COVINGTON, Ky. — It’s only a four-story building, but Northern Kentucky leaders have high hopes for OneNKY Center on Greenup Street in Covington.
The $27 million project will consolidate seven business promotional groups under one roof and establish the Covington Life Science Lab for researchers and startups. At a groundbreaking ceremony this morning, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said the building will be a job creator.
“You think of all these startup pharmaceutical companies,” Beshear said. “At some point, they were a startup with a good idea for that first drug. So, imagine the ability to have a wet lab you can go into as a startup, producing those first tests to move your company forward. It’s going to be a really special opportunity. It’s going to solidify Northern Kentucky as a pharmaceutical research hub.”
But it’s also the realization of a 42-year-old goal for Corporex Companies founder Bill Butler. He first proposed unifying business associations under one roof in 1981, as one of 16 Northern Kentucky initiatives he wanted Kentucky Gov. John Y. Brown to fund.
“The root energy for this project at the time was the most important finding of fact in that report,” Butler told the crowd at Wednesday’s groundbreaking. “Unity and consolidation, or lack thereof, was our single greatest inhibitor of progress. So why is this day so symbolic to me? Because it is a manifestation of what can be accomplished when we put other considerations aside and pull together for the good of the whole.”
The project is funded by a $15 million state grant to Covington Life Science Partners and up to $10 million in construction bonds, backed by rent revenue from seven other tenants:
- OneNKY Alliance, a CEO-led group that works on education, job creation and health issues;
- Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce;
- The tourism promotion group, meetNKY;
- BE NKY Growth Partnership, an economic development group formerly known as Tri-Ed;
- The Catalytic Fund of Northern Kentucky, which operates a $25 million investment pool created by banks, foundations and corporations;
- Horizon Community Funds of Northern Kentucky, a grant-making organization that started in 2017 and;
- The Northern Kentucky Bar Association.
“By putting them all together in one building, we’re going to have (a) shared common area with beautiful presentation centers, first-class amenities, high technology that these small agencies wouldn’t be able to afford alone,” Butler said. “We’re going to have centralized accounting so they don’t have to have as much staff. And the CEOs of their organizations therefore can spend their time with their mission and not managing money and people and things like that.”
Butler has reshaped Northern Kentucky’s riverfront with the RiverCenter office complex, Ascent residential tower and Ovation, a $1 billion mixed-use development on the west bank of the Licking River. Although he spends less time on daily operations at Corporex these days, he personally negotiated a construction contract with Paul Hemmer for OneNKY Center and announced the deal at the groundbreaking.
He also made it clear that he hasn’t given up on another longstanding goal for Northern Kentucky.
“Ultimately, we want a lot of the governmental agencies to find a way to share governance and in the private sector we said, ‘Well, we can’t expect them to do that unless we get our own act together.’ So, that’s what’s happening here,” said Butler.
