Senator Rand Paul visited with Maysville and Mason County officials, along with Crounse Corporation River Transportation Wednesday afternoon as part of a series of meetings being held throughout Eastern Kentucky.
According to Senator Paul, the nature of the visit it to learn about government involvement in local businesses.
“One of the purposes is to come and learn more about what governments seem to be doing right or governments doing wrong; what can governments do to allow businesses to thrive in the area,” Paul said.
Paul states with the help of local business owners, especially those involved in river traffic in the area, business and commerce will flourish.
“So basically we’ll have a round table of local, not only people in the barge business, but people in the coal business and people who use the barges to transport and then also business leaders in Maysville,” Paul said. “And we’ll ask them what’s working and what’s not working—what can we do to help Maysville thrive.”
The river industry is very influential throughout much of Kentucky, Paul said.
One of the main issues the river industry wants to address is improvements to all of the locks and dams, which allow a larger amount of traffic and commerce to come up and down the river.
“Barge business is a big business, not only in Maysville, but all along the Ohio (River)—all the way down into Paducah, even all the way down to Fulton,” Paul said. “It’s a big business for Kentucky.”
Matt Ricketts, President and CEO of the Crounse Corporation, says Paul is a champion for the river industry, and he understands the positive impact the industry has within the state. With the Kentucky offering more mileage of navigable waterways than any other state in the lower 48, according to Ricketts, keeping the industry up to date is a priority.
“One of our main priorities it to ensure that our elected leaders are educated on the needs of the system, particularly with respect to the infrastructure—the lock-and-dam infrastructure, and that’s what we’re here to talk about today,” Ricketts said.
To promote education of elected officials on the river industry system, Rickett said communitcation is the key to accomplish that.
“Today we’re going to spend some time talking about where the needs of the system are and what he and his staff, which have always been good listeners, try to help them, understand from the industry’s perspective if this is where the needs are in terms of keeping the system modernized, so that we can keep over 600 million tons of commodities moving on it,” he said.
