With the unanimous approval of the Transportation, Technology and Innovation District at Wednesday’s Metro Council meeting, city and state economic development leaders can now begin meeting to hammer out their pitch and work on a list of smart car tech companies to try to recruit to Baton Rouge.
The resolution creating the district puts the Capital City in the conversation as a landing spot for both fledgling companies and established national corporations looking for a place to manufacture and develop smart car technologies.
The resolution, which had been deferred for two weeks after questions arose about its boundaries and location, passed Wednesday without any discussion. City-parish administrators sent a lengthy memo to council members to address questions they had when first discussing the resolution.
John Snow, vice president of Emergent Method and consultant to the city-parish for the district, says the next step is to gather a working group and begin the process of recruiting tech companies to Baton Rouge.
The working group will consists of members from the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, Louisiana Economic Development, LSU, Southern University, Baton Rouge Community College, Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development and the city-parish.
“I think that’s going to help define the real strategic blueprint about how we move this conversation forward,” Snow says of that initial working group meeting.
The district would focus on downtown as well as two development-ready, LED-certified sites in the Baton Rouge Aviation Business Park and LSU Innovation Park. No tax incentives were created with the district, and recruiters will rely on statewide incentives such as LED’s Digital Media tax credit and others already built-in to downtown, the Aviation Business Park and the LSU Innovation Park.
Some officials have already had initial conversations with several companies—some of which Snow says are national, recognizable entities—to gauge their interest in investing in Baton Rouge for production facilities, testing, incubators or any number of other reasons.
The resolution is the result of the work Baton Rouge leaders did when they put together the city’s entry for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s $40 million Smart City Challenge. The department challenged governments to create a first-of-a-kind city using data to shape how people live and move about. Through that lens, leaders examined ways to incorporate technology to help solve Baton Rouge’s notorious traffic problems. Baton Rouge was not chosen, but the ideas developed from those meetings were carried on.
Snow says Baton Rouge could capitalize on smart car tech because other competing cities are implementing regulations and policies for how the technology. Baton Rouge is not currently doing that, he says.
“That seems extremely backwards to us,” Snow says.
The council at Wednesday’s meeting also approved adding the master plan for the Baton Rouge Health District to the FuturEBR comprehensive plan and passed a resolution encouraging Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, Baton Rouge General Medical Center and Ochsner Medical Center-Baton Rouge to enter into a patient transfer agreement with Champion Medical Center for its proposed freestanding acute care center on Harding Boulevard.
—Ryan Broussard
