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“Well, Livingston Parish now has six Ph.D.’s,” a colleague once told Sam Hyde when they bumped into each other at the Winn Dixie in Walker not long before the 2005 hurricanes. “I’ve met every one of them.”

Today, Hyde⎯himself among those half-dozen doctorates as a professor of history at Southeastern Louisiana University who lives in Walker⎯is convinced the number is more like 160.

It’s one of the more arresting indications that the region once perceived as a double-wide wasteland where a full set of teeth was a sure sign you were just passing through ain’t what it used to be.

The Ku Klux Klan’s woodsy former stomping ground across the Amite River from East Baton Rouge Parish is now home to million-dollar mansions, a top 10-rated golf course, a Fortune 500 subsidiary and one of the best school districts in the state. Even its ethnicity is changing ever so slightly⎯latest estimates suggest its white population is now 94%, down from 97% just a few years ago.

These days, Livingston is going head-to-head with neighboring Ascension Parish for population and economic dominance⎯and not just in a smackdown between outdoors superstores Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops. The parishes were the only ones from Louisiana to make the Census list of 100 fastest-growing counties in the nation in 2006, although only Ascension remains a year later.

There are predictions, however, that Livingston could jump to the front in short order. Claritas, a Nielsen marketing research firm used by site selectors, estimates it will take the parish just three years to take over the top spot. By 2011, the firm predicts a 14.1% five-year growth rate for the parish, compared to 13.2% for Ascension.

“We’ve swapped the top spot back and forth, but I look for us to move up and stay there for awhile,” says Parish President Mike Grimmer, who’s made it his mission to change the image of Livingston.

He’s biased, of course, but over the last three years, the parish has added 265 net new businesses, and its total wages have grown 56%⎯more than any other parish in the Capital Region. Median household income now stands at $42,916, compared to $25,470 in 1989 just before the growth spurt began.

In the coming year, both North Oaks Health System and Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center will break ground on Livingston’s first two hospitals, bringing physician and medical specialty firms with them. Shops and restaurants [including Hooters] will pop up around Bass Pro like eager gophers.

Carter Plantation, a swanky resort development in Springfield tagged as one of Golf Magazine’s top 10 courses, is erecting a deep-water marina, hotel and convention center on 1,800 acres. Don’t want to drive that far? Try the also-elite Greystone Country Club in Denham Springs.

Juban Crossing, a traditional neighborhood development on hold to resolve environmental issues, will eventually bring more than 1 million square feet of shopping, as well as medical and office space and 1,100 residences. Stine Lumber, LeBlanc’s Grocery and Walgreens are running their buzz saws in Walker. Wal-Mart bought 50 acres in Holden for a fourth location. Negotiations continue to attract an amusement park. And the list goes on.

“The transformation has been unbelievable,” says Hyde, a professor of regional studies. “It is vastly different from what it was.”

Slow going

Economic development was slow to come to Livingston Parish. Very slow.

The parish missed out on Louisiana’s whole cotton boom because its clay-based soil couldn’t grow the crop. That meant slavery never really found its way there in a big way.

The absence of labor and sparse population meant the only real industry to develop there was timber, much of which was used to build New Orleans. Weyerhaeuser still owns 115,000 acres in the parish.

The region known as West Florida was governed by nearly every major European power—French, British, Spanish—and then America, making it a haven for deserters from four different armies and desperados on the run from the law. Louisiana’s first American governor, William C.C. Claiborne, once commented that the region extending to the Pearl River was one “where the influence of the law is scarcely felt.”

Hyde says that very ethos remains problematic for economic development even today.

“The people are ferociously independent and they have no allegiance to anyone,” he contends. “New people coming in are accustomed to things like zoning laws. But in Livingston, particularly among the older families, there’s this fierce independence that is resistant to any government interference in private affairs. If they want to burn garbage in their backyard, then by God they want to burn garbage in their backyard. It’s one of the reasons Livingston just wasn’t considered a real prime place to migrate to. It was viewed as troubled and politically volatile, and people tended to steer clear of it.”

It wasn’t until 1986 that Livingston got its first major manufacturer⎯ Sunland Fabricators, now owned by the Fortune 500 firm Shaw Group. Last year, the company spent $1.7 million on renovations and $500,000 in new equipment.

