Ricketts tours Lukjan for Manufacturing Month

Gov. Pete Ricketts visited Sidney Thursday to tour Lukjan Metal Products LLC as part of his week-long Nebraska Manufacturing Month tour.

Ricketts had welcoming words for owner Elena Lukjanczuk-Kelly, and Gary Ring, vice president of sales and marketing.

"We're very excited to have you here, and really appreciate your investment in our state," Ricketts said. "You're not going to find better people anywhere else in the country than right here in Nebraska. Nebraskans are just awesome."

Manufacturers, Ricketts said, employ nearly 98,000 people in Nebraska.

"One of the great things about manufacturing is it creates these great-paying jobs, but not just in Lincoln and Omaha," he said. "We create manufacturing jobs all over our state, as Lukjan is demonstrating here in Sidney."

He added, "We can't be a healthy state if we're just growing Lincoln and Omaha. We have to grow our entire state and manufacturing gives us that opportunity to be able to do that."

Manufacturing companies, Ricketts said, contribute roughly $13 billion to the state's economy yearly, to become Nebraska's "second largest industry segment."

"We're a state that not only grows things, we're a state that also makes things," he said. "We want to continue to work on ways that we can create the environment for manufacturers to be able to expand."

Nebraska fosters economic growth through three areas, Ricketts said. First among them is tax relief.

"We've got to make sure we have a competitive tax environment," he said. "We just had the most comprehensive tax bill that came out of our revenue committee since the 1980s, and it has both income tax relief in it and property tax relief."

The key to stable tax relief, Ricketts said, is controlling spending.

"Before I became governor we were growing the budget 6.5 percent a year. We've been able to get that down to 0.6 percent," he said. "That's allowed us, for example, to increase the property tax credit relief fund by over 45 percent. That fund is direct dollar-to-dollar tax relief from the state to all property tax owners in the state."

Ricketts advocated "cutting red tape and making it easier to do business in the state of Nebraska" through regulatory relief.

"I put an executive order in place a few of months ago to halt all promulgations, all the issuing of regulations, so we can go back and review those regulations to make sure they actually they are actually required for the health safety and welfare of our people," he said.

He added, "Forbes ranks us the No. 1 state for regulatory environment and the third best state overall for business."

Nebraska invests in its people through infrastructure, Ricketts said, including the Transportation Innovation Act and grant programs to develop housing in small communities.

Ricketts lauded the coming of Ontario, Canada, based Agri-Plastics in Sidney.

"They love the location here in Sidney," he said. "They have access to transportation like Interstate 80. They've got a dry climate, which is important for making their plastics. And, of course, the wonderful people they can hire right here in Sidney, that's a big attraction for them."