Collapse of Kentucky Kingdom Discussions
We are saddened to report that the Kentucky Kingdom Redevelopment Company (KKRC) is no longer involved in attempting to reopen the Kentucky Kingdom theme park. Effective September 30, 2011, our agreement with the Kentucky State Fair Board expired and the Fair Board has chosen not to continue working with our company. For more than a year and a half, we had been operating under this agreement as the Fair Board’s chosen operator. We had a very dedicated team of individuals and we worked hard to put together a partnership between the public and private sectors that would have allowed the park to reopen.
The KKRC recently delivered more than 300 boxes of blueprints, construction drawings, business and marketing plans, budgets, and other materials to the Fair Board in the hope that this information, compiled over the last year and a half by our team of dedicated individuals, will give any future operator a jump-start.
The failure to reach agreement with the city, state, and Fair Board is indeed puzzling. From the very outset, our business plan, which was distributed to public officials in August, 2010, called for the formation of a partnership between the public and private sectors wherein the KKRC would rent the theme park from the state and the state would fund the necessary improvements (estimated at $50 million). The results of an economic impact study of the project, which was commissioned by the state last year, showed that the state stood to gain, on average, up to $10 million (and the city up to $1.3 million) per year in new tax revenues, while the Fair Board would receive as much as $7.4 million per year in rent, parking revenues, and capital improvements. That is a total of $18.7 million in economic benefits – and this is the amount that the city, state, and Fair Board will continue to lose every year that Kentucky Kingdom remains closed. That’s certainly not beneficial to the taxpayers.
In the most recent negotiations between the KKRC and the state, the amount of public funding required for the project was reduced from $50 to $20 million. With the $18.7 million in total benefits that the city, state, and Fair Board would receive from the park’s operation each year, this new scenario meant they would recoup their investment after only one year and continue to reap economic benefits for many years to come. Unlike many other capital requests, this $20 million would have paid for itself, and in fact would have helped support many other state and local entities that depend on tax dollars, like state parks, the Louisville Zoo, the Louisville Science Center, the Convention & Visitors Bureau, etc.
Then, of course, there are the jobs. A reopened Kentucky Kingdom would have created more than 1,000 - at the park itself and in the construction trades and hospitality industry. It’s hard to listen to local and state officials talk about the urgent need for jobs, while Kentucky Kingdom sits in the middle of metropolitan Louisville, within easy view of Louisville International Airport, slowly rusting away.
It was a tearful event when we had to let our employees go at the end of last week. This dedicated staff had worked tirelessly for many months to reopen Kentucky Kingdom and was deeply disappointed with this outcome. But they understand the score: $29 million raised by our team versus $0 raised by our elected officials. That’s not the type of partnership we had in mind when we introduced the idea of the public and private sectors joining together to bring Kentucky Kingdom back to life.
Like everyone else, we now watch from the sidelines, rooting hard for Kentucky Kingdom to be reopened.
Edward J. Hart
CEO
Kentucky Kingdom Redevelopment Company
