Here are the Moret’s comments:   

What are your three major goals for Louisiana over the next year?  For the balance of the four year term?

In economic development, our greatest aspiration is to turn around Louisiana’s net outmigration stats – to make Louisiana one of the best places in the world in which to start a career or grow a business.  We are working to reposition Louisiana as the next great American state for business investment and economic opportunity.  We are employing a balanced attack including parallel efforts to improve business development success (retention/expansion first, recruitment second) while pursuing transformative public policy changes designed to enhance the attractiveness of Louisiana as a place in which to invest.

Our top priorities for economic development during our time in office are described in the attached document (which Bayoubuzz has pasted below in a section entitled “Creating the Next Great American State for Business Investment and Economic Opportunity: An Overview of LED’s New Priorities”

Othe next year, we have substantially more than three major goals.  If I had to focus on just a few, I would select the following projects:

Ramp up three new critical LED initiatives: Business Retention and Expansion Group (focused effort to support Louisiana’s existing employers); Louisiana FastStart Program (custom workforce solution for new and expanding businesses), and State Economic Competitiveness Group (new LED team focused exclusively on identifying changes necessary to improve the attractiveness of the business climate in Louisiana).  These initiatives will dramatically improve our efforts to retain and grow Louisiana’s existing employers while improving our ability to attract highly attractive new businesses to our state.

Complete development of a statewide innovation plan, including developing national-caliber R&D capacity in disciplines relevant to Louisiana’s existing and emerging industry sectors; improving technology transfer; increasing access to early-stage capital; and easing the process of new business formation.

Develop a strategy for maximizing trade-related job-creation opportunities associated with the upcoming expansion of the Panama Canal around 2013.

Develop a multi-year plan for making Louisiana one of the best places in the country in which to start and grow a small business.

Identify several new, blue-ocean target industry sectors (e.g., digital media, nuclear energy) Louisiana can pursue to create new jobs and diversify our economy.

Compared to other states, how is Louisiana positioned given the national economic meltdown?    

Clearly we are not immune to the national economic situation, but so far Louisiana’s economy is outperforming that of the nation

While the national economy has been shedding jobs, Louisiana has been creating jobs; in fact, job growth has been so steady in Louisiana that our employers have roughly 80,000 job openings today.  We only experienced a significant slowdown after Hurricanes Gustav and Ike

Our national economy has experienced rising unemployment for the last few months, yet just a few months ago Louisiana hit a 30-year LOW in unemployment; in fact, even after the recent hurricanes hit our state, our unemployment rate is still well below that of the nation as a whole

We have at least a five-year backlog of industrial construction projects in South Louisiana

Louisiana’s real-estate markets also are holding up well.  Although sales volumes have slowed, our state has not experienced the kinds of real estate price declines that have plagued so much of the country.  In fact, one national group recently predicted that there is a negligible chance that housing prices will decline in any metro area in Louisiana over the next 24 months

As other states have experienced budget deficits, Louisiana is experiencing its third straight budget surplus in a row; in fact, three major credit rating agencies (Moody’s, Fitch, and Standard & Poor’s) recently upgraded Louisiana’s debt rating

While some of our country’s top banks have been under significant strain, Louisiana’s banking sector remains healthy, and our banks continue to make loans

If oil prices stay above roughly $60 per barrel, we may continue to grow (or at least stay stable) straight through a national slowdown; however, certain parts of our state are more correlated to the national economy than others

Fortunately, despite the slowdown, we have a significant number of high-potential prospects, and we think we can build on recent business development successes (e.g., expansions at Cameron Valves, Northrop Grumman, Gulf Island, Chouest, Coca-Cola, and others; EA global quality assurance center; Westinghouse/Shaw nuclear module manufacturing facility; Albemarle’s Fortune 1000 HQ relocation) with new announcements in the near future

Creating the Next Great American State for Business Investment and Economic Opportunity: An Overview of LED’s New Priorities

A snapshot of Louisiana’s economy suggests we are doing relatively well today, especially compared to the United States overall. Louisiana’s unemployment rate is well below that of the nation. Per-capita income growth in Louisiana has been higher than that in much of the country.

