1012 Corridor

THE 10/12 CORRIDOR ain’t what it used to be.

Less than two years after emerging as a thriving, marketable alternative to image-tarnished New Orleans, the corridor is now expanding to include that region.

It’s also contemplating a name change. Meet the Creative Corridor.

A coalition of community leaders led by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation rolled out those changes this fall—along with a proposed marketing campaign—in hopes of gathering needed political and financial support to take the corridor to the next level. It’s truly a make-or-break step for the fledgling effort.

The 10/12 corridor initially was billed as the linear city defined by the 11 parishes along the arc of interstates 10 and 12 from Lake Charles to Slidell, plus Ascension. Census estimates indicate the region is growing faster than the nation as a whole, and is now home to more than one-third of all Louisianans.

It also boasts the state’s best schools, biggest universities and best-educated and highest-paid workforce. Immediately after the storms, it was widely viewed as Louisiana’s “new economic engine.”

In November, corridor advocates brought in acclaimed marketing firm GSD&M to develop a brand for the corridor that could be marketed to the rest of the world. Part of the strategy was to distinguish it from the rest of the state—particularly New Orleans—to overcome negative perceptions like failing schools, government corruption and people being rescued from rooftops.

That artifice, however, has been all but abandoned. In recent months, community and business leaders from New Orleans and other parishes along the I-10 corridor east of Ascension have joined the 10/12 initiative. The final stop for the unveiling of the corridor marketing campaign was the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau on St. Charles Avenue.

10/12 CORRIDOR ADVOCATES now say there was never any intention of excluding New Orleans, or any other region, for that matter.

John Spain of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation says the corridor initiative grew out of a belief in the early days after the storm that if New Orleans did not recover quickly, there would be a financial crisis at the state level. About 35% of Louisiana’s tax base was dependent upon the Crescent City and its economy.

“Our thought was, OK, if the recovery of New Orleans is going to be slower than people hoped—which has proven to be the case—then there needs to be an initiative to offset that loss,” he says. “The obvious place is those cities and communities where people were displaced, and their economies are good. What we knew from the data that was done was that the corridor is now close to 40% of the state’s population, and that looked to be the obvious place where the state could go to grow the economy. And if New Orleans recovered quickly, there is no down side to having more than one urban area driving the state’s economy.”

Contrary to news reports portraying the corridor initiative as a hostile power grab, organizers apparently did meet with a number of business leaders in New Orleans to discuss the effort. In hindsight, however, it wasn’t enough.

“Their candid answer was, ‘We have enough to do in rebuilding our city. When it’s appropriate, we’d like to come back to the table,’” Spain says. “Now obviously, we didn’t talk to everybody in New Orleans, and there were clearly people we didn’t talk to who read newspaper stories and said this was an anti-New Orleans thing. It never was, although being candid, we probably didn’t communicate it to enough people and we didn’t do a good job of how we communicated it, which resulted in some misunderstandings.”

Stirling Properties CEO Martin Mayer, a St. Tammany Parish resident who is about to take over the reins of GNO Inc., says Orleans, Jefferson and the other parishes along I-10 began to wonder why they weren’t a part of the corridor group.

“All those parishes along the lake—St. Charles, St. James, Jefferson, St. John—that whole group felt like, ‘Well, we’re on I-10. Why aren’t we a part of that group?’” he says. “There was never a mentality from this area not to be a part of it. It was just a question of what it was; of defining what the 10/12 corridor was more clearly.”

Since then, the corridor alliance has met with the leadership of GNO Inc., the New Orleans Business Council, the Jefferson Business Chamber, the Northshore Business Council, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, BRAF and other entities. They immediately realized those groups had never before met together.

One of the first things they did was exchange data. GNO Inc. shared its report from an Angelou Economics study; the alliance shared its GSD&M study. Not surprisingly, they discovered they share many common interests, starting with a growing shipping and warehousing and distribution industry along 10/12.

“We have a major metro area growing that connects New Orleans, Baton Rouge and the Northshore,” says BRAC President and CEO Adam Knapp. “That long-term interconnectivity points to an abundant need for all of us to work down the same path. It seems to me abundantly obvious that if you’re talking about the 10/12 corridor, that inherently includes New Orleans, just like it includes Lake Charles and Lafayette.”

THE ADDITION OF NEW ORLEANS to the corridor won’t be a breeze. For one thing, the city brings some serious perception problems to the table—high crime, poor schools, government corruption. The parish also has a long history of considering itself superior to the rest of Louisiana and thus unwilling to build political coalitions outside its own borders.

That’s precisely the image the 10/12 corridor was trying to leave behind.

“People who have been in the conversation do understand that having New Orleans at the table does change the dynamics,” Spain says. “It does. It complicates the conversation somewhat. But I don’t think anybody has suggested for a moment that New Orleans shouldn’t be a part of this. I think everybody always understood that it would be at some point. But it clearly changes the dynamics and it does create new challenges but it also creates new opportunities.”

