Why Cincinnati?” a member of Baton Rouge’s business community asked Business Report editor Stephanie Riegel upon learning she was joining BRAC’s recent Canvas Benchmarking Workshop. “You’d probably learn more in Hattiesburg.”
Riegel wasn’t exactly surprised, noting in her latest column that BRAC’s periodic canvas trips always tend to elicit a certain amount of snarkiness from those who dislike the chamber and the downtown business crowd it’s perceived to embody. They often mistakenly assume the public will get stuck with the tab for public officials to go on an out-of-state trip, she says, or they just think the whole thing is a waste of time.
“Such criticisms are unfounded,” Riegel writes. “The recent trip to southern Ohio was hardly a junket, and there were plenty of valuable lessons to be learned from The Queen City, as the one-time jewel of the Midwest is still fondly called.”
Like Baton Rouge, Cincinnati—a city of some 300,000 residents—has a large, low-income population, blighted neighborhoods and a troubled mass transit system. Like Baton Rouge, it is part of a larger metro area that comprises prosperous suburban communities, though its metro area is admittedly three times larger than the Capital Region, Riegel notes.
But unlike Baton Rouge—all of Louisiana, for that matter—Cincinnati has made impressive strides to address its problems over the past 25 years by working collaboratively on a series of redevelopment and economic development initiatives led almost exclusively by the business community. And the stories about how they got things done in Cincinnati are valuable to Baton Rouge and rest of Louisiana, Riegel writes.
“Unfortunately, those from Baton Rouge who need to hear those stories the most didn’t bother to go on the trip. Rather, most of the attendees came from nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, law firms and local government,” Riegel writes. “They were an eager audience, but they already buy into the redevelopment thesis and don’t have the wherewithal to make it happen anyway.”
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