Growing state’s economy, creating jobs

July 21
July 21, 2009
Louise Fanguy Buquet
July 23, 2009
July 21
July 21, 2009
Louise Fanguy Buquet
July 23, 2009

We advanced an aggressive reform agenda in the recently concluded legislative session.


I could tell you about all the steps we took to crack down on sex predators by closing loopholes and revamping current laws so we stay ahead of the monsters that now prey on our kids through the Internet and text messages.

Or, I could tell you about the DWI laws we passed in this session that increase penalties on offenders so we keep our streets and highways safe.


Or, I could talk about the important laws we passed to strengthen discipline in the classroom and improve our state’s health care system.


Instead, I want to focus on the responsible 2010 budget, which does not raise taxes on hardworking Louisianians, while protecting our economic development plans so we can continue to attract new companies and create more jobs for our people, and preserving our state’s rainy day fund to help us during future budget challenges.

While dozens of other states across the country have raised a variety of taxes on their businesses and their people during this national economic downturn, we knew that continuing to spend like business-as-usual in Baton Rouge and just passing the bill on to you – the taxpayer – would be one of the worst things we could do during these leaner times.


We will not run things here in Louisiana the way they do in Washington – we can’t borrow from China or print more money. Instead, we cut state spending, eliminated waste and forced government to do more with less.


In fact, we cut total spending by around $700 million, and trimmed more than 1,300 positions from state government in this budget, bringing the total number of full-time positions eliminated to more than 3,300 since January 2008.

By tightening the belt on state government we were able to focus resources on our state priorities, including a $290 million investment in coastal restoration and hurricane protection projects, $200 million to expand and upgrade our community and technical colleges, and $98 million for construction projects at our state’s universities, during this session.


Since taking office last year, we have invested a total of $3.36 billion in road and infrastructure improvements.


These important investments in our infrastructure, along with our business-oriented approach of keeping our taxes low and enhancing our workforce training system so we are better meeting the needs of companies looking to expand, have helped to win economic projects that create a total of more than 32,000 new direct and indirect jobs since taking office last January, and $4.3 billion in capital investment for our state.

These new economic development projects create jobs all across our state, including recently the Global Strike Command in northwest Louisiana (900 jobs), the V-Vehicle Company (1,400 jobs) and Foster Farms (1,100 retained jobs) in northeast Louisiana, and SNF (500 jobs) and the Shaw Modular Solutions facility (1,400 jobs) in south Louisiana.


Even as the nation has been shedding jobs at an accelerating pace since the beginning of the national recession, Louisiana’s economy has continued to outperform its peers.

Louisiana has now experienced our second consecutive year of population in-migration, according to the US Census. We also rank second in the South for having the lowest unemployment rate, and we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation – nearly three percentage points below the national average.

The Baton Rouge market was reported to have the second largest total of year-over-year job gains out of 310 metro areas in the country recently studied, and both Livingston and Ascension Parishes recently made the top 100 List of Fastest Growing Counties/Parishes in the nation.

NewGeography.com ranked Lafayette, Baton Rouge and Shreveport-Bossier in the top 10 of their 2009 Best Medium-Sized Cities for Job Growth, and BusinessWeek named Baton Rouge and New Orleans among the most stable cities for riding out the national recession.

Looking ahead, we know our national economic challenges will not end overnight, and we have already begun work to ensure we have the tools we need to continue finding savings and protecting our state priorities in future years.

We have begun work with the Commission on Streamlining Government to identify ineffective, and duplicative government programs that can be eliminated or consolidated to ensure the state is living within its means in the coming years.

We are also working with the Postsecondary Education Review Commission to help the higher education enterprise operate more efficiently and to promote excellence instead of duplication.

In this budget, we restored around $118 million to higher education to give officials more time to develop plans to become more efficient and better live within their means. The work of the Postsecondary Education Review Commission will be an important part of the process to streamline spending in higher education during leaner budget years.

In the FY 10 budget, we also cut costs and streamlined government services by consolidating schools in Baton Rouge and mental health facilities in the New Orleans area. In Baton Rouge, we consolidated the Louisiana School for the Visually Impaired into the campus of the Louisiana School for the Deaf to increase student safety, capture additional federal resources and centralize business office functions while maintaining separate entities.

We also transitioned the Steve Hoyle Rehabilitation Center in Tallulah from a state-run correctional facility housing adult male offenders to a parish-run facility focused on reducing recidivism rates – to achieve further cost savings and improve efficiencies.

Additionally, DHH is working to streamline mental health care programs in the New Orleans area to maximize services and reduce state expenses.

We still have work ahead of us to find even more efficiencies all across state government so we can continue to attract business investment to our state and encourage growth and expansion to create more jobs for our people.

We know that no strategy to grow our economy is complete without supporting the businesses and industries that create jobs, and even as we face leaner times in our state budget, we remain unwavering in our commitment to making Louisiana the best place in the world for businesses to succeed and create opportunities so none of our children have to leave the state to pursue their dreams.