Louisiana’s economy has been growing faster than that of the nation as a whole. Billions of dollars of construction projects are under way in a variety of sectors, including industrial modernization projects, new manufacturing facilities, commercial office space and various transportation investments. Major bond-rating agencies like Fitch, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s have recently upgraded our state debt rating. In addition, Louisiana has avoided the worst of the national real estate crunch -- although volumes have slowed, prices are stable or up in most of our communities. However, beneath this attractive veneer is a reality with which Louisiana residents have become far too familiar: our greatest export today is not our agricultural products, not our wood products, not even our oil, gas or chemicals -- our greatest export too often is our people, particularly our young people who frequently believe they must leave Louisiana to find greater economic opportunities in such places as Houston, Atlanta or Dallas.

Dramatically changing this reality -- or more specifically, repositioning Louisiana as the next great American state for business investment, quality of life and economic opportunity -- is the new vision of the Louisiana Department of Economic Development (LED).  To successfully fulfill this vision, LED will need to go from good to great in business development, as well as to cultivate new capabilities in product development (i.e., public-policy efforts designed to increase the attractiveness of our state as a place in which to invest). In the process, we expect to become one of the top state economic development agencies in the country over the next two to four years.

This document describes the following seven major priorities that will be LED’s primary focus over

the next few years, as well as selected initiatives associated with each of them.

1. Increase our state economic competitiveness

2. Enhance the competitiveness of our local communities

3. Cultivate our top regional economic development assets

4. Provide new leadership for business retention and expansion

5. Develop national-caliber business recruitment capabilities

6. Cultivate small business and entrepreneurship

7. Aggressively tell the story of the Louisiana Renaissance

PRIORITY 1: INCREASE OUR STATE ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS

Our marketing and business development efforts at the state and local levels are important in securing new investment and job creation for our state. But the vast majority of business location decisions are driven by fundamentals, such as labor quality, availability and cost; the tax and regulatory environment; quality-of-life factors (e.g., public education, crime and recreational amenities); and transportation assets. Accordingly, the most important thing we can do to create a brighter economic future for our state is to increase our state economic competitiveness -- to make

Louisiana a more attractive place in which to invest.

Gov. Bobby Jindal and the Louisiana Legislature already have taken several constructive steps in this regard. The first step was adopting new governmental ethics laws that catapulted Louisiana from near the bottom to the top in the country. The second step was eliminating unorthodox business taxes, including the sales tax on natural gas and business utilities, the sales tax on manufacturing machinery and equipment and the franchise tax on corporate debt. More recently, Gov. Jindal and the Legislature worked together to adopt a comprehensive workforce development reform plan to improve the effectiveness of our community and technical colleges, provide turnkey workforce solutions to expanding and relocating businesses, and ensure that our workforce

programs are driven by real business needs. As significant as these recent reform efforts have been, we have much work left to do to increase our state’s economic competitiveness to a level at which businesses around the country routinely

choose Louisiana as their preferred location for investment and growth. Accordingly, LED’s budget for Fiscal Year 2009 (FY09) includes a new State Economic Competitiveness (SEC) Group with dedicated staff to develop public policy recommendations designed to make Louisiana a much more attractive place in which to invest, as well as funding for Louisiana Fast Start, a program providing turnkey workforce solutions for business expansion and recruitment projects.

