From riverfront city to ‘America’s next great city’

• By SCOTT DYER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jun 14, 2009

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East Baton Rouge Mayor-President Kip Holden likes to refer to Baton Rouge as “America’s next great city.”

In recent years, the historical riverfront city has started to grab national attention.

For instance, BusinessWeek magazine last fall named Baton Rouge one of the nation’s top places to ride out the recession. The distinction came because the local economy has been relatively immune to the banking and mortgage problems plaguing many U.S. cities.

Baton Rouge’s strong economy is partly because of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, which made Baton Rouge into a boomtown almost overnight. Thousands of displaced storm evacuees sought shelter in the Capital City, and many of them wound up staying and working here.

Coupled with rebuilding efforts in New Orleans and other hard-hit areas, the new residents provided the city-parish government with an unexpected windfall of surplus revenues, mostly from sales taxes.

And while the surge of sales-tax revenues has slowed in recent months, it was still up 3.9 percent last year compared to 2007. And the trend continued in early 2009, with sales tax revenues up by 5.3 percent over the same period last year.

So far, Holden and the 12-member East Baton Rouge Parish Metro Council have chosen to use the surplus revenues for one-time expenses, such as construction projects, instead of recurring expenses, like employee salaries.

Last year, the council agreed to use $4.5 million in surplus funds to build a North Boulevard Town Square between River Road and Fifth Street.

And the private sector is getting into the downtown development act as well. Wampold Companies recently completed the 12-story City Plaza II at Convention and Fourth streets at an estimated cost of $70 million.

Also, the council voted to create an arts and entertainment district downtown and agreed to waive sales taxes for original works of arts sold there.

Most traffic signals in downtown Baton Rouge are more than 50 years old, but they are in the process of being changed under a $9.9-million contract to replace 29 signals with state-of-the-art computerized signals.

The project will include the type of pedestrian crossing signals on Canal Street in New Orleans.

The upgrade of the downtown area signals is one of 35 road projects included in the mayor’s $690-million Green Light Plan. By persuading East Baton Rouge voters to extend the parish’s half-cent road tax for 23 years instead of the traditional three to five years, Holden and the council are able to float bonds and expedite projects that would have taken years to build on a pay-as-you-go basis.