Diversification is Name of Game for Northwest La.
Published Mar 10, 2008
Ratings for the Independence Bowl in December 2006 put it in the top 10 for college bowl games televised nationally.
One of America’s 100 largest cities, Shreveport anchors a metro area founded on navigable Red River ports, stoked with a 20th-century oil boom, elevated by an air base with a $700 million yearly impact and driven by a General Motors billion-dollar-plus investment that has produced 4 million trucks since 1981.
Those fulcrums endure in the North west Louisiana economy, even as the region establishes ventures in bio medicine and digital technology.
To harmonize the traditional and knowledge-based economies on a new playing field, leadership will be critical, and a pair of Shreveport scions point to a progressive future.
On Nov. 28, 2006, Shreveport inaugurated 41-year-old Cedric Glover as the city’s first black mayor. Exactly one month later, native son Gordon LeBlanc Jr. put his PetroSun firm in the national spotlight as sponsor of the city’s Independence Bowl game.
Both men yearn to see Shreveport and its Bossier City neighbor raise the regional economy to new heights.
Early in Glover’s tenure, Shreveport eliminated 75 percent of sales taxes on manufacturing equipment, with all such taxes waived by July 2008 in a bid to retain and grow manufacturing jobs.
Leveraging the Shreveport area’s vibrant health-care industry, BioSpace1, a $12 million wet-lab incubator, opened for emerging life-sciences businesses. The innovative center in the 800-acre Inter Tech Science Park will build on research from the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center and other organizations. InterTech leaders say they hope more than 6,000 jobs will be created there over the next 25 years.
UNIQUENESS ON DISPLAY
Such progressive developments com pelled LeBlanc to commit Phoenix-based PetroSun, an energy exploration firm, to a three-year sponsorship of college football’s Independence Bowl.
“My wife and I were both raised in the Shreveport-Bossier area, so it’s a homecoming of sorts for us,” he says. “The Independence Bowl partnership provides PetroSun a terrific platform, nationally, to generate greater brand awareness and introduce the public to some of our renewable energy initiatives, but it also provides a terrific opportunity for the company to make a difference at the local level.”
PetroSun joined the bowl at a propitious time. A last-second 34-31 victory by Oklahoma State over Alabama drew one of the year’s top-10 bowl-viewing television audiences, with several mil lion households watching.
On the cusp of 2007, in a stadium filled with orange- and crimson-flocked fans, the game created a bowl experience as good as it gets, Patrick Meehan says.
“We work year-round to make sure that when that day comes, we’re really showcasing not just the bowl but Shreve port-Bossier and beyond,” says Meehan, the bowl’s media relations director. “I think people really find out a lot about the game and the city itself with the commercials that run during the game. They really get a good idea of what a unique place Shreveport-Bossier truly is.”
In 2007, the region’s economic playing field is being illuminated even brighter.
Building on Louisiana’s largest array of riverboat casinos and the state’s premier outlet lifestyle center – Louisiana Boardwalk along the Bossier City riverfront – Shreveport recently saw a $52 million Hilton hotel open adjacent to the $100 million Shreveport Convention Center. The 350,000-square-foot convention facility drew more than 150,000 attendees in its first partial year, exceeding projections.
Story by Gary Perilloux
Photo by Roger Courtney/Afterimage Photography
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