Church’s Chicken

Church’s Chicken® announces an agreement with WETCO Restaurant Group, LLC, to purchase 20 Church’s restaurants in the New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Alexandria markets. This purchase plan will help to preserve over 400 jobs and ensure the continued operation of the restaurants.

The deal involves WETCO, Church’s Chicken and GE Capital and allows WETCO to be restructured as part of a consensual Chapter 11 bankruptcy. GE Capital is the senior creditor while Cajun is both the franchisor and a major creditor.

The need to restructure arose primarily from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the financial ripple effects that followed.

Church’s management says much of the credit for this deal goes to Bill Tucker, Founder and CEO of WETCO.

WETCO originally purchased the restaurants from AFC Enterprises in 2002. Bill Tucker and the senior executive team will continue to be involved in the business as expert consultants to support the transition and continue the community outreach programs they created.

“After two years of toiling with a disaster recovery plan involving governmental resources, without success, we’ve reached the point where the only way to save the business was to inject millions of dollars of additional private capital. WETCO was just not in a position to make this investment. I came to the realization that the best thing I could do for these communities and my employees was to sell the business, and let Cajun restructure this business, given their resources and opportunity to compete more effectively,” Tucker added.

Church’s is particularly pleased about the positive impact this move means for the people of New Orleans as they continue in their efforts to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

“We all worked very hard on this because we knew it was important to the people of this city to make it work. This is yet another sign of how important the New Orleans community is to us and how much faith we have in the people there,” added Pendergast.

Factory Goods

According to the Commerce Department, orders for U.S.-made factory goods fell 3.3% in August, the Commerce Department estimated Thursday. It was the biggest drop in factory orders in seven months.

LWCC

This month, Louisiana Workers’ Compensation Corporation (LWCC) observes its fifteenth anniversary of providing workers’ compensation insurance to Louisiana employers.

In 1991, LWCC was established by an act of the Louisiana Legislature—later passed by voters as a constitutional amendment—as a private, nonprofit mutual insurance company to help stabilize the market so that employers could obtain reliable, affordable workers’ comp insurance for their employees.

On October 1, 1992, LWCC opened for business. Within a year, the company’s policy count grew to exceed 20,000.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Louisiana faced a workers’ compensation insurance crisis due to businesses’ increasing lack of available and reliable coverage through private insurance companies in the state. This crisis was compounded by a severe economic downturn that placed an even greater burden on the workers’ comp system. The Louisiana Assigned Risk Workers’ Compensation Insurance Plan—better known as the “assigned risk pool”—was created in an attempt to solve this crisis. Private insurers were assigned a portion of the assigned risk pool depending on the amount of workers’ compensation business they voluntarily wrote in the state. However, due to a combination of factors, virtually all private insurers left the state, leaving Louisiana businesses few options for this important and mandatory coverage needed for their employees. Through collaborative efforts among the government, business and labor sectors, and with the approval of the voting public, LWCC was created and the assigned risk pool was dissolved, thus leaving LWCC as both a competitive and residual market for Louisiana’s businesses.

LWCC is now the largest workers’ compensation insurance carrier in Louisiana, providing coverage to about 22,000 policyholders in the state. The company carries an “A” (Excellent) rating from A.M. Best and, for the sixth consecutive year, has been named one of the top 50 property and casualty insurers in the nation by Ward Group, the leading authority on insurance industry benchmarking.

LWCC has been able to lower its overall rates by more than 40 percent since writing its first policy in October 1992. Since 2003, the company has returned $68.8 million in dividends to qualifying policyholders, a total that is unrivaled in the Louisiana workers’ comp market.

LWCC has compensated injured workers by paying over $1.3 billion in medical and wage-replacement benefits since it began operations 15 years ago. Currently, it has more than $550 million in total reserves available for the continued payment of claims of injured workers.

Blue Cross

Two years after Hurricane Katrina, health claims submitted to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana indicate that, in the aggregate, the total number of physicians practicing in the greater New Orleans area per 1,000 residents is near its pre-storm level.

“Three fourths of the population of greater New Orleans is back, according to the best available estimates,” said Blue Cross President and CEO Gery J. Barry, who is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a member of the American Academy of Actuaries. “Paralleling this repopulation trend, our claims data indicate that there are about three fourths of the pre-storm number of physicians now practicing in the region as well.”

