Clarksville, TN – Clarksville-Montgomery County is one of the fastest growing communities in America for a variety of reasons, including available land, cost of that land, Tennessee’s friendly tax structure, the strengths of our work force, etc. As we enter 2025, still riding high on a wave of growth and prosperity that has had dramatic effects on this community, both good and bad, we sat down with David “Buck” Dellinger, President/CEO of the Clarksville-Montgomery County Economic Development Council.
Upon entering Dellinger’s downtown office, I found him standing next to a window that overlooks a multi-block swath of the city that contains the new F&M Bank Arena, the newly renovated Double Tree by Hilton Clarksville, and several lots that are currently in development.
“That’s the site of the new county garage, which will be comparable size-wise (500+ parking spots) to the city garage that just opened,” Dellinger said. “Once that’s done construction will begin on what is now the parking area in front of the hotel. It will be turned into a 50,000 sf retail space, a plaza/market area featuring one or two stories of retail and restaurants, similar to 5th and Broadway across from Bridgestone Arena in Nashville.”
The first topic of discussion was the industrial park that sits on the northern border of Montgomery County. Dellinger says that, area-wise, the industrial park is equal in size to the city of Mt. Juliet.
“Since June 2021, some big things have happened, two of which that have really driven change are, 1) we were able to buy the Allensworth property, which added about 420 acres of contiguous land to our industrial park, with great power and water access. That helped us bring in LG Chem, which is bringing in at least 200 6-figure engineering jobs, 800 employees in total, and of those, another 200 highly technical positions that with overtime will become 6-figure jobs.”
According to Dellinger, from a salary perspective LG Chem moved the needle for Clarksville-Montgomery County in a big way. He also said negotiations with Hankook have led to plans for phase 2 and phase 3 of that company. Once completed, the new phases will take Hankook to more than 2,100 employees locally.
Dellinger continued, “These types of jobs are highly technical, so there will be training through the companies, along with TCAT (Tennessee College of Applied Technology) and APSU (Austin Peay State University) and all our education and workforce development partners. We are going to add a lot of opportunities for very good salaries within our community.
“Amazon is coming in with 1,500 – 1,900 jobs; I negotiated that one, and right across the street, we brought in FedEx with 300 new jobs. Since 2021, we’ve added 5,000 jobs to our community, which will all be here by 2030. And they’re all good-paying jobs, like Kewpie Mayonnaise, a Japanese company.
“We know jobs are important, but right now we have a tremendous amount of companies from around the world looking at our community, and moving forward we only want jobs that are gong to move the needle, and make salaries more attractive for our community.”
Local leadership’s goal is to create competitive salaries that will encourage college graduates and soldiers leaving the military to stay in the community, not move away for better paying jobs.
“In November 2023, we went to South Korea with TCAT APSU, Workforce Essentials, and Nashville State,” Dellinger said. “We took representatives there to meet with our partner companies and talk to them about how to integrate their training and their needs into our workforce and our workforce training pipeline. That’s all in an effort to keep workers flowing into these businesses that we’re recruiting.
“We have a great Korean team, people who live here and who are related to the military. For instance, Terri Jalinsky is a great partner. We took her with us to help navigate through the community, but also she is a great ambassador for the US, the state of Tennessee, and this community. She is such a great personality that it puts everyone at ease. She’ll be talking to CEO’s of LG Chem, LG Electronics, Hankook, like she has known them all her life.
“So, that’s a lot of what is happening in the industrial park, and that’s great for our community. When you include mile marker “8” to the Kentucky state line, that’s about seven miles, and it’s about three miles wide. From Jim Johnson Road all the way down Guthrie Highway, roughly, we are somewhere between twenty and twenty-four square miles of industrial park. For perspective, Mt. Juliet is 24 square miles.”
Dellinger says that for the larger industrial pieces, probably 90% of our prospects come through the state funnel, and that’s one of the reasons Clarksville is a big deal.
“What makes us special from a national or global perspective is what Tennessee does,” Dellinger said. “So, Tennessee is the first magnet. When people, businesses, and industries are looking nationally and internationally, they start with Tennessee, the Carolinas, Florida, Texas, and Georgia. Those are the areas that they look at first.
“Company leadership want to see what properties/communities are best for them, and then a lot of them end up in middle Tennessee. There is a great attraction for Nashville and the great quality of life in middle Tennessee. Then they ask, what’s the status of the workforce – the utilities, where is the available land, then they end up in Clarksville.
“We are able to maintain 36% of the soldiers who are leaving the Army from Fort Campbell, that’s about 4,400 soldiers every year. So that’s about 1,500 soldiers a year, more than 100 a month who stay in Clarksville-Montgomery County.”
Determining factors for separating soldiers include job and education availability, affordable housing, etc. With the changes in the real estate market over the last several years, many realize that ‘house for the money’ and overall cost of living in Clarksville stacks up pretty well against other parts of the country.
“So, why move?” Dellinger said. “It’s affordable, and we have a great school system. Clarksville is a good fit for these folks, by a long shot.”
While almost everyone is enjoying the positive benefits of CMC’s rapid growth, there are questions about the sustainability of that rate of growth. Proper growth management is certainly a sliding scale.
“We’ve got our foot on the brake a little bit,” Dellinger said. “We have to catch up with these 5,000 new jobs by 2030, and that’s just the jobs we’re creating. Our success does allow us to be more selective. We may have as many as seventy companies looking at Clarksville right now. We’ve submitted offers on about 40% of those – that’s just on the industrial, national or international recruitment.
“We work with big industrial companies, Trane, Lg, Lg Chem, OEM suppliers for vehicles, FedEx and Amazon. Then you have businesses that come here because it’s a good market, and it just works. Whataburger, Walmart, Aldi, Publix, are all looking at it from a different perspective, as the community continues to grow it becomes a great fit for them.
“We’re not at the high end of market approval, but we’re in the bandwidth. Our median income is still a little bit lower than we would like it to be. We are talking to lots of companies right now, but we have non-disclosure agreements, so I cant give you any names.”
All this information came during the first sixteen minutes of a forty-five-minute conversation. Dellinger shared much more on managing our growth, working with other local leaders to make the process as painless as possible, and other challenges and concerns that are being addressed. So, please look for part 2 of this article in our February issue.
