Firm relocating to Lafayette
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LAFAYETTE — A nationwide engineering and environmental consulting firm is relocating its corporate office from Boston to Lafayette.
ATC Associates, which has 65 branches in 36 states, announced the move at a news conference Wednesday at Lafayette City Hall.
The company has a branch office in Lafayette with about 25 employees but plans to add 20 corporate positions before the end of the year with more professional jobs to follow after the transition is complete, ATC Associates CEO Bobby Toups said.
“This is the future of the kind of company that Louisiana and Lafayette wants headquartered here,” said Gregg Gothreaux, Lafayette Economic Development Authority president.
ATC Associates works across a wide range of industries, offering services in environmental testing and cleanup, industrial hygiene, and engineering.
Toups said the company sought to relocate its corporate headquarters to the South to be closer to the oil and petrochemical industries.
The company considered some larger cities — Houston, Dallas, Atlanta — but settled on Lafayette because of its central location, economic incentives offered by Louisiana and the enthusiasm of city officials and the LEDA.
“What really made the difference for us was the attitude of the people we dealt with,” Toups said.
He said that in the larger cities “there was just not that effort” to work with the company.
ATC is accepting résumés and will begin interviewing this week to fill the corporate office positions, including openings in marketing, information technology, payroll and accounting.
Toups said future openings are expected for geologist, engineers and other technical professions.
“Those jobs will follow as we move along,” he said.
ATC Associates Chief Financial Officer Paul Grillo said it speaks well for the area that many of the résumés the company has received are from Acadiana expatriates looking to return.
“These are people who have been somewhere else and they’re apparently not happy with where somewhere else is,” Grillo said.
Gothreaux said a key to attracting more firms such as ATC Associates is Louisiana’s “Quality Jobs” incentive program, which provides a cash rebate to companies that create well-paying jobs.
The program offers up to a 6 percent rebate on payroll for new jobs and other rebates for capital expenditures.
“It’s probably the best tool for attracting professional employment,” Gothreaux said.
The news of ATC Associates’ move comes after Transcom announced this month it plans to hire 700 new customer service representatives at the company’s call center here, more than doubling Transcom’s Lafayette workforce.
Toups commented Wednesday that, based on what he has seen across the country, the local economy seems to be faring well.
“Lafayette, for some reason, seems unaffected by what’s going on in the rest of the country,” he said.
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