Gov. Jeff Landry says diversifying economy important for state
– Gov. Jeff Landry’s official announcement of the $100 billion SpaceX investment in coastal Vermilion Parish brought with it news of thousands of proposed direct and indirect jobs that reach beyond the borders of the parish, the governor said.
The governor stopped in his hometown of St. Martinville on Friday and spoke to The Teche News, three days after the announcement Tuesday in Abbeville that highlighted Elon Musk’s plans for SpaceX to develop a spaceport south of Pecan Island designed to support thousands of rocket launches annually.
“This SpaceX announcement eclipses anything that we’ve ever had before,” Landry said Friday. “The total amount of projects is absolutely historic. There’s never been that amount of investment, certainly in such a short amount of time. And those things are high tides that lift all boats. It doesn’t matter that it’s going to be in Vermilion Parish rather than St. Martin Parish. You’re going to feel a positive effect here.”
According to a statement provided for Tuesday’s joint state and SpaceX announcement,the project looks to establish Louisiana as a global hub for next-generation aerospace, with the capacity and infrastructure needed to dramatically increase launch frequency and expand access to space.
SpaceX, an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation company founded by Musk in 2002, is acquiring about 125,000 to 130,000 acres of land in Vermilion Parish to build its Starship launch complex that will be known as Starbase Louisiana.
The company is expected to create 3,000 direct new jobs over the next 10 years, paying an average annual salary of $92,600, 192 percent above the Vermilion Parish average wage, the state said. Louisiana Economic Development estimates the project will generate more than 8,100 indirect new jobs for more than 11,100 new job opportunities in Acadiana.
“This is one of the largest projects that we’ve announced under my governorship in regards to the number of direct jobs that are going to be created, in addition to the thousands of construction jobs,” Landry said Friday. “So SpaceX is committed to a minimum of 3,000 jobs. You heard Elon on the video (at the Tuesday announcement) when I was visiting him talk about 10,000 jobs. Again, like I referenced Cape Canaveral, 30,000 direct and indirect jobs. When you talk about 3,000 direct jobs you’ve got support jobs that follow those direct jobs as well.
SpaceX
“This is how we keep our best and brightest, our most talented young men and women, girls and boys, in Louisiana.”
These are the kinds of jobs that keep those kinds of graduates from leaving the state, he said.
And the impact is also felt at the university level. A lot of universities are struggling financially. Having an industry like the spaceport nearby is a big help for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, whose president has a PhD in robotics and whose school had the first computer science program in the country.
“This really is a godsend to the university because it’s going to marry what the university already is doing — they’ve got a standup, nationally recognized robotics program, they’ve sent satellites up into orbit, they have won all kinds of awards, so I think it’s almost like a perfect marriage,” Landry said. “I think it’s going to be very productive in keeping the university on solid footing.”
Tax reform, public safety efforts, working on legal and insurance reform to lower insurance costs and educational system improvements were all done in an effort to lure companies to Louisiana, he said.
“I think that what’s so great about this announcement is, we’ve been working to bring economic development projects around the state, basically to diversify our economy,” Landry said Friday. “For a long time, Louisiana’s economy was hitched only to a handful of industries, and when the market would drop in those industries, we would suffer. You see other states that were able to bear the economic downturns, and we started working on policies that would make corporations, not traditional to Louisiana but others, more interested in Louisiana.”
And the broader impact of the new developments goes beyond the areas where they’re located. Landry noted that a few months ago he was in Lafayette where ground was being broken for the largest openair electrical shop in the country, primarily to service data centers in other parts of the state, around Monroe, Alexandria, St. Francisville and Shreveport.
“Think about the distance between there (and Lafayette), and yet it’s like 600 jobs (in Lafayette),” Landry said. “When you have something this close at that scale, it’s going to be unbelievable.
“If you look at Cape Canaveral, it spins off about $14 billion annually into the economy of Florida. It’s responsible for over 30,000 jobs as of today.”
Cape Canaveral historically has been the center of NASA’s space launches and now both SpaceX and Blue Origin also operate and develop private launch sites in the Cape Canaveral area.
“Our fabrication yards, our machine shops, our people are going to be able to find opportunities that they never had before,” Landry said. “Since the downturn in the oil industry, we’ve struggled and basically had peaks and valleys and people are really just trying to carve out and keep our living here. This is going to give us certainly some permanency.”
