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It’s no secret Baton Rouge has undergone quite a change during the past 25 years. The bulk of this special 25th anniversary issue of Business Report examines these changes from various aspects.

From a general standpoint, Business Report wanted to know what significant changes Baton Rouge has seen, is currently tackling and will face in the future. Seven voices can be heard in our roundtable, though in unison the voices seem to say: Wherever Baton Rouge has been, it’s undoubtedly going places. ‘The genie is out’ and the time has come to press forward turning wishes into realities.

Question: What has been the most significant change in Baton Rouge over the last 25 years. What are the things that really stand out that say. “Can you believe that’s happened?”

Thompson: Katrina brought change that would have never occurred under any other circumstances. It’s the singular, most important event that’s happened in Baton Rouge since I’ve been here for 30 years.

Holden: It seems like we had that Rip Van Winkle effect. All of the sudden we awakened to the new thing that happened and pretty much everyone chipped in and chimed in. You ask the average person now and they’ll tell you about the buzz and excitement of Baton Rouge. … We watched a whole new shift in the way we think, I believe. Instead of sitting down and letting it happen, we’re making it happen.

Spinosa: One of the most significant changes has been the planning process here and the outgrowth of our community moving in the direction of smart growth, high-density, compact design. It was well under way before Katrina. Perkins Rowe is a very unique kind of project. These normally start in cornfields or on the edge of a community. Our planners here allowed this to happen kind of in the heart. We’re at the forefront more so than I think people recognize. Yes, there’s communities out there like the Portlands that have been doing it for a long time and are further down the road, but there’s a whole lot more that haven’t embraced it like we have.

Q: Clearly no one can ever be prepared for a tragedy like Katrina or Rita. We have this tremendous opportunity, but are we prepared to deal with these challenges?

Holden: With the Chamber, we’re going to start our own repatriatism program. When you talk about the job aspect, we’ll have companies list job openings on the Web site and bring people that were educated here back to Baton Rouge and back to East Baton Rouge Parish. We’ve had to rework our work force investment dollars. If you look at how the work force investment dollars were being used, it was mainly for barbers, beauticians and truck drivers. We’ve now had to rework that to carpentry, air conditioning, welding, pipe fitting, to film—we’re reshaping the whole direction of the dollar.

Q: I think you’re hitting a big issue here: labor. I know this is huge for the petrochemical industry. How do we solve this issue?

Milton: I think it’s the biggest opportunity and the biggest danger. It could cap all the growth everyone is talking about. We see it in our company and across the board. Forty percent of our population is going to retire in the next four years. We’re recruiting like we’ve never recruited before. The quality of people through the education system who are then competent to take the job is a real challenge. Where we put a lot of our focus is on the pipeline through the education system. I think one of the issues there is success measured for education now is how many kids go to college. The big gap and the big opportunity are in the skills, skilled trades. We really need to put some focus on that. A degree in Chinese art history doesn’t get you far, but somebody who’s had good technical training—we have jobs readily available up and down the river. They’re very good jobs, life-changing jobs for $40,000/$50,000/$60,000 base salary. It makes a big difference.

Q: Where does our future work force come from?

Thompson: We have to repatriate those that left. The college grads, all the young people that have left, we’ve got to bring them home.

Hudson: When I think about 25 years ago—I’m dating myself now—but I was heading off to college. My desire in leaving to go to college, I wasn’t coming back because the face of Baton Rouge was not a welcoming place for me, even though it’s home. When you think about 25 years ago and 25 years later, my God look at the face of Baton Rouge. I live in a wonderful neighborhood, but I sit on the back porch and drink wine with people who look nothing like me. My children play with children who look nothing like them. We go out to dinner and all of those things that my parents never would have done. We’re speaking that language. But I’m in the minority, if you will, of walking that walk of staying. I meet the Baton Rouge people across the country and it’s like, “Make the case for me to come home.”

Finch: I agree. After I graduated from LSU, we moved to Philadelphia. I didn’t come back until 2000 and that was because my brother gave me the opportunity to have my own business. I didn’t want to work for anyone else. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I came home because of family. We wanted to raise our kids and have the support of our family close by. Really it wasn’t that ideal. My husband is an artist, and there’s not a great community here that will support that. We made it work. He eventually taught in the school system and I got to open the restaurant, but it’s certainly not one of the cities we thought we would end up in even though we both grew up here.

Q: On one hand, you’ll have individuals who will argue for a knowledge-based economy. You can’t live off the land with oil, gas, timber, sugar cane, etc. There’s that shift. How do we balance out where we invest our dollars? We can’t ignore the past simply for the future.