Selected short-term initiatives

 Hire an outstanding group of individuals to lead LED’s new SEC Group

 Launch the Louisiana Fast Start program

 Conduct a comprehensive review of Louisiana’s economic development incentives,

benchmarking them against those of other southern states (e.g., structure, eligibility,

paperwork requirements), and recommend a comprehensive set of enhancements

 Conduct a comprehensive review of Louisiana’s competitiveness for the automotive

industry, with a particular focus on General Motors and the Franklin Farm Mega Site, and develop recommendations to improve our attractiveness at both locations for advanced manufacturing

 Develop strategic plans for cultivating Louisiana’s rapidly growing entertainment industries, including and in particular, film productions and digital interactive media

 Develop an in-depth understanding of the impacts of potential greenhouse gas legislation

at the federal level, as well as how Louisiana should respond

 Determine the market feasibility of creating a world-class center of excellence for shipbuilding research and testing that serves Louisiana’s existing resident industry and catalyzes growth in this important industry segment

Selected long-term initiatives

 Develop industry-specific plans to improve the competitiveness of Louisiana’s traditional industries (e.g., oil and gas) and emerging growth sectors (e.g., nuclear energy)

 Benchmark state public policies associated with major business-climate factors (e.g., workers’ compensation laws, tort system, energy) to identify gaps and how to close them

 Develop prioritized recommendations for dramatically improving Louisiana’s position in

major national rankings associated with business and/or economic development

 Develop a robust state strategy to capitalize on trade-related economic opportunities

associated with the upcoming expansion of the Panama Canal

 Benchmark the service levels of selected state agencies that interact with business against those of other states and identify improvement opportunities

 Recommend strategies to increase commercialization potential of technology-transfer activities in higher education

 Develop strategies for improving access to workforce housing in high-need areas

 Develop plans to improve our ports, airports, transportation and other public infrastructure, including creative financing strategies, with a focus on economic development

PRIORITY 2: ENHANCE THE COMPETITIVENESS OF OUR LOCAL COMMUNITIES

Although companies certainly consider a variety of state-level issues (e.g., business taxes or tort system) when selecting locations for new business investment, they primarily consider local and regional issues, such as the quality, cost and availability of trained workers and quality-of-lifefactors (e.g., the perceived quality of public school options). Moreover, they consider issues associated with a specific site, not just a state as a whole. Accordingly, our overall success in economic development in the state of Louisiana will be as much about cultivating strong local and regional economic development efforts as it will be about creating a more effective LED.

More directly, we must improve the competitiveness of our local communities -- the effectiveness of local and regional business development efforts, as well as the quality of the local product we offer companies -- to create more jobs and diversify our economy.

Each of our local communities and regions in Louisiana must prepare for success in the increasingly competitive world of economic development. That means each parish and region must have a strong economic development plan; adequate, stable funding; assertive, professional staff;

and coordinated, active engagement from the public and private sectors to be successful. Because much of this relies on local leadership in 64 unique parishes, LED cannot increase the competitiveness of each of our local communities acting in isolation. What we can and will do is provide technical resources, training, matching grants and benchmarking support to help each of our communities position themselves to compete. We have already taken several positive steps in this regard, including the recent launch of the Louisiana Community Network, a web-based suite of educational modules focused on increasing local economic development capacity.

Selected short-term initiatives

 Continuing LED’s partnership with the Louisiana Municipal Association, along with regional and local economic development partners, identify and incorporate improvements to our new Louisiana Community Network website, including new modules

 Launch a certified sites program with matching grants from LED to encourage the identification of development-ready sites around the state

Selected long-term initiatives

 Complete and publish a comprehensive review of funding and organizational models for local and regional economic development organizations to assist local communities in their efforts to strengthen their economic development efforts

 Prioritize and help fund expanded training opportunities for local economic development professionals to build local capacity

PRIORITY 3: CULTIVATE LOUISIANA’S TOP REGIONAL ECONOMIC

DEVELOPMENT ASSETS

Northwest Louisiana is as different from the New Orleans Region as the Bayou Region is different from Acadiana. As LED fulfills its mission of leading economic development for the state of Louisiana, we will do so with an overall approach that recognizes that each of our state’s eight economic regions is unique, and each region has its own unique assets. LED primarily focuses on eight economic regions in our state, each of which is anchored by a significant city (or cities): Northwest Louisiana (Shreveport/Bossier), Northeast Louisiana (Monroe),

Central Louisiana (Alexandria), Southwest Louisiana (Lake Charles), Acadiana (Lafayette), the Capital Region (Baton Rouge), the Bayou Region (Houma/Thibodaux) and the New Orleans Region.

