When Susan Bonnet Bourgeois took over as the new head of the Louisiana Department of Economic Development in January, her new boss, Gov. Jeff Landry, tasked her not only with leading the state’s economic development efforts, but also with taking an entirely new approach to attracting businesses and industries.
To that end, the state Legislature passed a law in June that restructured LED and gave Bourgeois’ office more autonomy, allowing him to override vetoes of LED incentives on a case-by-case basis and exempting his department from state procurement requirements. The law also creates an advisory committee of private sector executives to work with Bourgeois and requires LED to develop a strategic plan to guide the state’s economic growth.
As the planning process unfolds, Ms. Bourgeois, who formerly ran the North Shore Community Foundation, has been touring the state, trying to dispel perceptions that Louisiana is a hard place to do business. She sees opportunities in energy and technology that can combine local know-how with natural advantages.
This week on Talking Business, she shares her message and what’s next.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Your mantra is that we need to “change the narrative” about Louisiana as a place to do business. How do you do that when Louisiana ranks last on every quality of life outcome?
It has to happen on many fronts. We have a responsibility to talk about the opportunity. And the opportunity is there. This is not a sales pitch.
Where does this opportunity lie?
One is to highlight our strengths, where we have strengths. For example, Texas has a high effective tax burden, but it’s perceived as low. Ours is the exact opposite. We have a complex tax burden, but at the end of the day, compared to us, we have an advantage.
This is a great example of the narrative we can change, helping people better understand the realities of doing business here.
But in Louisiana, we don’t get as much for our tax dollars as we do in Texas. Our school system, our health care system, our climate. These are things that are important when companies are considering where to locate. What are your thoughts on that?
Certainly, some of the criticisms are true, but some are counter-narratives. If you look at our individual school systems, we definitely have bright spots. We need to tell those stories while continuing to focus on improvement. From a purely geographic standpoint, there are trade-offs. Industries and businesses that come to South Louisiana will embrace our geographic reality, because our geographic reality is the reason they come here in the first place.
What are your priorities as LED Secretary?
In the next 90 days, we will develop a strategic plan. During the session, the Legislature passed a bill that reorganized our department, and that legislation established an advisory committee made up of private sector representatives, whose primary responsibility will be for the state to develop a strategic plan for economic development and incorporate accountability measures. So it doesn’t matter who the secretary is, we have a plan that follows best practices and has been put together with stakeholder involvement and buy-in.
Who is executing this plan?
We’ve partnered with the Committee of 100 for Economic Development (made up of the CEOs of the 100 largest companies in the state), who will help us hire a consulting firm. Ideally, we want to hire the best in the industry — a world-class firm that has done these studies for other successful states. But we also want to partner with local facilitators to make sure we have the right people involved at the local level and can give us feedback that will inform what we put into the plan. At the end of the process, the plan will tell us what our real opportunity is.
But do you already know where those opportunities are?
Yes. There is an energy opportunity in Louisiana and we should take advantage of it and capitalize on it. It’s not just traditional energy, of course. We’re going to continue to be an oil and natural gas state, but we also have what I call energy addition. It’s not just a transition, it’s the addition of more types of energy, and we’re uniquely positioned to take advantage of all of that.
What’s driving the obsession with clean is global economic pressure. It’s happening, and it’s going to continue to happen, no matter who’s in the White House. When you look around and see the Shells and Exxons of the world investing in both conventional energy and new clean renewable energy, you see there’s room for both. Louisiana has a fundamental advantage that no other country has.
What are the benefits?
First, there’s the carbon capture piece. There’s the rocks, the rules, and the movement. We have the perfect geology for sequestration, the rocks. We have the advantage, the rules, the right to approve our own wells. And we have the pipeline infrastructure in place, which allows the movement.
Second, we have an advantage in terms of existing infrastructure — refineries, pipelines, feedstock, transportation. Third, we have a generational workforce that knows and is proud of this industry and this type of work. It’s an overlap in the cultures of people. So, when you put all of these things together, it’s a huge opportunity. We can make a strategic plan that is solely focused on this.
Are there any other areas you would like to focus on?
Another area where we have clear opportunity is grid capacity and the ability to ramp up generation more easily than many other states. We have the land and the grid capacity. The combination of those two things makes us very attractive to other industries like data centers.
Is Louisiana a good location for cloud data centers?
Yes, data centers are a great example of the intersection of blue-collar industry and technology.
We have relatively cheap electricity and lots of land.
Not in climate-vulnerable South Louisiana.
South Louisiana is unlikely. Definitely not south of I-10. But there’s a big opportunity in central and north Louisiana in that area. Northern Virginia, where a lot of the data centers are, is full, but the Virginia community college system has created a curriculum to develop that talent. Monty Sullivan with the Louisiana Community College System is already talking to those people to see how they can get ahead of the curve and develop that talent in central and north Louisiana.
What do you think about incentives like the Industrial Tax Exemption program, which John Bel Edwards began reforming early in his administration and sparked controversy by linking it to job creation and local autonomy?
We are preparing to develop a strategic plan, so I think it would be wise to wait until we know the state’s priorities before developing an incentive program. If we have a strategic plan and we have buy-in, we have a much better chance of success when we start developing policies to reflect that. So we’re doing our best to remain neutral on incentives until we know the plan.
