Clinton to lead Cenla’s efforts

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Aug 5, 2008 - Page: 1D - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Jim Clinton, who led the North Carolina-based economic growth partnership between 13 Southern governors and their constituents for the past decade, is coming home to Louisiana.

On Monday, the Cenla Advantage Partnership in Alexandria announced Clinton as the chief executive officer of its 11-parish economic development group.

Clinton, 62, will leave his position as executive director of the Southern Growth Policies Board and join CAP on Sept. 15.

Prior to joining Southern Growth nine years ago, Clinton’s Louisiana accomplishments included authoring a reorganization plan that reshaped the state’s executive branch from more than 250 governmental units to 20 principal departments.

He also managed the Louisiana Superdome’s transition from public to private management.

After working in policy positions, Clinton served in Baton Rouge as president of the Louisiana Partnership for Technology and Innovation and the Gulf South Research Institute.

Clinton’s wife, Susan, is an Alexandria native and the couple continued visiting the Alexandria area twice a year, giving Clinton insight into the emergence of CAP, which sprang from The Rapides Foundation.

“We never really got Louisiana out of our system,” Clinton said Monday. “It was an opportunity to come back and for my wife to be closer to her family members. And I’ve been very impressed with what The Rapides Foundation and the Cenla Advantage Partnership have been trying to do.”

Clinton called his Southern Growth tenure the most fulfilling work of his career and something he wasn’t anxious to leave, but he also has logged 75,000 to 100,000 air miles annually on the job.

“For me, I think it was that long-held sense of unfinished business in Louisiana and an opportunity to do it,” he said. “And I think the air travel system has just worn me out. The chance to work where I can do most of my work traveling behind the wheel of a car and where it seems like Baton Rouge is a long trip — that’s a very attractive thing.”

The Rapides Foundation, which has improving community health as its chief mission, convened a community meeting in 2003 to pose better regional economic development as a means to fulfilling that mission. The foundation committed $1.5 million over three years to CAP in 2005 and hired George Robertson as the first CEO. Robertson left the partnership earlier this year after a two-year tenure and informal talks with Clinton began.

Hiring Clinton “is a major triumph for central Louisiana,” said CAP board chairman and Cleco Corp. executive Mike Madison in a statement.

Clinton and the partnership are targeting strategies that deal with building a more effective work force, developing better regional collaboration and improving the region’s infrastructure.