Tyrone Legette, the former pro football player who opened a Sav-A-Lot grocery store on Plank Road in February, is expanding his New Orleans-based construction company with a Baton Rouge office.
“Our focus is definitely going to be on making homeowners affected by flooding whole again, and anything else we can do to help the community,” says Legette, who launched Legette Construction Inc. in New Orleans about a year after retiring from the NFL in 1998.
The Baton Rouge office will be located in roughly 1,500 square feet of space in the Brookwood Village Shopping Center, 12250 Plank Road, where the Sav-A-Lot is also located. Legette says the office should be open by next week and his construction crew is getting ready to begin work in Baton Rouge.
“The immediate attention needs to be on renovations and getting people back into their homes,” Legette says. “But since I retired from the NFL my focus has been to help first-time homebuyers, and that will be the long-term strategy.”
Legette says his company works closely with banks, nonprofits, housing authorities and local governmental agencies in the New Orleans area toward that end, and will look to do the same in Baton Rouge.
“We’re very hands on in changing and improving communities,” he says. “Putting people who have never owned a house into a home of their own is a great idea because it gives them ownership in their communities.”
Legette, a native of Columbia, South Carolina, played college football at Nebraska before starting his NFL career with the Saints in 1992. He has called the Crescent City home ever since. Legette played cornerback for the Saints through the 1995 season and spent several more seasons with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and San Francisco 49ers before retiring.
—Steve Sanoski
