The Baton Rouge Area Chamber has cleared a hurdle toward getting another large parcel of undeveloped land in East Baton Rouge Parish certified as ready for industrial development through Louisiana Economic Development’s Certified Sites program.
On Monday, the Planning and Zoning Commission approved a BRAC request to change the designation for a 382-acre tract at 15696 Old Scenic Highway from agriculture/rural to industrial. The property is owned by Texas-based businessmen Roland Kizer III and Jay Jackson.
“It’s a large tract near the Jetson [Center for Youth] facility. It has four-lane highway access and it would be ideal for logistics companies, for example,” says BRAC President and CEO Adam Knapp.
Through the Certified Sites program, BRAC works with landowners to get their sites development ready, then submits all of the required information to LED for verification and certification. Knapp says the process can take six to nine months from start to certification. Once certified, sites are considered “shovel ready” for development, meaning utilities and infrastructure already are in place or engineering plans have been approved to provide the such services within 180 days.
The Old Scenic Highway property is among eight in the nine-parish Capital Region that BRAC hopes to have certified this year.
“There are a lot of (request for proposals) from industrial companies that are only interested in sites that are certified,” Knapp says. “That’s why we’ve been one of the most aggressive regions in the state to identify sites and see them through the certification process. We’ve aimed to certify eight sites each year for the past three years.”
As of the end of 2014, Knapp says, LED had certified 43 sites across the state through the program. Of those, 19—or 44%—are in the nine-parish region BRAC represents.
“We’re playing a long game in economic development here,” Knapp says. “If we have more certified sites, then we expect that our region will receive more proposals from interested companies than other areas of Louisiana—and ultimately land more economic development deals.”
Knapp says BRAC last year submitted seven more sites in the Capital Region for LED certification. If approved, they would boost to 26 the number of sites in the region certified under the program. They range from a 40-acre site in East Baton Rouge Parish to a tract of more than 1,500 acres in Pointe Coupee Parish.
See a listing of certified sites in the Capital Region, and check out an interactive map of all LED certified sites in Louisiana.
—Steve Sanoski
