When Louisiana Economic Development was trying to woo GE Capital to Louisiana in 2013 to open a technology center in downtown New Orleans, it agreed to provide the company with a $12.7 million grant to cover its relocation costs, workforce training and other expenses, Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel notes in her latest column.
“In return, the company promised to create some 300 new, well-paying jobs—software developers and IT engineers—by 2015,” Riegel writes. “It was a one of those proverbial win-win deals inked with such frequency and announced with much fanfare during the years of the Jindal administration. But like so many of those announcements that sounded so good at the time, the reality of the deal hasn’t lived up to its billing.”
Riegel says it was New Orleans executive Bobby Savoie, who owns technology consulting firm Geocent, that was one of the first to notice. Shortly after its 2013 opening, GE began aggressively targeting Savoie’s talent and using its generous subsidies from the state to lure his employees away, Savoie says.
“These people were making between $80,000 and $90,000 a year with us,” Savoie tells Riegel. “GE offered them $120,000. They ended up hiring 25 of our people and took a lot of our top-notch talent.”
Savoie replaced those he could, Riegel says, but he wasn’t able to fill all the positions. Ultimately, he sent some of the work to his other offices in South Carolina, Alabama and Washington, D.C. He contends GE drove up the cost of labor in the market and actually made Louisiana less competitive, not more.
“I raised hell about it with (then-LED Secretary) Stephen Moret and others,” he says. “But they couldn’t tell GE they couldn’t hire locally.”
That was 2014. New Orleans CityBusiness wrote about it at the time, with Moret telling the magazine that the state would take a more aggressive approach to luring Louisiana expats and mid-career professionals to IT jobs here—but that it wouldn’t and couldn’t impose hiring restrictions on GE.
“For its part, GE’s local Chief Information Officer Mike DeBoer said at the time that the company was trying to hire half its workforce from outside Louisiana, but that it wasn’t under any obligation ‘to meet recruitment goals related to geographical location,’” Riegel writes. “DeBoer has since moved on. He recently left his position at the New Orleans tech center, and GE could not be reached for comment. But things haven’t improved in the two years since.”
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