UPDATED WITH STORY: Wellness Center will be watched for impact on St. Mary's health

FRANKLIN -- It's a gym. It's a place to do yoga. It's a pool and a snack bar, a place to stay well and get better.

The new Wellness Center at Bayou Bend Health System in Franklin is also an experiment to see if a $22 million investment can improve the well-being of a parish with poor health outcomes in a state where the outcomes are, on average, even worse.

"My challenge to you," Gov. John Edwards said at the center's ribbon-cutting Friday morning, "is to make sure we produce better health outcomes because of this facility. If we do that, the quality of life is going to go up, health care costs are going to go down and then we all will see the wisdom of replicating this facility all over the state."

"The whole idea," said state Sen. Bret Allain before the ribbon-cutting, "is to turn a health care system into a wellness system."

Edwards and Bayou Bend CEO Stefanie Guidry cut the symbolic ribbon at the center Friday morning. Looking on was a crowd that included lawmakers Allain, Rep. Vincent St. Blanc, former state Rep. Sam Jones, mayors of St. Mary municipalities and a large conference room full of members of the public.

Guided tours took them through the 60,000-square-foot facility. It embraces a cavernous but brightly lit gym with high tech treadmills -- they can replicate the exertion of walking against a parachute -- and weight machines that will tell you how you're doing. They saw a Kids Club room where parents can drop off the little ones during a workout.

There's a walking track around the gym, and a pool outfitted for therapy as well as for swimming. There's a place to buy healthy snacks.

But behind the beautiful architecture and tall glass windows is a sad story.

According to information compiled by the LSU AgCenter, 35% of St. Mary's adults are obese. More than one in six is diabetic.

The data say 37% of adults are physically inactive, and 11% are uninsured. Twenty-four percent smoke. Another 17% report some for uncertainty about having access to adequate food.

Those people are more vulnerable to cardiac disease, kidney disease, conditions related to improper diet, and even cancer.

Yet St. Mary still ranks in the upper half of Louisiana parishes, 27th among 64, in health outcomes.

Allain has a unique perspective on the rationale for building the center. He has influence in the Senate on budget matters and serves on the board of Hospital Service District No. 1, which operates Bayou Bend.

In an interview before Friday's ribbon-cutting, Allain, R-Franklin, noted that half the state budget of about $40 billion comes through the state Department of Health, much of it in federal funding.

"We were able to tap into the money and to do something with it," Allain said..

The Wellness Center is the result. State health officials will be watching to see if it improves health outcomes here, Allain said.

In his remarks at the ribbon-cutting, Edwards compared the process of obtaining funding for the center to a squirrel stashing acorns for the winter. Little by little, and with discipline, the locals put away enough money to fund the center, he said.

Also speaking at the ribbon-cutting was St. Blanc, who called Friday "a great day for my district."

Franklin Mayor Eugene Foulcard said he was up Thursday night anticipating the opening of the center.

"It was like a kid waiting on Christmas morning, just the sheer excitement of the facility opening up and the things I know it will do to improve health care outcomes in our area," Foulcard said.

"This is an amazing day," said Parish President David Hanagriff, "not just for Franklin but for all of St. Mary Parish."

Guidry, who was praised by Allain for her leadership as the center was built, introduced Greg Stock, CEO of Thibodaux Regional Health System. Thibodaux Regional has partnered with Bayou Bend and has an even larger wellness center that served as a model for the Franklin facility.

Stock said the center makes sense from a business as well as a health perspective.

"You build this beautiful facility," he said. "You go out and recruit doctors and the doctors say, 'Hey, this is a pretty nice place. This is a nice little community. I might want to live here.'

"You develop other services and they all complement each other. And you have stuff nobody thought you could have in the beginning."

Baldwin Mayor Clarence Vappie, a long-time employee of Franklin Foundation and Bayou Bend, was impressed by the center.

"I went through the whole building last week," Vappie said, "and it inspired me to work out."