Each of these eight economic regions has at least one unique economic asset that could create a thousand or more high-paying jobs with the right level of leadership and targeted investment. In the near future, LED will develop a regional economic development asset program to identify targeted investment opportunities that can create new jobs for our state. We will treat these projects just as seriously as we do attracting a new business to Louisiana, in part because these projects allow us to build on our existing strengths.

Examples of regional economic assets include: NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility (New Orleans area), Cyber Command at Barksdale Air Force Base (Northwest Louisiana), Pennington Biomedical Research Center (Capital Region), Chennault International Airport (Southwest Louisiana), England Airpark (Central Louisiana), Franklin Farm Mega Site (Northeast Louisiana), several shipbuilding and oil service opportunities (Bayou Region), and the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise or LITE (Acadiana Region).

PRIORITY 4: PROVIDE NEW LEADERSHIP FOR BUSINESS RETENTION AND EXPANSION

The vast majority of new job growth -- and 100 percent of our job losses -- will come from the businesses already located in Louisiana. Too often we have taken these companies for granted, with relatively little focus on understanding and addressing their needs.

In this administration, business retention and expansion (BRE) efforts will be prioritized over business recruitment efforts. Accordingly, our FY09 budget includes a new business retention and expansion team, as well as funding to provide resources to our regional economic development organizations to support an expanded statewide focus on business retention and expansion. In the next few months, we will recruit an outstanding business retention and expansion team, develop a state and local action plan for reaching out regularly to the roughly 1,000 top economicdriver

companies in the state and make plans to include small business development centers in our BRE efforts.

We will manage BRE projects just as aggressively as we do business recruitment projects, and we will incorporate feedback from our business retention calls into our state competitiveness efforts as we identify opportunities to make Louisiana a better place in which to do business.

PRIORITY 5: DEVELOP NATIONAL-CALIBER BUSINESS RECRUITMENT

CAPABILITIES

Although most job-creation opportunities will come from cultivating businesses already located in Louisiana, our state will still execute an aggressive business recruitment program to capture a disproportionate share of the relatively few large projects that locate in the United States each year, as well as to attract investment in new, high-growth industry sectors that can diversify our economy.

Over the last few years, LED’s business recruitment capabilities have been strengthened thanks to increased funding for marketing/advertising and deal-closing funds, including the Governor’s Rapid Response Fund and the Mega Projects Development Fund. Nevertheless, we need to make the transition from good to great.

Over the next few months, we will benchmark our business recruitment efforts for each stage of the process -- from lead generation to service after the sale -- to clarify what represents nationalcaliber execution and identify gaps that we need to close to ensure we are consistently executing at a national-caliber level. Additionally, we will look for opportunities to improve our level of collaboration with our regional and local partners around the state, with a particular focus on our process for coordinating prospect management and associated communications. Our overall goal is to become one of the top two to three business recruitment organizations in the country. We will

know we have achieved that objective when top executives and site-selection consultants agree that Louisiana’s economic development professionals are among the most responsive and most professional in the country.

Selected short-term initiatives

 In partnership with LED’s regional and local economic development partners, adopt a

standard prospect protocol agreement to clarify roles and communications for LED and its

local/regional economic development partners to ensure seamless handling of prospects

 Implement best-practice processes and guidelines to achieve national-caliber prospect and

project management

 Enhance incentive evaluation, approval and communications processes to consistently yield

optimal and timely results

 Develop a bullet-proof approach for delivering on financial commitments made by LED to companies

 Develop capability to consistently deliver A+ presentation books in response to Requests for Proposals (e.g., verbiage, supporting data, description of incentives and programs, workforce responses, look and feel, Q&A)

