Nearly two years after voters approved a dedicated 2% hotel motel tax to fund a new Baton Rouge North Economic Development District, the agency is hoping to finalize tonight a draft of its strategic plan for how to revitalize the area.
At its regular monthly meeting, board chair Ron Smith says the BRNEDD board will review changes to the plan, which has been in the works for months. He hopes to release the draft publicly within the next week or two, and unveil a final version of the plan later this fall.
The strategic planning process has consumed the BRNEDD board over the past three months, according to Smith, who says completing the project took precedence over hiring a new executive director for the organization.
In March, the BRNEDD advertised for two paid positions—a full-time executive director with a salary not to exceed $55,000, and a part-time marketing specialist with a salary not to exceed $22,900.
Several candidates applied, including the two contract employees who have been running the organization since it was created, Rinaldi Jacobs and Woodrow Muhammad. But the board never acted on the applications, and ultimately tabled a hiring decision until after it could complete a strategic plan.
Smith now says it didn’t make sense to hire a full-time director until a strategic plan was in place to guide the agency.
“We decided we could not determine what the position would actually look like until we had a strategic plan,” he says.
For months in late 2017 and 2018, Muhammad worked on a plan for the agency, but earlier this year the board brought in a professional facilitator to complete the process. It partnered with Southern University, which agreed to share the services of the Alabama-based consultant that is helping the university with its strategic plan.
Though the agency has been slow to get off the ground—which board members attribute in part to the fact that the tax revenues that fund the BRNEDD didn’t materialize until Dec. 2017, nearly a year after the agency was approved—once a strategic plan is in place Smith believes the agency will begin to have more of a visible impact.
The BRNEDD board meets at 6 p.m. at the Urgent Care Center, 5439 Airline Hwy.
