In 2007, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and Baton Rouge Area Chamber jointly funded a study to explore the feasibility of a new international airport that would be located roughly halfway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Officials in both cities had been kicking around the concept for several years, and the Capital Region’s leadership especially liked the idea. New Orleans, however, wasn’t wild about the proposal. Less than three years after Hurricane Katrina, the city was still in serious recovery mode, and tensions were high between the business and political leadership in the state’s two largest cities.
As it turned out, the consulting firm that conducted the study didn’t like the idea either, citing data showing that the market wasn’t big enough to support a new international airport, and also pointed out that the FAA likely wouldn’t fund it anyway.
The report wasn’t what BRAF and BRAC wanted to hear. Still, the leadership of both groups made the findings public, going so far as to present the report with New Orleans officials at a press conference in that city.
More than seven years later, the way Baton Rouge business leaders handled the airport study—even though it was a hard pill for them to swallow—is considered the beginning of a thaw in what were then very icy relations between the two cities, Business Report details in the cover story of its new issue. Numerous business leaders in both cities still talk about the event and the positive effect it had on their relationship. They characterize it as the foundation on which a newfound spirit of regional cooperation was built.
“BRAC and BRAF could have buried that report,” Michael Hecht, president and CEO of the economic development group GNO Inc. tells Business Report. “Instead, they came down to New Orleans and said, ‘We have to get behind (Armstrong) as the international airport for the area.’ It really mattered a lot.”
That study mattered because it helped build trust between the business leadership of the two cities—trust that had been lacking prior to Katrina and was all but wiped out immediately after. Today, that level of trust and the regional cooperation it has engendered is one of the most significant and positive legacies of Katrina. After years of competing over crumbs—and watching markets like Houston and Atlanta bypass both New Orleans and Baton Rouge—the cities are finally working together, at least in the area of economic development.
Is it too little too late? Perhaps. Is there still room for improvement? No doubt. But the relationship between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is arguably better than it has ever been, and both communities are beginning to see results.
Read the full cover story—including profiles of six businesses that either relocated or expanded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—in the new issue of Business Report. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
