BRAC backs Jindal plans

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: May 9, 2008 - Page: 6A - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The Baton Rouge Area Chamber formally backed several initiatives of the Jindal administration this week to ramp up state economic development efforts, including requests for $307 million more in deal-making money for big projects and a nearly $8 million increase to the Governor’s Rapid Response Fund.

Stephen Moret, the Louisiana Economic Development secretary, left the Baton Rouge chamber in January to head the state’s economic development work for Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Through a strategy paper released this week, BRAC says the additional money is needed to advance its nine-parish region as well as the entire state, with:

• $2.5 million to carry out research that benchmarks Louisiana’s standing and points the way to becoming more competitive with other states.
• $400,000 to create a business retention and expansion team in Moret’s department that would work with local officials.
• $2 million to manage site selection data better and improve responsiveness to business prospects seeking large industrial sites.

The Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget has to approve mega-project spending.

The Legislature created the fund in 2007 with money pledged to the ThyssenKrupp steel mill but it was not needed when that $4 billion project went to Alabama.

Alabama, pending a June 5 popular vote, is about to expand its $350 million deal-making fund by another $400 million, the chamber said, making it a still more formidable opponent.

Louisiana elected officials should “look at the fact that we can create a tremendous amount of economic development activity from the investments and that’s going to create a tremendous amount of spinoff activity down the road,” said Adam Knapp, the chamber’s president and chief executive officer.

“We’ve got in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 deals that we’re looking at right now in our area that we’re competing on,” he said, and a number of them will rely on the mega-project fund or the rapid response fund for success. “If you look at what the state potentially has to do deals with, to not have the money will lose business opportunities for the state. It’s on the table that we can have projects and do some significant job creation statewide.

“And those deals happen because of access to these flexible funds.”

Moret’s department is recruiting several huge prospects — with job counts ranging from 500 to 2,000, average pay from $45,000 to $80,000 and capital investments from $100 million to $3.6 billion — that could overtax the mega-fund if the state is successful on one or more of the large deals. Increasingly, business prospects expect states to have large mega-funds in place rather than wait for a special legislative session to fund large capital projects, Moret said recently.

Knapp said funding increases for economic development, along with a retooled work-force strategy approved by the Legislature this week, are the final pieces for a significant upgrade in Louisiana’s business climate that could sway a project to the state.

Ethics and business tax reductions approved in special sessions earlier this year were equally important, he said. Though the mega-project strategy necessarily requires big dollars, none of the strategy diminishes other BRAC priorities, such as courting expansion of existing companies, Knapp said.

In the past two years, the chamber structured a pair of deals to retain one publicly traded company’s headquarters — Amedisys Inc. — and to establish in Baton Rouge the headquarters of another public company — Albemarle Corp. — that had a big presence here.
Nor is BRAC diminishing its focus on LSU, Knapp said.