Political reality is, however, that the corridor needs New Orleans.

For one thing, mentioning the 10/12 corridor or even Baton Rouge to people outside Louisiana likely elicits blank stares. The fact is, New Orleans is an international city and it’s how most people around the world know the state.

“New Orleans is an international brand,” Mayer says. “In France, for example, they don’t know the 10/12 corridor; they don’t know what that means. People may not be as familiar with St. Tammany is or Baton Rouge, but most people know what New Orleans is. It is a brand that hopefully can become an asset to the brand of South Louisiana.”

Additionally, the corridor will need broad support to secure state funding for the marketing campaign aimed at promoting the creative corridor. GSD&M has estimated it will cost between $3 million and $23 million to reach an in-state and national audience.

Spain says the coalition is considering seeking money from the Department of Culture, Recreation & Tourism and Louisiana Economic Development. Another option is using recovery funds, as New York City did after 9/11. “At some point, somebody should stand up and say, ‘You know, it’s about time to tell people we’ve recovered and we’re back,” he says. “In the 9/11 case, they were actually able to use some recovery dollars to deal with the key issue of the recovering economy of New York City, and that’s exactly the same thing we’re talking about here: Rebuilding the economy, changing the image, telling the nation and the world that we’re back in business.”

LOUISIANA DEMOGRAPHER and political analyst Elliott Stonecipher, whose research fingered the 10/12 corridor’s growth pattern, notes that the New Orleans region is politically stronger than it’s ever been, with both the Senate president and House speaker. Likewise, the push for the pay raise was strikingly centered in the Orleans delegation.

“The good news is that this is the perfect solution for the southeastern part of the state,” he says. “Whether New Orleans ends up on top or Baton Rouge does, there should not be a fight between these two. Some calmer heads have obviously decided if we bow up against each other, we’re both going to lose.”

“When the work began with GSD&M, they didn’t include the loop region,” he says. “It’s speculation, but that certainly suggests that what we’re talking about here is the political reality of not setting up a battle royale between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. That’s what they’re trying to avert. It’s quite frankly an awfully interesting concept if the political forces in these combined areas now really do get it together and become a functioning coalition. But the bad news is that if that happens, then the rest of the state is absolutely going to be suffocating. Talk about suck the air out of the room!”

Spain and others, however, insist the expanded corridor has benefits beyond that. He notes that the region already has been identified by demographers 20 to 25 years out as a mega-region from Houston all the way across to Florida. “That means communications and planning are going to have to be done on a larger scale, in a regional conversation,” he says. “We can’t do it like we’ve done in the past.”

GNO Inc. President & CEO Michael Hecht agrees.

“If you consider the geographic unit that truly matters to both people and businesses these days, it extends beyond the borders of the Greater New Orleans region or the Baton Rouge region alone,” he says. “For example, there are individuals who live in Tangipahoa. One member of the family works in New Orleans; the other, Baton Rouge. And businesses considering locating in Louisiana are considering the entire quadrant of the state. I would make a strong argument that the economic unit most relevant from business and personal perspective is the triangle that exists between Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Slidell, extending west on I-10 towards Lafayette.”

Mayer says the new, expanded corridor should find complimentary shared assets—like the airport and the port—and channel marketing efforts for greater gain.

“If we combine our strengths instead of tearing each other apart with weakness, we could compete on a global level,” he says. “There are a lot of infrastructure issues that we have to work on together in order to be able to successfully compete. It’s not a zero-sum game, and that’s the mentality of the past. Instead of fighting over the same piece of pie, we need to work together make the pie bigger.”

SPAIN KNOWS THERE’S STILL DISTRUST between New Orleans, Baton Rouge and other parts of the state. But he believes the new leadership in those communities can bring about change.

Lake Charles Mayor Randy Roach, one of the first proponents of the corridor initiative, says he isn’t worried about his city being left behind by such a heavy concentration of southeast Louisiana involvement. “I think after we saw what happened in New Orleans, we realized how much we need New Orleans and New Orleans recognized how much they need us,” he says. “As long as we keep that in mind, we can benefit from a shared relationship.”

Lake Charles, for example, is already engaged in discussions with the Crescent City about how it can promote New Orleans to travelers coming in from Texas.

Mayer says people in other parts of South Louisiana who felt they couldn’t work with New Orleans in the past will see changes like that. “Our New Orleans business community, and GNO Inc., have made some significant strides,” he says. “I think they feel they have an equal, like-minded partner they feel they can work with.”

And just how might the addition of Orleans and those other I-10 parishes affect the marketing campaign being developed by GSD&M?

No problem, says Haley Rushing, the firm’s senior vice president and chief purposologist.

“I actually think that when New Orleans is at its best, it is absolutely at the heart of this theme,” she says. “There is no inconsistency when you look at the core values that unite the entire region: ingenuity, family, entrepreneurship. It just makes sense to leverage and claim the best of New Orleans.”

To read about promoting the Creative Corridor, click here.