Barry announced the release of a white paper prepared by Blue Cross staff after media coverage and anecdotal evidence continued to suggest a chronic healthcare shortage in the four parishes known as Region 1: Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines and St. Bernard. The white paper, Physician Availability in Greater New Orleans: Two Years After Hurricane Katrina, publishes information on the number of primary care physicians and specialists in Region 1 who are actively filing claims with the company. In addition to Blue Cross network providers, who represent about 90 percent of all providers participating in this region prior to Katrina, the analysis included claims submitted by non-network providers as well.

The white paper compares this data with population estimates to determine the ratio of primary care physicians and specialists per 1,000 people in the region. The data indicate that Region 1 as a whole has experienced little or no change in the number of physicians per 1,000 residents. Both pre- and post-Katrina, the density ratio of 2.4 practicing physicians per 1,000 residents is on par with the national average.

“While this ‘big picture’ comparison of physician density pre-and post-Katrina is encouraging, access to care can still be an issue,” Barry said. “Primary care capacity remains limited, and there are other factors to be considered as well. For example, some of the doctors submitting claims may be spending only a part of their time in the region, or are seeing a number of patients from outside the region. Also, many individuals may not be able to locate the same doctors they saw before the 2005 hurricanes. Finally, long-standing professional relationships that doctors had with other doctors have been disrupted, and this can create problems in finding the right doctors for referring patients,” Barry said.

“This disruption means that patients have to adjust to a changing configuration of providers,” Barry said. “In addition, access to proper healthcare for the uninsured is particularly challenging. The safety net of the charity hospital system collapsed and has only been restored to a limited level.

“This white paper provides solid data to work from for those who are studying these complicated issues,” Barry said. “Blue Cross is going to continue studying issues that remain critical in the New Orleans area.”

Media representatives may request a copy of the Blue Cross white paper Physician Availability in Greater New Orleans: Two Years After Hurricane Katrina by e-mailing Corporate.Communications@bcbsla.com.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana is Louisiana-owned and -operated. Marking its 73rd anniversary this year, the company is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. It is a tax-paying mutual company, owned by its policyholders. Headquartered in Baton Rouge, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana also has district offices in Alexandria, Houma, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Monroe, New Orleans and Shreveport. The company’s subsidiaries include HMO Louisiana, Inc. and Southern National Life Insurance Company, Inc. For more information, visit www.bcbsla.com.

Business Council

The Business Council of New Orleans and the River Region today announced the appointment of Robert W. “Bob” Brown as the Managing Director of the organization, effective Monday, October 22nd.

In announcing the appointment, Jay Lapeyre, Chairman of the Business Council and President and CEO of Laitram, L.L.C., said, “The addition of Bob as Managing Director is an important and strategic step for the Business Council and our efforts on behalf of the New Orleans-area community to improve our living and work environment.”

Brown will serve as Managing Director, filtering and coordinating decisions of the executive committee, supporting and coordinating initiatives, managing relationships with elected officials, governmental bodies and civic groups, and compiling the research needed to frame, analyze and achieve Business Council goals and priorities.

Brown comes from the University of New Orleans, where he has served in a number of administrative positions—most recently as the Vice Chancellor for Governmental, Community and Diversity Affairs, beginning in October, 2002. He holds degrees from Park College, Parkville, Missouri and Pepperdine University, Malibu, California.

The Business Council was founded in 1985 by a group of committed business leaders, led by then-CEO of Freeport McMoRan, Inc. James R. “Jim Bob” Moffett. Its purpose is to promote and enhance the economic climate, social welfare and environment of the city, region, and State. Post Katrina, The Business Council has aligned with civic and activist groups in successful legislative and constitutional initiatives to improve education, flood safety, property assessments, and insurance. The Business Council is extremely active in efforts to improve flood safety and crime prevention. It is a leading member of the Flood Protection Alliance and the New Orleans Crime Coalition – a broad and diverse coalition working to improve system wide effectiveness of the Criminal Justice system

The Business Council offices are located in the Freeport McMoRan Building, 1615 Poydras Street, New Orleans, Louisiana.