LEXINGTON, Kentucky — When businesses are looking at relocating or expanding into a metro area, they’re not concerned about things such as what parish or county they are moving into. They’re looking more at the whole area and how various entities get along with each other.
That’s the message that the president of More Than A Bakery, a contract baking company, had for a delegation of Acadiana business and community leaders Tuesday. Bill Quigg said that when his company decided in February 2016 to build a $57.1 million bakery in Versailles, Kentucky, he wasn’t concerned what county he was moving into. Quigg and his wife, Felicia, had already decided to expand into the Lexington market.
“We don’t care about boundaries. We don’t know where lines in the sand are,” Quigg told about 75 people who attended the One Acadiana Leadership Exchange to Lexington. “We were looking at a region, looking at industrial sites. It didn’t matter whose county we were in.”
When More Than A Bakery was looking at locations for its third bakery, Felicia Quigg said she would “feel tension” in some areas when she would move from dealing with regional economic development agencies to county economic development groups. “The community where everybody was singing from the same hymnal stands out,” she said. “Unfortunately, we didn’t get that in every location.”
Even though More Than A Bakery is building in neighboring Woodford County, Felicia Quigg said officials from Lexington are still helping her business, even though she didn’t move into the city or county limits.
Bill Roider, executive director of St. Landry Parish Economic Development, said that’s a model that Acadiana officials should use when pursuing big relocation and expansion projects.
“Those lines are coming down,” Roider said. When FedEx decided last year to build a new distribution center in Carencro, Roider said he didn’t care because of the hundreds of new jobs it would create. “Those are St. Landry Parish people going to work in that facility,” he said.
He noted that while the Quiggs were talking about relocating, they only said “Versailles” once and kept on talking about the merits of “Lexington.” That’s something that could happen in Acadiana. “Could it be that people would say ‘Lafayette’ about something going into Opelousas, Crowley or New Iberia? Sure it could,” Roider said.
The One Acadiana visit to Lexington concludes Wednesday. Jason El Koubi, president and chief executive officer for the group, said Lexington was selected for several reasons, including the fact that like Lafayette, it’s a metro area surrounded by rural areas and few suburbs. He also cited the fact that the region has managed to turn lifestyle attractions such as horse racing and bourbon into economic engines. El Koubi wants to see the same thing happen with Acadian culture.
Also of interest, in light of the Lafayette Parish school tax election Saturday, was how Lexington business leaders in the mid-2000s rallied and got the local school board to pass a 5-cent property tax to build and renovate public schools. That tax will generate more than $300 million over the next 20 years, said Alan Stein, a Lexington businessman who backed the effort.
“We’re blessed to have a world-class educational system,” he said. Among U.S. cities, Lexington ranks 9th for residents with a doctorate degree or higher and 11th in terms of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree. “Education is critical to all that.”