New owners market Sunshine Business Park

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Aug 13, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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KEAS LLC, of Port Allen, paid $1.7 million for an 84-acre Donaldsonville-area business park on La. 70 near the Sunshine Bridge.

The company, whose principals include Donaldsonville businessman Dickie Esquivel, Bayou Bistro’s Brad Antie, New Roads businessman Gerard Smith and trucking and warehouse businessman Steve Kent, bought the park Friday. 

The first lot in the Sunshine Business Park sold previously to Shree Ganesh LLC, which is building a 65-room Comfort Inn slated for a December opening. That company also is building Hampton Inn & Suites in Gonzales near Cabela’s and in Morgan City, said Benjamin Stalter, the vice president of commercial real estate for Maestri-Murrell Inc. of Baton Rouge.

Stalter, who brokered the $1.7 million sale, said the Sunshine Business Park will appeal to light industrial manufacturers, suppliers and wholesalers who do business with petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River. Near the business park are Motiva, Air Products and the

Faustina chemical plant under development downriver from Donaldsonville. Many other plants are in proximity.

KEAS bought the site from Don Guillot and other business partners who had begun the business park concept.

“We’re going to sell 1-acre and 2-acre lots,” Stalter said. “And we have one lot now that has (La. 70) frontage that we’re talking to some restaurants about. Ideally, the project could be as big as the market demands, but we feel like we have about five or six people right now looking hard at those industrial business lots.”

The site is about a mile west of the Sunshine Bridge.

To the east, the Ascension Economic Development Corp. is talking to property owners along Interstate 10 in the parish about selling 100 acres to 200 acres to a developer, who would erect speculative buildings and recruit tenants to a business park that would focus on distribution, office and light manufacturing space and build out over a period of years.