Joe Pitts, Mayor, City of Clarksville
In an interview with Invest:, Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts discussed his priorities for the city and balancing economic growth with quality-of-life concerns. “It’s a delicate balance, with a need to be sensitive to our legacy neighborhoods,” he said.
What are your immediate priorities for the city of Clarksville?
After the historic amount of rain that we’ve had in our community over the last year, we have shifted our priorities to look at our stormwater management program and protecting households. That’s first and foremost on our agenda.
Close behind that is continuing to improve our infrastructure so that our citizens and visitors can move through our community, and to invest in quality-of-life issues.
Our next priority is public safety. If your community is safe, then nothing else really matters.
What infrastructure projects or revitalization efforts are ongoing or in the pipeline?
In 2021, the City Council adopted our Transportation 2020+ plan. It was not meant to have a shelf life of 20 years, but was mainly a granular look at where we could have the most impact with our investment in roads, bridges, sidewalks, and public transportation within our community. The good news is we’ve executed that plan almost to perfection. So much so that we’re now dipping into tier-three projects where we thought we would do well over the first five years to get tier-one projects finished. Those priority projects have either gotten finished or are well underway, and we’re now taking several tier-two projects off the list. As a result, we are looking at tier-three projects.
We still have a long way to go, but the public is responding favorably to what we’re doing.
To what extent are private-public partnerships important in bringing economic development and prosperity to Clarksville?
We can’t do it without our private partners. They do what public dollars can’t or won’t do, or won’t go so far to do. We depend on those private business partners to come in and help us. For example, TRC, a company out of Brentwood, has just built a 586-space parking garage in downtown Clarksville, where we had a lack of available parking. Now we have a nice, shiny, new parking structure, and they’re also refurbishing and rehabbing an existing parking garage for us. That is just one example of the private business sector stepping up and helping us to put the necessary infrastructure investment in the right place.
How is the city of Clarksville balancing economic growth and maintaining the best quality of life possible for its residents?
We are going through the same evolution that many growing communities are seeing, where people look at all the growth, all the new construction going on, and start to think we are losing our sense of who we are. But we are just enhancing that sense. With growth comes opportunity: the opportunity for high-school and college graduates to be able to stay and find a job here that will support themselves and their families should they choose to have one.
It’s a delicate balance, with a need to be sensitive to our legacy neighborhoods. Those are the neighborhoods that have grown up around the center of the city and are the oldest. We have to protect them, while making sure their infrastructure is adequate.
It’s easy for developers to come in and kind of take over, so we’re trying to balance all that. I don’t know a city that’s doing it perfectly, but there are a lot of good examples out there.
What are the main sectors or industries driving growth and employment in Clarksville?
Hankook Tire is a good example. It’s expanding, doubling, and tripling its footprint here. LG Electronics, which makes washing machines here, has also added a dryer component. Also, LG Chemical is building a plant. It will employ 600 to 800 people. The plant is being touted as the single largest foreign investment in Tennessee, at $3.2 billion. Kewpie is a Japanese company that makes ondiments like ketchup and is also investing here. So, we’re seeing a lot of foreign investment, while we continue to have local companies that are growing and adding to their presence.
What makes Clarksville a great place to live, work, and play?
Our climate is certainly helpful. You get four distinct seasons. The people here also make a difference. We also have two rivers running through our historic downtown, a state university, a state community college, and Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne Division. There is an interstate that runs to Nashville, a thriving industrial sector, and a growing entertainment district. It’s hard to find something that doesn’t check a box for just about everybody, any age group.
Our location on the state border with Kentucky certainly helps because we enjoy a sort of regional approach. We enjoy the Greater Nashville region, but we also enjoy the Southern Kentucky and northern Tennessee region.
What will be the primary challenges for Clarksville moving forward?
The common theme is the growth that we’re enjoying. And again, growth brings opportunities, but it also brings challenges, including the housing market. We’ve seen an increase in housing prices. We also need transportation infrastructure. I think we’re making great progress there, but we still have a long way to go.
Another challenge is raising our per capita income and average income within our community, and making sure that people can take advantage and have access to our thriving public and growing private education sectors.