Milton: There’s hardly an industry today that’s not knowledge-based. I challenge you to come look at our facilities. I don’t think it’s a case of whether it’s knowledge-based or not. I think it’s more about how you get that knowledge and how you use it. We’ve got a gap here between what we can do and the resources to make it happen. You come back to that same root cause which is do you have the horsepower and the brain power to deliver what you can?

Griffin: If you think about Raising Cane’s chicken fingers, we continue to be a growing business and a dynamic business in our community. I can tell you right now, we haven’t had a vice president of marketing since Hurricane Katrina: a) because we have very high standards and b) because when we bring these folks in, we have to sell them. I’m here in Baton Rouge because I believe in the foundation and good work and that we are on the cusp of greatness. As we continue to push and get these public and private partnerships and we deliver on things, we will be an incredible city. But when I bring people in, I have to sell the gap. I think it’s incredibly difficult to recruit high-caliber, executive-level individuals. We’re already at a loss, and we have a net migration-out problem. I went to LSU’s MBA classes about a year ago and I said, “How many people plan to stay in Baton Rouge?” Of 300 students in the class, one person raised their hand because they had a job. We can recruit those people all day long, but we only have so many spots. There’s a real need for us to be very cognizant of what young people want. When we say what we want, because I work with Forum 35, sometimes it’s very difficult to get what we want. We have to have a dynamic community that addresses those needs. If we say arts and entertainment is important, it shouldn’t take two years for an arts and entertainment district to come up. Or when we say education is important, Forum 35 shouldn’t be the only organization that’s out in Glen Oaks helping education. There’s a tacit assumption in our community, in my opinion, that education can’t be fixed, and we should all invest in private education.

Milton: Baton Rouge can be quite introverted. Eighty-one percent of people stay, the highest in the U.S. But I tell you once we get people here, the community wins out. It’s got a very strong community. The arts and social scene that’s growing. We’ve actually started having trouble getting people to move out again. A big selling point of Baton Rouge is very much a community. I lived in Houston and London in my last two jobs, and it’s hard to find a community there. Once we get them here, we find it works.

Hudson: I’ve talked with some of these same students, and what I’m finding is I’d almost rather keep my employees longer. I’m encouraging them. You stay, whatever we need to do to keep you in the workplace. When I talk to some of the students coming out of the master’s programs or the internal audit master’s programs at LSU, they really aren’t quite sure what they want. They’re consistent with the Wall Street Journal article not too long ago that talked about “the age of me” and “moms and dads telling them they’re the most wonderful things on the planet.” They walk into my workplace and they want me to pay them $70,000 out of LSU or Southern or Tulane or whatever. They’ve never sat behind a desk. They’ve never talked to a supervisor. I’d rather hire somebody who’s been somewhere else. Maybe the repatriation is a better fit.

Thompson: In this community, we have 100,000 people that have been surveyed that said, “I am not now working, but I would like to go to work.”

Q: With all the help wanted signs up, how can they not get a job? What’s the problem?

Thompson: It’s not not getting a job. It’s that they’re not trained or they have no mechanism to get in the workplace.

Hudson: Are you hiring people?

Finch: I’m having a hard time hiring people. It’s really difficult to find good talent.

Hudson: Are they understanding what it means to work?

Finch: They do, but few of them. Not very many.

Thompson: We’ve got to get our state delegation from the nine-parish area and those senators and those representatives have got to work together. Orleans and Jefferson parishes have the best cohesive legislative unit of anybody in the state. Those people down there, they hang together. They really take care of their area. We’ve got to the same thing for the nine-parish area. We’ve got to get our legislators and our senators together and functioning as a group in the legislature to get our share of the resources. Now, this place we live in, that we call Baton Rouge, is now the commercial capital of Louisiana. New Orleans’ day is gone and will not come back probably for a long time. We need to start acting like it and being sure that we get our share. The second thing is, we’re going to have to tax ourselves. We’re going to have to be willing to step up and understand that if we’re going to improve the infrastructure, if we’re going to get our roads, our sewers, whatever we need to be a first-class community, we’re going to have to tax ourselves.

Q: Does Baton Rouge want to be a big small town or does it want to be a small large city? I think depending on how that question is answered dictates how much we care about attracting young, eclectic types.

Spinosa: If we don’t embrace that, we’re on the demise. If we step away from that and make a conscious decision to be no growth I think is what you’re saying, then we’re a city in decline.

Milton: I think it’s already a small big city, but how good a small big city is the question.

Q: There’s an element out there that does not want that. There are a lot of very successful people in Baton Rouge that say, “What do we have to change for? It’s been perfectly wonderful my entire life.”

Thompson: They’re in the minority.

