LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Kentucky taxpayers may get repaid the $15 million they invested in Braidy Industries after all, but the company that once promised to kickstart the revival of Appalachia leaves a trail of dashed hopes in eastern Kentucky five years later.
Indiana-based Steel Dynamics said this week that it will build the large, state-of-the-art aluminum plant that the company formerly known as Braidy Industries — now called Unity Aluminum — had planned for a site just outside Ashland, Kentucky, since 2017.
But Steel Dynamics is evidently looking beyond Kentucky for the location of the plant, saying it will be built somewhere in the southeastern United States.
"It really hurts," said Corlie Williams, a lifelong Ashland-area resident. "We've just been taken advantage of."
Williams was one of dozens of 2020 graduates of a two-year technical program at Ashland Community & Technical College, which was set up to feed skilled industrial workers to the never-built aluminum mill.
Braidy Industries founder Craig Bouchard once promised $65,000-per-year jobs with bonuses and other perks to those who graduated the program with a B-average and a clear drug test. Bouchard was ousted in 2020 before receiving a $6 million settlement to walk away from the company.
Steel Dynamics said Tuesday that it will use its cash to build the aluminum rolling mill and two satellite aluminum recycling facilities, spending $2.2 billion in all. The mill is expected to open in 2025.
The project will be a joint venture in which Unity Aluminum will get a $25 million payment and a 5.6% stake in the new mill in exchange for Steel Dynamics' ability "to access key aluminum industry talent and knowledge from Unity Aluminum," according to a presentation distributed to Steel Dynamics investors.
Gov. Andy Beshear said Thursday that Kentucky officials will try to sell Steel Dynamics on locations within the state, but Steel Dynamics hasn't reached out about Kentucky sites, and state officials had no advance knowledge of the deal with Unity Aluminum.
"Isn't it something that with everything that commonwealth did for Unity (Aluminum), it appears they're dropping us as quickly as they can," Beshear said.
Steel Dynamics, based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, did not respond to a request for comment.
Unity Aluminum declined to comment beyond the announcement from Steel Dynamics, but the company confirmed that Kentucky will be repaid the $15 million it invested in 2017 as part of the Steel Dynamics deal.
Former Gov. Matt Bevin championed the Braidy Industries' project and persuaded the state legislature to vote unanimously to approve the money without disclosing its specific use in the waning hours of the 2017 legislative session. Some lawmakers, including Republican allies of Bevin, would later say they regretted appropriating the money. Â Â
It's unclear if Ashland-based Unity Aluminum will continue to have operations. Unity's Aluminum's website was scrubbed as of Thursday, save for the mostly blank homepage.
Beshear, a Democrat, blasted his Republican predecessor for the Braidy-Unity saga, saying it provided "false hope" to an area struggling with the loss of good-paying, blue-collar jobs in the coal and manufacturing industries.
"Braidy is going to go down as the worst and shadiest economic development deal in Kentucky's history," Beshear said during his weekly news conference Thursday.
Beshear criticized the company's lack of operations when Kentucky invested, that the company's other significant investor was an aluminum company partially owned by a Russian oligarch and that the state's former economic development director under Bevin, Terry Gill, "somehow" became interim president of Unity Aluminum in 2020 following Bouchard's ouster.
Beshear didn't directly answer when asked if his economic development cabinet or the board of Commonwealth Seed Capital, the state entity that made the Braidy Industries investment, negotiated the return of the $15 million. Beshear implied the state may be owed more than the original investment.
"I hope that we get that $15 million back. But listen, the commonwealth doesn't lend $15 million with zero interest," Beshear said. "And then what do we have for it? Nothing. False hope for a region that deserves hope and deserves results."
Williams, who is out of work stemming from health complications and a recent car accident, said her two-year associates degree provided valuable technical and industrial skills. The problem is that there are so few places around Ashland to put the knowledge to use in a high-paying job, she said.
After years of delay, it's especially caustic to learn that the much-hyped Braidy Industries project will materialize elsewhere, she said.
"Now you finally figured out how to make this happen, and you're taking it away from us," she said. "You finally figured out how to put the pieces together, but the only way you could do that was still by screwing over the people who trusted you the most."
