REBECCA CARRASCO

VACHERIE – The future viability of St. James Parish depends on economic developments like the proposed intermodal transportation center, according to St. James Parish President Dale Hymel Jr. “We are hoping that is airport, wherever it is built in the River Parishes, will bring people into the community,” he said. Taking a sober look at the changes of the recent past, Hymel discerned a parish faced with an uncertain future. “If you look at the census of the 1960s and 1970s,” Hymel said, “St. James had 25,000 people. Now we are down to 21,000. And if you look at the demographics, our percentage of people 65 years and older has increased, while our percentage of middle-aged people, say 35 to 45, has decreased. Fewer young people are staying. We have fewer children in the parish.” When the population decreases, the economy shrinks, he noted, and that is why many officials in the River Parishes are supporting some type of economic development project to try to stimulate growth and bring citizens to move back into the area. Hymel drew a comparison between the proposed airport project and the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. “The Dallas/Fort Worth airport was built right in the middle between Dallas and Fort Worth, and just look at how it brought Dallas and Fort Worth together,” Hymel explained. “Now you cannot tell where one ends and the other starts. I think the same thing could hold true for Baton Rouge and New Orleans. It can only enhance the River Parishes if they can connect Baton Rouge to New Orleans.” Hymel agreed with Governor Mike Foster’s recent suggestion that Louisiana is well positioned to take advantage of the increase in business that the United States is going to be doing with Central and South America. “That is projected to be a boon to the economy, and we can take advantage of it through this airport by shipping cargo back and forth,” Hymel said. The private investors who want to put money up to build this airport see the same opportunities, he explained. “A lot of times, when they manufacture their product they have to ship it to another airport, in Miami or Memphis, to move it out,” he said. “Having that transport capability located here, in a key place in Louisiana, will make it easier for them to locate their jobs here.” He added, “A computer manufacturer, for example, could construct its assembly plant to take advantage of e-commerce. A computer ordered over the Internet from anyplace in the world could be assembled and shipped out through this airport within a day.” The jobs would in this way belong not just to the airport, but to various satellite or supporting industries and businesses. Another example Hymel mentioned of warehousing and distribution possibilities was cold storage for flowers. “Right now flowers shipped in the United States go through Miami from Brazil. So to come to New Orleans they fly into Miami and they are put on trucks that go to New Orleans,” Hymel said. “Why can’t this be a central place? To come from Brazil into this airport, put into cold storage and then shipped throughout the United States and elsewhere?” This sort of development offers rich promise of employment. “Once the airport is up and running,” Hymel observed, “it is projected to have 2,000 employees on this industrial plant. “So 2,000 jobs or positions will be available. There are only 800 or 1000 people in the parish unemployed. So if you hear people saying that a lot of jobs will be filled by outside-parish people, that’s certainly true because we do not have that many people in the parish looking for work.” He added, “But if we got only half of the jobs, that would wipe out the unemployment we have in the parish.” Not only is the number of jobs promising, according to Hymel, but so is their variety. “All our people that are unemployed can’t go to work for a petro-chemical plant,” he explained. They would have a better chance, he suggested of finding semi-skilled work in a warehouse or distribution center. “People that are unskilled or semi-skilled need service-type industries, such as hotel and motel, Wal-Mart and K-Mart, restaurants. And we do not have any of that. In St. James we do not have any hotels in the parish.” The reason for the absence, Hymel suggested, is related to population. “When someone is looking at locating a franchise such as a Wal-Mart or a McDonald’s,” he said, “what they look at is the size of the community, whether or not it can support the business. There are cities around here with more than with 20,000 in it, and we are a whole parish with 21,000 people.” We live in a nice community, Hymel conceded, and nobody wants to see it destroyed. “Opponents say we need to concentrate on getting more industry into the parish, and that is what I have been trying to do,” he said. “But it is more difficult since Shintech. Other industries find out about it and they don’t want to put up with the hassle. The next 25 to 30 years the projections show that we are going to have less industry because of advanced technology. So we need to look at something else. We need to diversify into getting away from a dependency on chemical plants.” Whether the airport is going to be in St. John or St. James is still undetermined, but either way the concept is a good one, Hymel concluded. “Louisiana needs this airport, and the community needs this, to ensure that we get continued growth and economic development.”