 At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. With 40 years of being in the hearing care industry, you'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. On Thursday, March 16th, the Southeast Kentucky Chamber of Commerce held a members meeting with guest speaker Colby Kirk. The former Martin County Judge executive spoke about the initiatives and goals for one East Kentucky. The main talking points for the meeting included creating new jobs related to industrial recruitment and other opportunities for industrial parks. So I was asked to give an overview of our work at one East Kentucky. So it was more of an educating experience today, talking about our strategic efforts, kind of the three pillars that we work towards an overview of our goals. And of course, we are a non-profit economic development organization. We serve nine counties in Southeast Kentucky. I think everyone's interested in our work as far as industrial recruitment for the region. Our primary purpose as an organization is to try to steer jobs and investment to this region. So folks are always interested in what kinds of companies we're talking to and what kinds of companies are visiting to take a look. So we had some discussion around that and we talked about the great industrial parks throughout our region, the available sites and buildings and the opportunities for these companies to do business here. Kirk also mentions partnering with downtown communities for the purpose of growing businesses. This will help attract more people to local retailers across six East Kentucky cities. Some of the other work that we're doing outside of industrial recruitment is in partnerships with downtown communities in our nine county area. We talked today also about a project to look at bringing more retail to downtowns. We're administering a grant to partner with six cities in the region. Ines, Pressensburg, Pikeville, Hazard, Whitesburg, and Jenkins, where consultants will visit and come up with a strategy to improve the retail communities in downtown, reduce vacancy, and come up with strategies to draw more folks to downtown. Investments in downtown add a lot of value to industrial recruitment because as companies look at an area, they look at kind of the heart of those communities and what downtown's like because if they're going to locate a business here, they're going to live here, they're going to see what life is like. So we'd like to help through those strategic initiatives as well. Reporting from Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Colum.