Hudson: The vocal minority. I think the more you see people travel and the more exposure we bring in through the mayor and when you travel and bring in ideas, I think the more that gets sent out into the community, the more we see what the possible is. I think that’s what’s so exciting about “well there could be art and music and a Sephora and a Bally’s.” All of these things I see in another city, and I can walk downtown and see. I think as we keep talking about that and keep sending that out into the community, that vocal minority gets suppressed and all of the other ideas rise to the top.

Thompson: We cannot go back. We are now the commercial capital in this state. To think otherwise, you haven’t been here. All of the economic, financial indicators for our businesses are out the top. The cork’s out the bottle, and the genie’s out. What we’ve got to focus on: quality of life, the arts, young people, what do we need to do to make our community more attractive for those so as we get ready to repatriate some of our LSU grads, they come around and say, “I really like that.” That’s part of the responsibility to create the environment for us to get people to come, to like it and stay here and to attract people back. To think that we could either hold tight or go back, there’s too much momentum. It cannot happen.

Q: Can we achieve our potential without a significant addressing of the public education system? Is that the greatest anchor at this point?

(A chorus of “yes.”)

Hudson: You have to address it, but I’ll go back to skill. It can’t be that everyone is college-bound. It has to be a mix.

Thompson: We’ve got to come to the realization that what we owe every student in public education the ability to read and the ability to do math. We’ve got to focus our curriculum and our instruction and everything to where we can get them to read and do math. If they can read and do math, then Exxon can take those young people and make something out of them.

Milton: Where we do have technical training at two high levels in Baton Rouge Community College and P-Tech, there’s not enough room for students. The demand is huge. If we can go down lower into high schools and get people really tuned in to science and math and reading and some practical skills we’ll be able to…

Q: Obviously real estate, industry, government are huge drivers here. But really what gets this community going and all of America going are entrepreneurs. What are the things we have to do or have done? What are the challenges we have to deal with?

Finch: We are glad to be here. It’s very exciting to see the growth. We have two locations on opposite sides of the city. It’s exciting to see that people are attracted to what we have to offer, which is something very different, very unique.

Q: I guess my question bluntly is within the African American community, is this a business-friendly place to live, work and play?

Holden: You got different perceptions. You have some young people that believe firmly that there’s racism here, and they can’t break the barrier. You have others who have broken through that glass ceiling and are successful and love a lot of the things we do. It’s not just African Americans, we’re now starting outreach programs in the Vietnamese community, Hispanic community that had never been done. There’s no excuse. We have to tell people how they can do business, but we also have to talk about power and training. Bottom line is you can keep people here, but you have to figure out how to fully embrace and lift them. We need to have that discussion openly and frankly with the community, and it cannot be one-dimensional. It’s no longer black and white. It’s much broader than that.

Hudson: Mothers, parents, for the most part all want to do the right thing for their children. I may need to be approached differently than this mother, but we still may say yes. You need to know how to be inclusive. We’ve really failed on how to be inclusive. That’s from an economic standpoint, that’s from philanthropy, that’s volunteerism, that’s on so many levels. If we know how to speak the language of business to all of these different segments.

Thompson: The young people are a whole lot better than the old folks are in doing this. They’re a whole lot more inclusive, they’re just better. I think this community now is a whole lot better today than it was 10 years ago.

Q: Do young people feel like they have a power voice?

Griffin: I think young people have an opportunity to stop talking and start showing up more. The problem is we want to have a voice, and we want to say we’ve said it. But we have to show up. We have to vote. I’ve been through some community issues where there are some things we clearly wanted, but nobody picked up the phone like the other opposing groups. Nagging works in our community. Young people just have to embrace that and show up. It’s vitally important as far as really being in the middle and having a say in what we want.

Q: What will Baton Rouge look like? As you see what forces are in place now, talk to me about Baton Rouge in 10 years? What do you think we will see?

Holden: You’ll see a loop for sure. Frankly, I hate to keep harping on Taiwan, but if you take a look at us, we were Baton Rouge, a city. Now we’re recognized in the state. You’re watching regional recognition and national recognition. The next thing is global. That’s what you’re seeing coming out of the Pennington agreement is you form those partnerships, but you deal with Baton Rouge. Everyone’s predicting the Asian economy to be the hottest economy growing. You then figure out, OK, let me look at the Caribbean. Let me look at Latin America, Canada and our other neighbors and see what partnerships are out there. Next year, I’m going to China. You’re watching all this stuff happen on the global economy now that is putting Baton Rouge on a different level. At the same time, you’ll see infrastructure. I’ll go back to what Graham said. It’s going to take the fact that we’re going to have to step up and say, “We’re going to have to tax ourselves in order to make this happen.” Then we’ll watch phenomenal growth.

