Elizabethtown Planning and Development Director Joe Reverman recapped development in 2024 during a joint meeting of the Elizabethtown City Council and Elizabethtown Planning Commission Monday.
Reverman said the increase in development that came with the announcement of BlueOval SK can be clearly seen in the data.
“With the spike that you see there from 2022, 23, and 24, that three-year span, if you compare that to 2018, 19, and 20, which is kind of like your pre-BlueOval era, that’s about a 30 percent increase in the number of building permits that were issued after BlueOval,” Reverman said.
Reverman said major projects in the industrial park, the expansion of Baptist Health Hardin, and a spike in apartment complex construction has led to an increase in construction costs.
“You can see again that 2022 spike after the BlueOval announcement, and that represents about, if you look at 22, 23, and 24 again, compared to 2018, 19, and 20, that’s about a 250 percent increase in the cost of construction that we’ve seen over that three-year span,” Reverman said.
During his update, reverman said one of the biggest challenges the city will see is developing multiple types of housing. The development of multi-family housing like apartment complexes that has come since the BlueOval SK announcement is something the area had not seen before.
“There really was a change in the housing market post-recession in 2008 that really never hit our city just due to the size and kind of the steady nature that we were growing at,” Reverman said. “We were recession-proof, which was a good thing, but we never really saw the change in the housing market until we saw this big housing boom come after BlueOval in 2022.”
Reverman said goals in 2025 for Elizabethtown Planning and Development are improving residential development standards, developing a downtown master plan, and rolling out online permitting/licensing software. Learn more by visiting the Planning and Development page on the Elizabethtown city website.
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