Grand opening ceremonies were held May 26 for the new Kosair Children’s Medical Center – Brownsboro in northeast Jefferson County. The new facility offers pediatric emergency services; a full range of pediatric diagnostic imaging services; full-service laboratory and wide range of pediatric outpatient surgery services. The medical center’s layout, processes and amenities were designed to ease children’s and families’ anxiety about medical experiences.
The inaugural HullabaLOU Music Festival at Churchill Downs Racetrack is expected to generate $37.7 million in economic impact for the Greater Louisville market area, according to an independent study conducted by Scott Ray & Associates of New Orleans, which specializes in economic impact studies of music festivals and special events. The HullabaLOU economic impact study estimates 30,000 people per day will attend the music festival scheduled for July 23-25, with half of the visitors coming from outside of Louisville. Estimated spending by HullabaLOU patrons on local hotels, food and beverage, retail shopping, other entertainment and transportation is expected to total $6.4 million. The event will feature 66 artists performing a wide variety of musical genres.
After four years, UPS’s expansion of Worldport, its global all-points air hub in Louisville, is now complete. The expansion enables the hub to process 416,000 packages per hour, up from 350,000 per hour, and increases to 70 the number of aircraft parking bays at the facility, helping to optimize the UPS air network by allowing more planes to use the facility each night. The $1 billion expansion increases Worldport’s footprint by 1.1 million s.f. to 5.2 million s.f. – the equivalent of more than 90 football fields – and the hub now contains 155 miles of conveyors. The original Worldport facility was completed in 2002.
Texas Roadhouse Inc. has announced plans to open its first restaurants outside of the United States in the Middle East. The Louisville-based company, which has 337 restaurants in 46 states, has signed an area development and license agreement with Kuwait-based retailer M. H. Alshaya Co. to build 35 Texas Roadhouse restaurants in 10 years. The locations will be spread across eight Middle East countries. The first restaurant is expected to open in the first quarter of 2011. M.H. Alshaya operates 1,700 stores in the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, Cyprus, Russia, Poland, Egypt, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) is eliminating 49 jobs at its Louisville headquarters as part of a reorganization plan “that is adaptive to trends in the church and the world.” The church has also cut 12 vacant positions and accepted voluntary separation offers from another 12 employees, bringing the total number of positions eliminated to 73. As part of the reorganization, the church is reducing spending by 12.2 percent in 2011 and an additional 2 percent in 2012. The changes are being implemented in response to a decline in overall membership and decreased contributions.
Louisville-based Kindred Healthcare continues to expand with the acquisition of a nursing and rehabilitation center in the Cleveland, Ohio, area and the purchase of previously leased facilities in Massachusetts. The company has also opened a new 74-bed freestanding long-term acute-care hospital in Houston, Texas, and begun construction on a 120-bed transitional care center in Westfield, Ind., that is expected to open in the first quarter of 2011. Kindred is a Fortune 500 healthcare services company with annual revenues of over $4.2 billion and approximately 54,100 employees in 41 states.
Two Louisville companies have been named to the Inner City 100 list, which each year recognizes the fastest-growing 100 inner city companies in the United States. Pro-Liquitech International placed 84th and Consumer Choice Coffee placed 93rd. Both businesses are located in the Park Hill neighborhood of west Louisville, an area the city is helping revitalize. Consumers Choice was founded in 1971 and roasts coffee and supplies coffee and tea to numerous retail stores and restaurants in the region. Pro-Liquitech was created in the early 1990s when Dave Dafoe left his corporate position at Brown-Forman to start a beverage development company that now has clients that includes Ocean Spray and Starbucks, among many others.
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