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Baton Rouge Business Profiles interview Stephen Moretby the publisher
BP: Let's talk about aspirations for Baton Rouge. SM: We are a big small town that needs to turn the corner to be a vibrant, mid-sized city. Outside Louisiana, we don't have a unique brand or identity. We need the same economic opportunities of Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, or anywhere else. We want Baton Rouge to be looked at as a destination for talented college grads and business people around the country. My hope is that the Chamber, working as the voice of the business community, can help marshal the resources to help Baton Rouge become what we want it to be. BP: How do you plan to get started? SM: Over the next three months we're going to do a diagnosis. For us to be successful, we need to be sitting down with the leaders in the business community and asking them what they think are the most critical challenges for Baton Rouge and for their businesses, and what they can get excited about. We want to begin with a good set of relationships, so that the game plan and initiatives for 2005 and beyond are relevant, and we have an idea of what's necessary for staffing, organization, and funding. We're not going to develop a grand master plan for Baton Rouge. Instead we're going to focus on the few things we can really make an impact on, such as education, governmental affairs, member services, and economic development. So we're going to be looking at CapStrategy, developing a better agenda, figuring out what's the best way to do endorsements, and getting involved in the political process. We'll be using surveys and focus groups to find out what the members' needs are and what they would value the most if we offered it. BP: You mentioned education. Do you have any general comments? SM: I know it's a mantra, but 20 or 25 years from now the cities that are successful will have found the way to do education the right way. Not just K-12, but pre-K through university and lifelong learning. Learning needs to become a lifelong endeavor. That requires changing not only the system but even the culture.
BP: Do you think comparisons of Baton Rouge to other cities are fair? SM: When you think of D. C., Boston, and New York &mdash these are cities that almost succeed despite themselves. They have so much money, so much capital and infrastructure, educational institutions, national brands, Fortune 500 headquarters, etc., that they've become cauldrons of economic development. But one of the things that's starting to hurt these cities is the cost of living. If you went to D.C. today, for example, and wanted to buy a condo in a nice part of town, you would pay $500 to $700 per square foot. So at some point the economic opportunity is offset by the cost of living. Over the next to 10 or 15 years, I think there will be great opportunities for the next tier of cities that are not necessarily economic powerhouses today, but are distinctive and interesting, like Baton Rouge. We often hear of Louisiana's negatives, but on a national perspective professionals are attracted to our distinctiveness and authenticity. Louisiana has a unique and exotic flavor. Our downtown needs to continue to flourish, so that someone from New York, for example, can appreciate us, too. BP: LSU's entrepreneurial program has been ranked in the first tier in the nation, along with Harvard, MIT and Stanford. And Baton Rouge itself is often cited by The Business Report and elsewhere as one of the best-ranked towns its size in the nation for entrepreneurs. How can we get positive messages like that out nationwide? SM: The cost of national advertising can be prohibitive, but this is certainly worth exploring. Over the next few months we'll sort through different ideas, considering the cost, potential impact, the time involved and other factors so we can choose the most effective ways to present ourselves. On the whole public relations side, we need to find ways to position Baton Rouge as special and different, which it is, and I think that will help better position us on the national scene. BP: How can the citizens of Baton Rouge get a better handle on the real facts behind the complex issues of the day, like the Loop?
BP: In other words, make complicated issues clear enough so that people can intelligently&mdash SM: —engage the issues, understand them, debate them. At least to have a sense of the issues at a high level so we can have more of a dialogue, not some big amorphous thing. Having said that, this isn't the kind of thing cities do a lot, so I'm talking about an aspiration. I think people can get excited about that.
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"Have you talked to Steve Moret?" Ed Buggs asked me recently about the new Chamber president. "Let me tell you, this is an impressive guy."
We need to make Baton Rouge a place that is a learning community. Now the Chamber doesn't run LSU; it doesn't run K-12. But I think we can find ways that we can advocate for positive changes. What is an alternative leadership structure for the school system? How can we capitalize on the fact that we have the largest historically black university in the country (Southern)? We need a flagship university that can go toe-to-toe with UVA and even someday Michigan and Berkeley. We're not in that tier yet. A lot of it is funding and focusing on a few key research areas. We need to find a way that we as city can help LSU be more successful.
SM: When you talk about questions of transportation, education policy, or health care, Baton Rouge really doesn't have a think tank that can analyze many of our issues in an objective way without agendas or outside influence. I'd like to see us develop something like that &mdash maybe something we do inside the Chamber, or we could try to catalyze and develop it outside the Chamber, something kind of like BGR (Bureau of Governmental Research) in New Orleans or PAR (Public Affairs Research) at the state level &mdash an organization or research team that would analyze the major issues of the day, potentially supplemented with focus groups that would allow these issues to be thought through. I know there is interest on the focus group side from the Manship School of Mass Communication, for example; we just need to figure out the research piece. With the Loop, for example, no one can really engage on that because no one really knows how it would work, or be financed. Everyone wants the traffic issue to be addressed. As a community I think it would be valuable to have a consultant who can come in and synthesize the existing analysis in a clear way, literally on a page or two, what the potential approaches are. For example, "There are five options on how to do a Loop, here are the descriptions, pros and cons, what it would cost, the state and Federal tolls, etc. &mdash and then let's have a debate as a community on it. I'm not saying necessarily that the Chamber would initially lead something like this, but we as a city need to think about it. We ought to at least know, Rich, what our options are. It shouldn't be that we have these issues that just simmer for years and no one really knows what's happening.
