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City expects riverfront revitalization to draw visitors
Joe Walker
jwalker@paducahsun.com

To the left is an artist’s rendering
of what a revitalized River Heritage Museum might look like.

Above, Seamen’s Church Institute Director David Rider believes an upgraded training center would help boost the local economy.
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The river industry continues to help fuel the rebirth of downtown via the River Heritage Museum and the Seamen’s Church Institute Center of Maritime Education.

City officials have seized the opportunity with a $50 million riverfront revitalization plan, expected to take at least 15 years to complete, including an amphitheater, marina and 150 to 300 rentable boat slips. Early work involves a boat ramp, transient boat launch and Schultz Park improvements.

Apart from his downtown hotel project, James Marine CEO Ronnie James is leading the river-industry component of a fundraiser for a $34 million museum expansion that would ultimately involve a glass-encased extension over the floodwall. Museum board Chairman Glen Anderson said at least $10 million raised privately would go into an endowment, with $24 million leveraged between government and private funding for construction and high-quality, interactive exhibits.

“The timing is perfect right now,” Anderson said. “This is going to give another spark to the total redevelopment of the downtown area.”

Anderson said the project is patterned after the Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque, Iowa, and the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, Tenn. — both of which actually experienced the marked growth in visitation projected by ConsultEcon Inc. The firm has made similar projections for Paducah, he said.
“We expect 100,000 visitors a year, which is about 90,000 more than we have today,” Anderson said.

Starting no earlier than fall 2010, a glass ship-like expansion will go up adjacent to the museum. The final phase, several years away, calls for a third building and walkway across the floodwall.

“It’s going to be dramatic for downtown Paducah,” Mayor Bill Paxton said.

Anderson said a high-tech, five-panel simulator will open in September, giving visitors the look and feel of what it’s like to navigate a towboat along the Ohio River from Cairo, Ill., to Paducah.

“The big theme of the museum is our commercial past and current activity on the river, plus ecological information about what lives on the river, and how all that works together,” Anderson said.

Training simulator
The Center for Maritime Education at 111 Kentucky Ave. trains about 1,500 people annually — a fifth of the nation’s towboat captains, pilots and apprentice steersmen, and is at capacity with classes scheduled about 44 weeks out of the year. Some deckhand training also is done.

Besides supporting Paducah’s standing as river hub, the training center pumps plenty of money into the local economy. Twelve to 15 people from two companies at a time typically spend 2 1/2 days in town, which equates to 60 bed nights in local hotels, plus meals in Paducah restaurants, said new Seamen’s Church Institute Director David Rider.

“They come from all over the river system,” he said. “A big part of the decision to locate the training center here originally was Paducah’s proximity to the inland waterways.”

The center received $400,000 earlier this year through the West Kentucky Workforce Investment Board to upgrade its 11-year-old, 105-foot-wide simulators in two theaters that give trainees a panoramic river view from the wheelhouse. Rider said the upgrade includes much more intense lighting.

He is leading a $750,000 private fundraiser for upgraded computers and software to make the entire operation state-of-the-art.

“It’s now two decades old, and who has software that’s two decades old?” he said.

Rider also wants to implement night training for steersmen who must log about two years before become licensed pilots.

Joe Walker can be contacted at 575-8656.