St. Tammany NOW

St.Tammany NOW brings you the latest economic development information and business and industry insight in our community provided by St. Tammany Corporation, the economic development organization for St. Tammany Parish. St. Tammany NOW highlights who and what makes the St. Tammany business community thrive and illustrates the opportunities to diversify and fortify our economy.

In this issue, we share highlights from our Impact Report, which showcases the wide-ranging program of work that we have facilitated in our efforts to support our local economy through strategic partnerships, business technical assistance, and forward-thinking, responsive program development.

Our Impact Report serves as a complementary progress report for THRIVE 2023, St. Tammany’s first ever comprehensive strategic economic development plan that was adopted in 2019 and has served as the organization’s roadmap through multiple unexpected and overlapping crises that affected the region and nation, including multiple active hurricane seasons, an economic downturn, and a global pandemic.

This report shows that St. Tammany Corporation’s efforts have resulted in over $173 million in investment and 895 new and retained jobs in the local economy from July 2020 through the end of 2022. In addition to jobs and investment numbers derived from directly supporting local businesses, the team at St. Tammany Corporation created and implemented multiple strategic initiatives that bolster key industry sectors, support entrepreneurs and small businesses, and help the residents of St. Tammany Parish access quality jobs.

ORGANIZATIONAL 5-YEAR LOOKBACK

In July 2023, we celebrated five years of St. Tammany Corporation being a part of the community. While our Impact Report covers mid-2020 through the end of 2022, it’s important to look at where our local economy is compared to where we were just five years ago. During those five short years, we are proud to have made tremendous strides in helping local businesses expand and create new jobs, working with our partners to carve out new pathways for our residents to start strong or level up in their careers, and increasing strategic investments into our economy. Our organization has also grown into a fullservice, independent economic development organization, and we now have in-house staff that can provide project financing technical assistance, state and local incentives program assistance, project management, site selection, business attraction, communications and research support, and workforce development tools for businesses looking to start up, relocate, or expand in our parish.

Since our organization’s founding in 2018, we have been able to work directly with businesses to provide tailored technical assistance, directly resulting in business expansion and attraction announcements representing over $210 million in capital investment and 1,839 new and retained jobs in St. Tammany Parish. Our award-winning business retention and expansion program, Advance St. Tammany, is the platform through which we work to help break down barriers to businesses’ growth and success in our community.

The positive spillover effects of direct technical assistance to businesses are also significant, and our local economy has proven its resilience. Our most recent analysis shows that our labor force has just shy of 121,000 workers either employed or actively looking for a job in St. Tammany, making ours the fourth largest labor force in the state. In fact, over five years, even with the economic downturn, pandemic, and natural disasters, our economy added more than 3,000 jobs, with continued positive projected growth.

The total size of our economy has also increased by nearly $2 billion—with a B—over five years. Gross Regional Product, which you can think of as the local version of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, measures productivity within a local economy and captures the total size of all wages earned, investments made, taxes paid, and other transactions generated within our local ecosystem. Every time a resident or visitor pumps gas, buys groceries, or enjoys a meal at a restaurant within our parish’s boundaries, it contributes to the total size of our local economy.

In 2023, we are on the verge of having a $14 billion economy in St. Tammany Parish alone. Our economy accounts for 15% of the ten-parish Greater New Orleans region’s GRP and 5% of the state’s economy. As one of the fastest growing parishes in the state by population, and the primary destination for residents migrating within the Southeastern Louisiana region, we see the potential for opportunities that accompany this growth: more job opportunities for our residents and a more appealing business environment.

BELOW WE OUTLINE SOME OF OUR KEY STRATEGIC INITIATIVES THAT WE WERE PROUD TO HIGHLIGHT IN THIS REPORT:

Northshore Regional Resiliency Collaborative

As an operational ethos, we strongly believe in collaborations and partnerships to help accomplish our work for the broader success and edification of our community. During the pandemic, we saw an opportunity to work with our economic development colleagues across the five-parish Northshore region to pursue a federal grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration that would create the Northshore Regional Resiliency Collaborative, which includes elements such as business continuity and resiliency planning, economic impact analysis, and regional comprehensive planning.