Since then, other smaller firms have trickled in around it, the latest being Compressor Engineering Corporation of Houston, which is about to begin construction on 7 acres and brings with it 25 jobs and a nearly $1.4 million payroll.

Then in the early 1990s, subdivisions developed north of Denham Springs in the Watson area, where a large concentration of Albemarle Corporation workers lived and Live Oak schools were thriving.

Cheap land and the prospect for solid public schools attracted policemen, firemen, schoolteachers and other blue-collar workers from Baton Rouge, who were fed up with the all-controlling desegregation order, crime and other aspects of big-city life. They started moving into places like Denham Springs and Walker.

That first wave of growth prompted LSU environmental studies professor Paul Templet to predict in an essay in A Fierce and Fractious Frontier: The Curious Development of Louisiana’s Florida Parishes that Livingston Parish, with its extraordinary concentration of mobile homes and no tax base to pay for infrastructure, was fast becoming a new ilk of ghetto.

Enter Hurricane Katrina. Enter 9,100 new people. Enter 7,000 new homes since 2000.

Last year alone, there were 1,381 new home permits. And these aren’t the kind of homes that come on wheels, either. Empty lots along the Amite River Diversion Canal start at $126,000; around Carter Plantation, $200,000.

A Livingston Board of Realtors market report indicates the average home in the town of Livingston [population 1,636], for example, sold for $271,069 in March. That’s compared to $119,967 around the same time a year ago.

“Watson really kicked the ballgame off,” Grimmer says. “It used to be when you looked in the microscope, it was Denham Springs and Watson where the growth was exploding. Now it’s Denham Springs, Watson, Walker, Livingston—all the way out to Holden. Even bigger is when you go down to the Diversion Canal and look at what’s happening there. So now it’s throughout the parish, not just an isolated area.”

Jeff Woods of Shaw-Sunland, president of the Livingston Economic Development Council board of directors, has lived in Livingston Parish all his life. He moved to Walker 25 years ago.

“Where the Wal-Mart is, that was woods,” Woods, 47, remembers. “Where the McDonald’s is at, we used to haul hay out of there. Everything has grown up. Our way of life has changed.”

In February, Bass Pro Shops opened along Interstate 12 in Denham Springs. John Ware, executive director of the Livingston Economic Development Council, says that, more than anything, put Livingston “on the national map.”

“One thing business people don’t like to do these days is pioneer,” Ware says. “In today’s market, somebody could lose their job if they don’t choose the right place. Bass Pro is almost like a rubber stamp that the pioneering is over. It’s a lot easier to sell the community to corporate management when someone else has taken the risk.”

Not an easy win

Even with all the buzz, Livingston Parish is apparently no shoo-in and will have to work hard for that top spot.

Its boom twin, Ascension, has plenty of superior attributes to keep it in the limelight. Last year alone, the parish managed to snag the $126 million Tyson-Syntroleum Biofuels plant, a $1 million Kellogg’s Distribution Center, a $37 million Kinder Morgan Liquid Bulk Storage Facility, a $1.5 billion Shaw Biofuels plant, a $3.5 million 84 Lumber Distribution Facility and the $165 million International Marine Tank Liquid Terminal.

Both parishes started growing around the same time, and both still are considered white-flight bedroom communities, supplying rooftops for workers to East Baton Rouge and other parishes.

But LSU economics professor Loren Scott notes that Ascension also has a large industrial base that Livingston does not. Consider that Turner Industries is Ascension’s largest employer [1,500 employees], compared Wal-Mart in Livingston [600 workers]. Ascension also boasts BASF, Rubicon Inc., Motica, Shell Chemical and Oxychem.

Those firms translate into big dollars. Ascension’s nonfarm earnings in 2005⎯the latest year for which such data is available from the Bureau of Economic Analysis⎯were $1.8 billion, $409 million of which is manufacturing. By comparison, Livingston’s total nonfarm earnings were $882 million, $97 million of which was manufacturing.

“The strength of Ascension is its petrochemical base by far,” Scott says. “At one time, it had the third-largest chemical workforce in the state behind East Baton Rouge and Calcasieu. And the chemical firms have a tendency to continue to get bigger, and they offer high-paying tech jobs.

