By Sonny Simmons
Panola Partnership CEO

The beginning of another new year brings optimism and hope for success in our endeavor to create new jobs and investment for Panola County. No one knows what the future holds, but we at the Panola Partnership know that we will be working hard to create new opportunities for Panola County throughout the coming year.

Overall, we feel that 2014 was a very successful year. We were fortunate to have seen four of our existing industries expand their operations, adding jobs and new investment. We also witnessed several new retail businesses locate. And for the first time in over 5 years our unemployment level has dropped to around 9%. We also, through a lot of hard work, managed to acquire another 300 acres of prime industrial property to secure the land that is needed for our future industrial growth.

This year, we will concentrate a lot of our efforts in working to fully develop the Airport Industrial park to make it one of the best industrial parks in the state. This will be accomplished by working with the Mississippi Development Authority and TVA who will assist us with grants and technical support.

We will also continue to concentrate a lot of our efforts on retail recruitment and development within the city limits of Batesville due to special funding provided by the City of Batesville for this purpose.

We will be developing new marketing material that will be distributed to site location consultants and interested industries and businesses that will help us maximize our exposure and to highlight what we have to offer. In addition to these marketing efforts, we recently completed a thorough upgrade of our website to help make it more user friendly and contain all the information needed to help a company or business make the decision to locate here.

We feel good about where we are and where we are going. We will continue to do all we can to bring new opportunities to Panola County and to help make our community the best it can be.

We will look to the future with optimism, we will stay positive, we will invest wisely and we will out work our competition. This will be our formula for success and failure is not an option.
Forever forward