From the Editor: A turning point for St. Mary?

At the July 8 St. Mary Parish Council meeting, Parish President Sam Jones and Economic Development Director Evan Boudreaux said 14 companies are looking at the parish as a future home.
Neither Jones nor Boudreaux mentioned the names of prospective employers. It would be rare for a local government to talk about a deal that hasn’t been finalized. Louisiana’s open records law gives them an out if negotiations are in progress.
But Boudreaux did say the prospects could bring that total of new investment in the parish to $1 billion, based on the last few years and what the immediate future might bring.
Harrumph, said some of the 101 people who commented on the story on our Facebook page.
Many of the others said words to the effect that they’ve heard it all before. The comments included advice on what St. Mary really needs to grow, along with skepticism and outright cynicism.
“14 hotels and urgent cares,” said one poster.
“We not talking about the 3 new storage places are we?” said another.
Others opined that for us, economic development means car washes.
Skepticism is good. The stakes are high when the subject turns to economic development in a parish that has lost 15% of its population since 2010 and 24% of its jobs since 2015. It’s natural to be suspicious of spin.
Show us the money, we say, as we should.
On the other hand, the parish scored big with last year’s acquisition by Saronic of the Gulf Craft shipyard. Saronic and local officials have talked about $300 million in investment and up to 1,500 jobs. To judge by the buildings going up along U.S. 90 and the Charenton Canal, they’re moving in that direction.
Maybe Jones and Boudreaux earned a little slack. A little optimism.
And maybe St. Mary Parish is finally finding its way to a more stable and secure economic future.
Historically, the local economy has relied at various times and to various degrees on timber, seafood, sugar cane, and oil and gas. That means sending raw materials elsewhere for someone else to add value.
We’ve been, largely at least, what economists call a natural resources extraction economy.
Lots of people made lots of money, or at least good livings from those industries. But — the favorite word of economists everywhere — we might benefit from a more diversified economy.
We’ve had our share of technical expertise for decades. My observation would be that the expertise has often been in the service of resource extraction, mainly energy.
Economists say resource extraction economies tend to have greater disparities in wealth and income. They are vulnerable to swings in commodity prices, as anyone who works in the oilfield will tell you. Or producers can be hurt by changes in a global economy, the way Louisiana shrimpers are struggling with competition from Asia and South America.
But look what has happened in the last few years. There’s Saronic, with its plans to build autonomous vessels. Metal Shark has boat-building connections to militaries around the world.
Conrad is building berthing vessels for the Navy. Halimar just announced that it is now part of a network building unmanned surface vessels.
More and more, local companies are taking resources and adding value to create an end product, not just pulling resources out of the ground or water for someone else to make money with.
The economic mix is changing here, and it seems likely to continue changing whether all, some or none of those 14 companies decide to make their way here.
Bill Decker is managing editor of the Morgan City Review.