

​To continue fostering collaboration and dialogue among our region’s leaders, we invite you to the upcoming Regional Summit on November 20 at the Hyatt Regency Lexington. This event will bring together business, community, and government leaders from across the Bluegrass Region to network, share updates on the Regional Competitiveness Plan, and learn from industry experts. Together, we can make Greater LEX a more competitive place for jobs and talent. Stay tuned for more details on the summit, and let’s keep building a prosperous future for the Greater Lexington region!

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