Seeds and stems: An industry advocacy group called Women Grow encouraged women and minorities to explore careers in the medical marijuana field at a marijuana business convention in New Orleans on Tuesday evening, WRBZ-TV reports. “We want them to have an equal opportunity to become the next billionaires in this industry,” says Chanda Macias, the group’s chairperson and a dispensary owner from Washington D.C. Women Grow hopes to bolster public support for Louisiana’s emerging medical marijuana business and recruit the next leaders in the industry. Read the full story.
Preparing for takeoff: Western Global Airlines, a Florida-based cargo freight carrier, plans to establish an aircraft maintenance facility at Shreveport Regional Airport, creating 50 new direct jobs this year, according to Louisiana Economic Development. Beginning this month, the airline will make a $3 million capital investment for tools and take over one of the hangars at the airport to maintain its 16 Boeing 747s and McDonnel Douglas MD-11 wide-body freighter aircraft. Over the next decade, LED says the company plans to hire up to 170 employees and may expand the Shreveport facility to provide maintenance for third party aircrafts. To land the project, the state is providing the company an incentive package that includes a $1 million performance-based grant and workforce assistance via the LED FastStart program. It will also benefit from the state’s Quality Jobs Program. LED has more details on the announcement.
It’s a tourist parade: Visitor spending in New Orleans increased 6% last year to a record-breaking $8.7 billion, and the 17.74 million tourists who visited the city represented a 5.7% increase over 2016 figures, according to the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau. The bureau says the high numbers could partly be due to a new system that began being used to process tourism data last year. The organization now uses the same date company, DKSA, as the state government and other destination cities, and the numbers differed significantly from the city’s previous University of New Orleans data reports. Earlier this week, Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser announced 47.1 million people visited Louisiana last year—an increase of 500,000 visitors over 2016—and spent $17.5 billion.