 Update and promulgate incentive and other program rules for improved clarity and

Consistency  In partnership with Entergy, launch a web-enabled statewide database leveraging GIS technology to provide a comprehensive inventory of available sites and buildings, along with key demographic information

Selected long-term initiatives

 Identify and develop plans to cultivate new, high-growth, industry sectors with the potential to diversify Louisiana’s economy over time (e.g., digital interactive media, nuclear energy, advanced manufacturing, other alternative energy technologies)

 Complete the placement of all business-incentive application processes online

 Develop and implement aggressive international marketing strategy to increase foreign direct investment

 Cultivate strong relationships with top 100 site-selection consultants in the United States

 Cultivate relationships with senior executives of Fortune 500 companies

PRIORITY 6: CULTIVATE SMALL BUSINESS AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

So much of Louisiana’s economic success historically has been derived from our geographic assets (e.g., oil and gas deposits, Mississippi River) and branch plants of large corporations (e.g., Dow, ExxonMobil, General Motors) that we haven’t done enough as a state to cultivate small business and entrepreneurship. We lack sufficient access to early-stage capital to catalyze new business formation, and we have fallen behind in our support for small business and entrepreneurship in our state.

Over the next few months, LED will develop a multiple-year plan to reposition Louisiana as one of the best places in the country in which to start and grow a small business, as well as to create a more vibrant entrepreneurial culture in our state.

This plan likely will include a variety of components related to increasing support for smallbusiness development centers, improving access to early-stage capital (e.g., strengthening the angel-investor tax credit), cultivating technology-based businesses, expanding minority business development services, and reducing tax and regulatory burdens (e.g., review of capital gains tax) that hold back the growth of small businesses in our state. We expect to recommend that components of this plan be implemented with funding and enabling legislation to be considered inthe 2009 regular session of the Louisiana Legislature.

PRIORITY 7: AGGRESSIVELY TELL THE STORY OF THE LOUISIANA

RENAISSANCE

One of the greatest challenges facing economic development in our state is the relatively negative perception of Louisiana held by some business executives in the United States and around the world. Often these perceptions are based on outdated or completely inaccurate views of our state.

To create a brighter economic future for Louisiana, we must not only increase our state economic competitiveness (Priority 1) and improve our business development activities (Priorities 4 and 5), we must also convey to business executives around the country and around the world that Louisiana is positioning itself to become the next great American state for business investment, quality of life and economic opportunity. Although we can’t solve all of our problems overnight, we can continue to build momentum in a positive direction and foster confidence that we are getting there quickly.

Public policy changes enacted earlier this year, including governmental ethics reform, elimination of unorthodox business taxes and comprehensive workforce development reforms, already have built positive momentum and an improving image for our state. These moves have been bolstered by a variety of business recruitment wins, including the relocation of Albemarle’s corporate headquarters (Louisiana’s fifth Fortune 1000 firm), EA’s North American Test Center at Louisiana State University, the new Shaw/Westinghouse nuclear module manufacturing facility in Lake

Charles and the Coca-Cola manufacturing relocation from Hattiesburg to Baton Rouge. Moreover, Fortune 250 steel producer Nucor has indicated that it favors St. James Parish for its new, multibillion dollar iron plant.  Although fresh new marketing and advertising strategies, including a new website and marketing collateral, will play a significant role, our primary approach to telling the story of the Louisiana Renaissance will be securing earned media by continuing to enact bold public policy reforms and deliver impressive business development wins. In addition, we will launch a quarterly economic development publication targeted at in-state and out-of-state business executives that will communicate economic development progress in Louisiana.

This document outlines LED’s overall priorities for the next few years. Although not specifically articulated herein, LED is executing a separate action plan for addressing hurricane recovery issues, which will remain a significant priority for some time to come. While we are implementing each of the strategies outlined in this document, we will take special care to address the ongoing economic recovery needs of those communities impacted by hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike.

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