CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – (CLARKSVILLENOW) The Clarksville Economic Development Council (EDC), hosted their 2016 Growth Summit Thursday at the Riverview Inn. Around 160 business and community leaders heard speakers talk about economic development issues affecting Clarksville-Montgomery County.

Montgomery County Mayor Jim Durrett and Clarksville Mayor Kim McMillan, opened the program by both expressing their excitement for the future opportunities in economic development for the area.

Commissioner Kevin Tripplett with the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development led off the speakers and said tourism in Montgomery County has a strong economic impact that brought in over $202 million for the state and the city and county should be very proud of that.

Colonel Rob Salome, Garrison Commander for the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) talked about Technological Advances at Fort Campbell. Salome started off by sharing some facts and figure about the installation.

“Just to give you an idea of scope for those of you who might not know how big Fort Campbell is, this morning we had 47,000 cars come through our gates. We have about 27,000 active duty soldiers, 54,000 family members and somewhere around 10,000 contractors depending on the day,” said Salome.

The Colonel said that Fort Campbell’s economic impact on the region in Tennessee and Kentucky is about $4.55 billion. He added that Fort Campbell was proud to be part of the community and said there were some amazing things happening now and also coming up In the future on post.

Salome also said on Wednesday he had a video teleconference with Major General Gary Volesky, Commander of the 101st, who is currently deployed to Iraq and Volesky said never fear, the 101st is taking it to Isis in Iraq, which raised cheers and applause from those at the summit.

Enoch Moeller, Site Operations Manager for Google was the Keynote Speaker. He spoke about the Google Data Center coming to Clarksville-Montgomery County at the former Hemlock site saying that Google’s Data Centers are critical to Google operations and services.

He described a data center as being the size of two big box stores and home to tens or event hundreds of thousands of servers which are specialized computers designed by Google to be as efficient and high performance as possible.

“We want to land a data center in a community where we feel we can be successful, where we can work with the local community and with organizations to help grow and have a positive impact beyond just running the data center itself,” said Moeller.

When asked about a timeline on the Google Data Center, Moeller said the planning and development process for the center can take up to two to four years. He added that just because there isn’t anything happening on the ground right now, doesn’t mean something isn’t happening behind the scenes.

Other speakers included Ulrich Schmidt, Managing Director of KMPG,LLP, who spoke about business and industry selecting Clarksville-Montgomery County and Kelli Nowers, Community Director of Nashville Entrepreneur Center, talked about connecting entrepreneurs.