On the grow: Production at the LSU AgCenter Food Incubator has more than doubled this year, with tenants making more than 44 tons of their food products in 2015, up from 21 tons in 2014. When the incubator opened in 2013 with just a handful of tenants it produced 3.5 tons of product, says incubator director Gaye Sandoz. She credits AgCenter food scientists Luis Espinoza, Marvin Moncada and Gabriela Crespo for helping tenants formulate innovative products and increase output to meet growing demand from local retailers. Along with the production increase, Sandoz says, food incubator products have a rapidly growing presence in retail stores. The incubator currently has 29 tenants and a waitlist of about 20 entrepreneurs. “We are in need of a larger facility and looking at different options for our future growth,” she says. The LSU AgCenter has the full story.
The state we’re in: The brightest young people in Louisiana are going to make their mark somewhere—and if it’s not in this state, it will be in another—LSU President F. King Alexander told a group of business leaders and other stakeholders as keynote speaker of the Central Louisiana Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Meeting and Business Expo on Monday. As The Town Talk of Alexandria reports, it wasn’t surprising that Alexander spoke mainly about the need to protect investment in higher education in an uncertain financial climate. “The next generation of students is going to build someone’s economy,” Alexander said. “They will create someone’s economic engine. We want to make sure it’s our economy right here in Louisiana.” Alexander asked the central Louisiana business leaders to partner with other higher education stakeholders to prevent state colleges from “being held hostage like last year, when we were going down to the final day to find out if we were going to have a budget or not.” Read the full story.
One thing leads to another: A former Louisiana contractor has won a $20 million lawsuit he filed against the state Department of Transportation and Development over a 2007 incident he says cost him his business because he refused to pay a bribe to a state official. Jeff Mercer of Mangham tells The News-Star in Monroe he filed the suit over actions that caused his business, which employed 20 to 40 people, to be shuttered. Mercer claimed in the suit that Willis Jenkins, a DOTD inspector on a bridge project on Louisville Avenue in Monroe, “demanded a bribe.” The original suit was for $20 million, but because it has taken eight years to try, judicial interest will compound the amount by an additional several million, says Mercer’s attorney David Doughty, who adds two separate suits for more than $10 million in contractual losses are ongoing in Baton Rouge. On Friday night, a 12-person jury ruled unanimously in Mercer’s favor. Read the full story.
