(225) 755-1000
New technology may help find best locations for prospective industries
By GARY PERILLOUX
Advocate business writer
Published: Dec 2, 2007
(original article published here)
In late 2005, the newly renamed Baton Rouge Area Chamber unveiled a blue-and-white shield logo, with nine blue arrows stretching outward and, if you looked closely, nine white arrows boomeranging inward.
The white arrows were designed for a reason, chamber officials said, to show the contributions of outlying parishes to the nine-parish Baton Rouge metro area.
Some current digital mapping projects show just how strategically outlying parishes can contribute to the region's economic development.
Two parishes ? West Feliciana and Ascension ? stand at the forefront of finding a way to map dozens of geographic, utility, community and transportation features on individual pieces of property in the Baton Rouge region. Eventually, those details will be accessible to power brokers and the public at the click of a computer mouse.
Such a powerful application, the theory goes, could make the decision to locate here easier for companies that invest millions of dollars and hire hundreds of people.
The technology falls under the umbrella of geographic information system ? or GIS ? mapping.
The new mapping work has nothing to do with the role parish commissions play in determining zoning, said Steve Jones, who leads the West Feliciana Community Development Foundation.
"The parishes determine what a piece of property can be used for," Jones said. "This is going to be more about finding the suitability of the property (for commercial or residential development and other uses). And it's a fairly simple process once we collect all of the data for it. I think that's the beauty of it."
Eventually, the work could dovetail with a plan to make all land use data in the state available to the public.
Jones and Tommy Kurtz, who leads the Ascension Economic Development Corp., were searching in early 2007 for a user-friendly way for industry prospects to see their parishes at a glance. They're developing local map databases and tools with C-K Associates of Baton Rouge.
Not to merely see the traditional maps of towns and rivers and parish boundaries. But to see where floodplains are, to see where navigable streams are, to know how the proximity of churches and schools and houses and roads might influence a manufacturer's interest in a property.
In general, the closer to ports, railroads, multilane highways and major utilities, the better for manufacturers and distributors. Proximity to dense residential areas, schools, churches and other public places can raise red flags for safety and security reasons.
Having a single map find all those assets and liabilities - in exactly the framework a business wants to see it - can be a gold mine for parishes courting industry. A custom map can weigh all the features that interest a company at different percentages of importance, then color code the parish to identify the strongest sites.
The sophistication of the data and the simplicity of the online tool can make a site selection consultant's job far easier, Jones said.
It also can convince them they're looking at a progressive community that can answer virtually every question that needs answering, Kurtz said.
"You're able to be much more focused on your site selection process," he said. "It gives a tremendous, bold presentation and it helps market your sites more than just sending a report out. It gives you an understanding, from a map standpoint, of what's there."
GIS maps, with the ability for users to continually change the data according to their needs, are such a powerful tool that the Baton Rouge-based Center for Planning Excellence wants Louisiana to adopt such a map statewide.
The center will be among the advocates seeking a state office of planning through the Legislature this year, a first step toward creating what it's calling the Louisiana Location Index.
The index emerged from the post-hurricane Louisiana Speaks planning process as one of the next big steps the state needs to take, said Camille Manning-Broome, the principal planner for the Center for Planning Excellence.
"Right now, the data for Louisiana is scattered," she said.
A statewide GIS mapping project could tell residents where best to build and not to build, where environmentally sensitive areas are, where businesses could maximize transportation corridors to gain access to customers, where specific industries would thrive ? and so on.
"It creates certainty and stability," Manning-Broome said, referring to economic development choices. "And it has some incredible benefits on being able to plan properly, having all of that data at your fingertips, and for companies to be able to make assessments."
That's precisely what the Ascension Economic Development Corp. did in a GIS mapping project it hired C-K Associates to conduct.
"It's really about making the best interpretation of the information you have," said Victor Leotta, who oversees geospatial technologies for C-K, a 26-year-old environmental consulting firm of 90 employees who also work in site selection across the South. Leotta calls C-K's version of the GIS mapping project a geographic suitability index. A project C-K is completing for Entergy Corp. will enable Entergy to offer online GIS maps for industrial prospects statewide, tapping public domain data.
Those maps will measure about three dozen criteria, but local parishes will want to collect further data, detailing characteristics about each parcel of land in the parish, Leotta said.
Ascension Parish, which has long operated a GIS department, had the local data Leotta needed to run GIS suitability maps. West Feliciana is in the process of gathering that data for land planning use and economic development.
"All of this boils down to one theme," Leotta said. "You need the data layer to feed the models. That's the most important thing."
Leotta met with Baton Rouge Area Chamber officials last week to decipher how the Baton Rouge region might map perhaps its most crucial data piece ? characteristics of the local work force.
With unemployment not much above 3 percent in the region, incoming industry will want to know much more about the skills and availability of Baton Rouge area workers ? vital answers such as the willingness of workers to take on new jobs and their ability to be trained.
Kurtz used C-K's land suitability model recently to determine the effectiveness of a 1,000-acre megasite Ascension Parish is marketing and to find the best locations for a future Interstate 10 business park and a major retail project in the parish.
Out-of-pocket expenses for AEDC have been about $10,000, and Kurtz soon will send a custom map book of about 25 different GIS maps to major site selection consultants in the country.
The next step is building a Web-based platform enabling those same consultants, their clients and the public to perform an instant GIS map analysis online.
Kurtz estimates it could cost $100,000 to carry out such a project for the entire Baton Rouge region.
"It would be good for the prospect especially to be able to use the maps and print information out, whether it's local or regional," he said. "It's a very big strategic advantage."
Kurtz learned just how big an advantage GIS maps can be from Greater Oklahoma City Chamber President Roy Williams, whose group beat 120 other metro areas to win a Dell Inc. customer service center in late 2004.
"It made the process easier because I could go in there myself and look at it," Dell's senior real estate and construction manager Peter Kaharl said after the decision. "It was the first time Dell has utilized GIS in its site searches, and it gave decision-makers access to information they don't normally have.
"We looked at hotels, places for people to eat, traffic conditions around the site now and at the time we will occupy it."
The payoff for Oklahoma City: 4,000 jobs, more than twice the number Dell originally planned.
Jones, the West Feliciana economic developer, wants not only the Baton Rouge region to embrace an easy-to-use, online GIS mapping system: He hopes the state will adopt it as an immediate priority based on the Louisiana Speaks research.
"I think the work they've done is phenomenal, and not to incorporate it in some statewide program would be a complete tragedy," Jones said.
States such as Maryland and New Jersey have created statewide GIS maps, said Manning-Broome of the Center for Planning Excellence.
But the creation of them ? and the maintenance of GIS data ? won't happen without a permanent revenue stream. In Maryland, the state pays $2 million annually to maintain GIS databases, with some revenue generated from user fees, Manning-Broome said. Her center is hoping fees could be avoided in Louisiana to encourage use by the public.
Creating a statewide office of planning would be "a great start" toward establishing a Louisiana Location Index, Manning-Broome said, but "we would have to go to the Legislature and get more funding to do a robust Louisiana-wide index."