The land being acquired for Starbase Louisiana became available after the state settled a coastal erosion lawsuit with ExxonMobil. Under the terms resolving decades of coastal marshland litigation, ExxonMobil conveyed about 130,000 acres of its property in Vermilion Parish to the state, clearing the legal title for SpaceX to acquire the site.
The state had been involved in 42 coastal erosion lawsuits filed by Louisiana parishes against more than 200 energy companies, primarily seeking financial damages, permit enforcement and mandatory environmental cleanup.
“When I first became attorney general, I inherited those lawsuits over 11 years ago, and from Day 1 I always wanted to try to find a resolution,” Landry said. “We ended three decades of legacy lawsuit cases that have plagued the state, last year or the year before. But when I got them I was looking for a resolution. Since becoming governor, we’ve settled or found a resolution with four of the five major oil and gas companies, so this was absolutely a component (in the SpaceX deal).
“It was a vehicle by which we could settle this lawsuit and get those things off of our books, because they had created so much political discourse and uncertainty in the energy industry. It was a win. We were able to settle it. And the way that we settled it, it was good for the coast, it was good for the environment, Exxon got a good deal, SpaceX got a good deal, and the State of Louisiana got a great deal.”
Landry said the property being sold to SpaceX is going to coastal projects that are within the state coastal master plan, have been approved by the Legislature and how the funds are spent is constitutionally predicated so it won’t be wasted.
“It’s going to be spent on protecting our coast,” Landry said.
He added that the part of the settlement that he’s most excited about is that ExxonMobil will spend $200 million in the state, with $160 million going to the state to address orphan wells that the state is liable for across the coast. The remaining $40 million will be spent addressing orphan wells that probably would have ended up in the orphan well program.
In addressing the impact on the environment and wildlife from building the spaceport in the marshes south of Pecan Island, Landry said that the process isn’t anything new either in the country or to wildlife.
“Cape Canaveral was built in the 1950s, still operates today, as built in a marsh just like where SpaceX is putting theirs,” Landry said. “Boca Chica, which is SpaceX’s Starbase headquarters in Texas, was built on, not next to, on a wildlife refuge. I went, I visited it myself. I personally saw it. The birds are there. There’s no impact on the wildlife. There’s a cattle form next to it. The cows don’t look like they need anxiety (medication). Sometimes I think that the only group of creatures out there that seem not be able to adapt to things real well are human beings. But there becomes very minimal impact once the activity begins.”
The governor said work is expected to begin as quickly as possible on the project. Surveying is being done, the permit process is underway and activity will ramp up as permits are issued.
The project had been kept officially under wraps until the announcement this past week, though there were widespread rumors and talk of the investment in the months leading up to it.
Landry said the nondisclosure agreements that the parties involved signed was meant to keep details of the project from reaching competing companies and other states who might want to lure the company elsewhere.
“I think a lot of it has been blown out of proportion,” Landry said. “Those non-disclosure agreements only just say hey, I don’t want you to talk about my project while we talk about that project. I think Louisiana should have learned its lesson back in the 1960s when Walt Disney tried to locate Disney World in Louisiana and people in this state, not all of them but some … basically tried to take advantage of Walt Disney and he took his toys and everything else and moved to Florida, and the rest is history. When you look at what he did in Florida, he did it and built it in secrecy until he was ready and finally able to tell the public what he was doing.
“If we want these kinds of projects, those are the kinds of things that corporate America demands. So we can stay poor or we can engage in the discussions in private settings that corporations demand so that their competitors don’t know what we’re doing, and quite frankly, I don’t want other states to know what we’re doing as well.”
Landry said the project is another positive step for the state.
“We want to keep winning, and that’s what we’re doing right now on a scale that is literally historic,” Landry said. “It’s never been seen before.
“I don’t think the teachers in Richland Parish who just got another $50,000 a year, or the young men and women who are gonna be able to fulfill their dreams by staying here in Louisiana because SpaceX is here or some of our high tech jobs that would otherwise go to California and maybe Texas, that get to go to work for Meta or Amazon or some of the others that we put in our data centers that we put here, are gonna complain about that.”
Landry added that having programs like SpaceX’s Spaceport and the data centers being built around the state helps the country stay competitive internationally.
“This is the new race for world power, and if we want America to stay on the cutting edge, then these are the jobs of the future,” he said.
As for St. Martin Parish, Landry said that any time he can bring jobs and opportunity to the people of the parish in which he was born and raised, he wants to do that.
“This is a project that’s going to impact everyone,” Landry said.