Thompson: I’m going to make two predictions. In the next 10 years, the combination of Southern and LSU will be one of the top five research institutions in the country. They will get more grants. When you become a true research facility, you get all sorts of professionals to come in to run those research projects. They will be in the top five in the country. No. 2, Pennington and the new teaching hospital for the LSU med school will be located in Baton Rouge, and those two will have synergy together that will make us one of the primary graduate medical education communities in the country.

Spinosa: Baton Rouge is going to be a better community to live in. Instead of developing subdivisions, we’re developing neighborhoods. This whole planning and smart growth, I don’t want to keep going there, but it’s so important. Since the ’50s there’s been no community in these suburban models we embraced. Baton Rouge is going back. I think that’s going to help make Baton Rouge a better community for people to want to come to. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Griffin: Ten years from now I think we’ll live in a city that looks a lot like Baton Rouge, but much much better. And I hope we’re winning the popularity contest. I think at the end of the day there are cities like Austin. I’ve visited Austin thinking it could be the city to move to. I didn’t like the traffic. I didn’t like the culture of people necessarily. I like Baton Rouge. I think if we win the popularity contest when we bring these graduates back from Southern and LSU, that’s a winning formula we can’t go wrong with.

Finch: I would like to see continued diversity. We were part of the first Asian families to move here. We were the second Chinese restaurant. There’s so much difference between then and now. I think I was the only Asian kid at U-High at one point. Now my children go there.

Five years later: How far have we come?

Five years ago, Business Report invited a handful of young executives and seasoned veterans to discuss the status of Baton Rouge and its future. Here are some of their talking points from separate roundtables. Gauge for yourself if their comments are still pertinent. (Positions listed are from September 2002 and may not necessarily reflect current positions.)

The panelists were:

Robert Davidge, president and CEO, Our Lady of the Lake Medical Center

Hans Dekker, executive vice president, Baton Rouge Area Foundation

Todd Graves, president, founder and CEO, Raising Cane’s

J. Miles Higgins, president and CEO, The Relocation Center

Hans Sternberg, principal, Starmount Life Insurance

Milton Womack, owner, Milton J. Womack Inc.

On change

Davidge: I think if we’re going to move Baton Rouge forward, we have to get the school situation resolved, we talked about that, but we’ve got to deal with transportation. We’ve got to have alternative arteries that will take people off of I-10 through the middle of Baton Rouge.

Sternberg: I think we need to stop bashing ourselves and start saying some really wonderful things that Baton Rouge, as opposed to any other part of the state, may have. We’re the seat of government, both state and city. We’ve got two universities. We have ports, we have the river, we have a stable, educated work force. We have reasonable wages. We’re at the intersection of two major interstate highways. We’ve got so much going for us, I can’t believe how much I read in the newspapers about what’s negative.

Womack: I think we’re like this little fellow, Pogo. He looks in the mirror, and he says, ‘I have seen the enemy, and it’s me.’ We’re our own worst enemy. I like Louisiana. I like what we have. We’ve got a lot of problems, but it’s just like democracy. Nothing’s going to be perfect. If you ever get consistent, good leadership, and you might have that now, it’s going to become of one the greatest cities of the world. It’s got all the potential.

Sternberg: You will see Baton Rouge outpacing New Orleans over the next 10 to 15 years. We will pass them, both in population, industry and every other area.

On attracting outsiders

Sternberg: What I heard Milton and Bob say, it’s something that I agree with and they said it in different ways, but what we’re missing are some of the corporate headquarters that would attract normal college graduates. But we don’t have a lot of corporations in Louisiana. We had more 20 years ago, unfortunately. And, somehow, we’ve allowed those to escape.

Graves: Lack of national businesses headquartered here. I know we lose a lot of great graduates. We have two universities pumping out exceptional people. And a lot of them are going to Atlanta, Austin and Dallas if they want to stay in the South. If we had national businesses, that would be great to keep all these people and generate more business to keep leaders in the community.

Dekker: We have a great quality of life, but there are amenities that we need to make stronger. The bike path on the levee, the arts block downtown. I think you have to paint a picture of a quality of life that’s attractive. If you didn’t grow up rooting for the LSU Tigers, you’re out of luck. We need to have a package of things. One of the lingering problems with corruption is that we don’t have confidence in the public sector.

Higgins: As far as relocating people on a corporate level to Baton Rouge, that’s not an issue, really. The issue with companies trying to get people to come to Baton Rouge is the education. It boils down to we’re not in line with the rest of the country from an education standpoint. There are also some surrounding areas, West Feliciana, Ascension, that have really strong public school systems. And that’s what we try to show them.