This initiative is led by St. Tammany Corporation in partnership with Livingston Economic Development Council, St. Helena Economic Development Foundation, Inc., Tangipahoa Economic Development Foundation, Washington Economic Development Foundation, and Northshore Technical Community College.

The scope of this initiative encompasses EDA’s priorities of recovery and resiliency by assisting with economic resilience in the form of business continuity and emergency disaster preparedness programming and training to maintain and grow competitiveness. An

Chris Masingill Chief Executive Officer St. Tammany Corporation

innovative, collaborative program of this nature in this multi-parish footprint returns positive economic impacts far beyond the parish boundaries through innovative and intentional public-private partnerships. The Northshore, Greater New Orleans, the Baton Rouge metro, and the Gulf Coast all benefit from the outcomes of this grant: workforce education and training, talent retention, business diversification and continuity, and innovation and business formation.

Northshore Healthscape

By multiple metrics—including jobs, productivity, and growth—healthcare is one of the top industries in the three-parish Northshore region, which includes St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, and Washington Parishes. In fact, the healthcare and social assistance industry supports nearly 23,000 jobs and contributes more than $1.6 billion to the Northshore’s economy. The demand for healthcare jobs is also projected to increase by 10% over the next five years alone. Recognizing that this industry is a major economic driver on the Northshore, and noting the strain that the pandemic put on healthcare providers across the nation, St. Tammany Corporation saw an opportunity to bring our major healthcare institutions to the table and start a conversation surrounding strategies to harness the competitive advantages of the industry sector and foster workforce and talent development to position our community as a healthcare destination for world-class care. Major hospitals and workforce training providers serving our region are represented in this initiative, led by St. Tammany Corporation. Northshore Healthscape is supported by North Oaks Health System, Ochsner Northshore-Mississippi Gulf Coast Region, Our Lady of the Lake Northshore, Slidell Memorial Hospital, St. Tammany Health System, and St. Tammany Corporation in collaboration with Northshore Technical Community

College and the Workforce Development Board for TriParish Works.

Startup Northshore

In August of 2022, St. Tammany Corporation introduced STartUP Northshore, a three-year regional pilot program focused on catalyzing entrepreneurship, innovation, and business formation in the threeparish Northshore region. The program’s launch was accompanied by the announcement of a strategic partnership with The Idea Village, the New Orleansbased hub for entrepreneurial resources credited with elevating the region’s reputation as a center of innovation, entrepreneurship, and business in the Gulf South. With the support of The Idea Village, we introduced the first ever IDEAinstitute Northshore program, building upon the IDEAinstitute model’s success in New Orleans by offering this idea-stage accelerator program to entrepreneurs based on the Northshore.

IDEAinstitute Northshore is the first “spoke” in The Idea Village’s vision of creating a “hub-and-spoke” network meant to increase hands-on support and accessibility in surrounding communities by developing a network of local satellite programs that expand the program’s reach across the region.

Today, St. Tammany Corporation is the only economic development organization in the state of Louisiana that has an entrepreneur-in-residence on staff whose primary purpose is to build up a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem in the region. To date, we have facilitated two IDEAinstitute Northshore cohorts, hosted the first ever New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week event on the Northshore, and plan to launch the Northshore’s first pitch competition, the NSpire Startup Slam, during the third quarter of this year. There is so much more exciting news to share from our organization’s work. To read more about what St. Tammany is doing to support businesses and create jobs in our community, visit StTammanyCorp.org to read the full Impact Report, or stop by our office to pick up a copy of your own.

St. Tammany Corporation continues to be a resource hub for businesses and consistently shares timely, relevant information related to our economic landscape and upcoming business resource programming on our online platforms. Stay connected with St. Tammany Corporation on Facebook and LinkedIn at @StTammanyCorporation, our website at StTammanyCorp.org, and our data and research platform at StTammanyStats.com.