“When you go to Livingston, you really have to search to find any kind of industrial base. Livingston has to do what Ascension has done in terms of having a large manufacturing base of some sort that enables them to have their own economic base, and it probably can’t be chemicals. Right now, they rely very heavily on the Baton Rouge economy to drive their own economy.”

Both parishes also routinely lose shoppers to the Mall of Louisiana and Mall at Cortana in Baton Rouge, although Ascension has a regional mall of its own in Tanger Outlet Center in Gonzales. Livingston’s biggest retail draw is the antique district in Denham Springs, which likely brings in nowhere near the revenues that Tanger does.

“One of the things Livingston struggles with is they don’t have a big regional mall,” Scott says. “They lose retail to Baton Rouge as does Ascension. My understanding is that what they were trying to do with the Juban project is try to keep that flow over the bridge from taking place.”

Ascension also boasts two certified megasites on the Mississippi River⎯the deepwater Pointe Sunshine and Orange Grove. A megasite is a 1,000-plus-acre tract of land optioned as a single parcel that is free of easements and fully served by utilities. In other words, it’s ready for development. The Ascension Economic Development Corporation also started the state’s first food incubator a year ago⎯the Louisiana Edible Creations Center⎯to nurture the food processing industry.

Livingston, however, has its advantages, too. For one thing, the parish has more than twice the land potentially available for development. Its schools also rank fifth in the state, while Ascension’s rank eighth. And it has 400 miles of waterways⎯a definite draw for tourists as well as those whose lives are measured by the number of miles on their boat.

Common goals

The two parishes have similar strategies for getting or staying on top.

No. 1 on that list: Diversify.

“That’s what you might say would be the national championship for us⎯to be a self-sustaining economy,” Ware says. “We want people to be able to live, work and play here. It’s not that we don’t want them to go somewhere and eat or see a movie or the symphony or what have you, but it is our economy, and we’d like to have it operating at the highest potential level that we can.”

Last month, Grimmer traveled to Kenner to court a food industry firm that wants to expand to 15 acres. He also sat down at the table with a Springfield boat maker and a Utah motor company desperate to open a larger manufacturing facility somewhere in Livingston Parish to meet demand from Bass Pro. His priority right now, though, is entertainment⎯as in movie theaters and an amusement park. Something for kids and families to do.

Ware adds that the parish is working toward becoming a certified retirement destination in hopes of attracting retirees with time and money to spend. They’ll soak up some of the housing market and contribute to the tax base, but won’t put a strain on the school system.

Ascension Economic Development Corp. President/CEO Tommy Kurtz envisions his parish as a prime spot for the distribution market. By the end of May, he also hopes to have a contract to bring in a national developer to build a business park to bring in some badly needed office space. And the parish is also trying to woo the movie industry and has posted more than 1,000 pictures of possible filming locations on the AEDC Web site.

Ascension Parish President Tommy Martinez also looks for more retail and entertainment. “What we really need is a bowling alley and theaters,” he says. “I don’t know why they haven’t located here.”

Both parishes also are focused on doing what they can to expand badly needed infrastructure to handle all the growth, whether that means roads or sewers or both.

Consider that despite having nearly 100,000 residents, Ascension has just one four-lane road⎯a portion of La. Highway 44. This session, the parish got $15 million to expand La. 73 to three lanes. Livingston has its own struggles with roads. Thus far, the parish hasn’t been able to get money from the state to widen the two-lane Juban Road from Interstate 12 to U.S. 190 to handle anticipated retail traffic once Juban Crossing opens.

Both parishes also lack parishwide wastewater programs⎯a project that could cost as much as $200 million in Ascension Parish alone. Livingston Parish has developed a master plan with the Army Corps of Engineers and is now trying to work on funding. “If you don’t have highways and infrastructure, you’re going to choke,” Martinez says. “That’s what stops business.”

And that’s where this battle begins.

“Ultimately, when you look at both parishes, I think it’s going to come down to who has the better leadership, who had the better vision, who invested in the right things and who was the most successful in getting funding,” Ascension Parish Councilman Chris Loar says. “One of us is going to become the next St. Tammany⎯maybe both of us. Who knows? There could be enough growth to go around for everybody.”