U.S. Congressman John Price and Accelerant CEO Joel McKay Smith tour the new ‘Accelerant Opportunity Hub’ opening Spring 2018 in the former J.C. Penny’s building in downtown Price, Utah. Photo: Gephardt Daily/Patrick Benedict
PRICE, Utah, Feb. 1, 2018 (Gephardt Daily) — A new high-tech business nerve center being built in the heart of Carbon County is offering the hope of hundreds of good-paying jobs for a rural community that desperately needs them.
Starting in the spring of 2018, the Accelerant Opportunity Hub will open for business in the 105-year-old J.C. Penney’s store in downtown Price. The venerated building — once one of the crown jewels of Price’s Main Street business district — is being remodeled, stripped to the lathe, soon to be rebuilt, refurbished and turned into a state of the art business lab.
If all goes as planned, the building will once again be home to an economic turbine in the heart of Utah’s coal country, a place developers say will be a “convergence point for partner companies to find newly skilled talent to fill their workforce needs.”
It’s all part of an ambitious project called Access Castle Country, described by organizers as a “public-private mechanism,” designed to inject new jobs, new industry and new economic stimulus into rural counties like Carbon and Emery.
Spearheaded by Wasatch Front businesses, Accelerant BSP, Blacksmith International and FutureINDesign, the Access Castle Country project is fueled in part by an $800,000 federal Economic Development Agency grant.
Its stated mission is to “connect rural communities with new job opportunities in leading industries like IT, tech, finance, health and advanced manufacturing” and to become a “convergence point for partner companies to find newly skilled talent to fill their workforce needs.” Employee teams will then work remotely in the Accelerant Opportunity Hub, in an effort to continue paving the way for new, higher-paying jobs to come and to stay in the rural community.
It’s a bold initiative which has caught the eye of businesses and civic leaders, like newly elected U.S. Representative John Curtis. The former Provo mayor toured the facility during a recent open house and praised the project and its organizers.
“I’m so impressed. It’s really exciting to see this effort come together,” Curtis said. “So many good things can come out of this. It’s just amazing.”
One of those “good things” is not only the creation of jobs for a highly skilled workforce, but also the retention of homegrown workers who would otherwise be forced to leave their rural communities to find jobs commensurate with their skill sets.
Dean Lundberg, president of Accelerant BSP in Salt Lake City, has been working on the project for nearly three years. He said it’s one thing to create a well-trained rural workforce, but keeping today’s skilled workers in their communities is problematic. Currently, only 14 percent of high school students in rural Utah remain in their hometowns after graduation. Those attending nearby schools, such as Utah State University Eastern, are even more likely to leave.
“It takes a convergence point between education and opportunity and the infra-structure to make it happen,” Lundberg said. “So, that’s what’s been happening in this community. There are educators here, but no employers to match and so the largest export of these rural communities is their kids. We’ve got to reverse that trend. We’ve got to keep good jobs here, and that’s why the location is here.”
In addition to the high-tech training, budding enterprises will have access to a light manufacturing facility being built on-site by Blacksmith International. Brian Sather, Blacksmith’s CEO believes it will help smaller companies bring their products to market and will also lure light-manufacturing jobs that might otherwise go overseas. He says the time for such a project is overdue.
“There’s a workforce here,” Sather said. “There’s a need here for jobs. There is a facility here and a community that has been super supportive.”
Accelerant CEO Joel McKay Smith couldn’t agree more.
“This is going to be a functioning, full facility with multi-purpose use in a few months,” he said. “It’s becoming real. It’s very exciting.”
