Entergy, LED unveil site tools

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Jul 7, 2009 - Page: 6B

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Utility provider Entergy and Louisiana’s economic development department, LED, unveiled an online site selection database Monday that supersedes anything available in the nation, the parties said.

Entergy Corp., through its Entergy Louisiana and Entergy Gulf States affiliates, began funding the project more than two years ago, launched a test phase in 2008 and rolled out the finished product Monday in a joint announcement with LED.

The Louisiana Site Selection Center — through a Web portal linked with chambers of commerce and regional economic development groups — allows site selection consultants, real estate agents and companies to seek ideal business locations for their industries — and to harvest layers of data telling them everything from how close a site is to a fire station or school to how the property is zoned and, in many areas, what the spending patterns are.

“This application is the only one like this in the United States for (statewide) economic development groups,” said Entergy’s director of economic development Shelley MacNary, who said the Entergy-LED project enables chambers and regional groups to tap a uniform database of property information while branding that information with graphics and photos unique to their area.

Public access to the entire body of site-selection information also is an unusual feature, said Perry Pertuit, an Entergy senior economic development analyst.

Among the licensing partners Entergy brought aboard are Synergos Technologies Inc. for market research data and Microsoft Virtual Earth for aerial photography and mapping. Entergy chose the Microsoft product over Google Earth because it offers better information layers with views that are updated more often, company officials said.

Technologies deployed in the project came with input from site-selection professionals who work with such information daily, Entergy officials said.

“We’ll have 800 to 1,000 different variables,” Pertuit said. “Some of the other databases out there might have half that.”

For a retail developer or industry looking for a location in the heart of Livingston Parish, for instance, the Louisiana Site Selection Center could lead them to a 385-acre property available at the junction of Interstate 12 and Satsuma Road, with a parishwide property tax averaging 135 mills, with 12,000 people within 15 miles who are employed in the retail trade sector and with a natural gas pipeline traversing the site.

By applying a series of parameters, site selectors can continuously fine-tune characteristics of different sites to find one best-suited to their purpose, said Victor Leotta, the owner of LEO LLC, a company that consulted with Entergy throughout the project to build the site selection center.

The ability to provide custom appearances and to highlight regional properties for local economic development groups is important, Leotta said, but “it’s still one convenient application.”

“That was the single most important thing for all site-selection consultants,” he said, citing the uniformity of the data. “I think this ultimately leads to more looks at Louisiana. I don’t think there’s a better system out there.”

That was Entergy’s goal, MacNary said. Though it partnered with the state, Entergy funded the project entirely and declined to disclose how much it has spent on the project. The work continues, with Pertuit and Leotta listing another 30-plus features to launch in August at the site, adding such applications as the ability to draw map boundaries around an area and to be notified by e-mail when a new property becomes available in that zone.