Inside Report for October 27, 2009

• By LANNY KELLER
• Advocate Opinion page staff
• Published: Oct 27, 2009 - Page: 9B

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A couple of weeks ago, Mayor-President Kip Holden was so offended by critical   coverage of his upcoming bond proposal that he petulantly took a copy of The Advocate and threw it on the floor in front of a civic group.

For politicians, if the press taketh away, it sometimes also giveth.

Before the Press Club of Baton Rouge on Monday, Holden triumphantly held aloft The Advocate’s travel story about the extraordinary tourism success of Chattanooga.

The Tennessee city’s riverfront renaissance was described in glowing detail, and this time, the newspaper’s storyline fit in with Holden’s storyline about the bond issue.

For Holden, who wants to fund the premier museum of the Mississippi River and the Louisiana coast with a portion of the Nov. 14 bond issue, the Tennessee city is a symbol of how to go “from a smokestack town to one filled with tourism.”

The Alive project on the riverfront would be built with $225 million in bonds backed by a sales tax and a property tax that is before voters on Nov. 14. Other “economic development” parts of the bond issue would expand the convention facilities in Baton Rouge.

While Alive has been derided as an amusement park that would not attract visitors, the same battles were fought in Chattanooga over an aquarium and expensive infrastructure projects to reclaim the Tennessee River frontage for public use. The idea that 600,000 visitors would visit Alive in its first year has been criticized; Holden said 8 million visitors went to the smaller Tennessee city last year.

“We believe those (Alive) numbers projected by Dr. Jim Richardson (of LSU) have a lot of credibility,” Holden said.

With about 170,000 people, the Tennessee city has clearly done a great job promoting its river connection — the aquarium there is expanding at a cost of $30 million — but there are also other attractions such as Lookout Mountain nearby.

Still, Chattanooga did a lot of things right.

In 2001, a group of Baton Rouge civic leaders visited Chattanooga and viewed its progress. The aging industrial base of the cities — in Chattanooga’s case, horrendous soot from factories that were about to go out of business — can be said to have forced city leaders to look to a diversified economic future.

Alive is intended not to be an aquarium, as successful as those have been in Chattanooga, New Orleans and other river or coastal cities.

Rather, its model is the high-tech design and more museumlike setting of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.