Sometimes journalism is a grind, sometimes it's a surprisingly rewarding pastime, and often it's both. My latest articles for the Baton Rouge Business Report run the gamut of topics from dry to personal to straight-forward information sharing.
Here's the line-up:
A barge cruises on the Mississippi River in Ascension
Parish, La. Image by Geo Swan via Wikimedia Commons.
- Fill 'er up gives local reaction to the FDIC's plan to replenish its shot insurance fund for lenders by charging three years' of fees up front. Don Ayres of American Gateway Bank said of the problem, caused by all those bank failures of late: "If you participated in the booming real-estate market, that’s where the majority of your loans are. I don’t care how good of a banker you are, you’re in trouble."
- A river runs through it is about the two sides of Ascension Parish (county), one that benefitted from big-time growth along an interstate, and the other that lags because of old infrastructure such as above-ground phone and power lines. "If we had an interstate, it would be just the opposite," said Becky Katz, executive director of the Donaldsonville Area Chamber of Commerce. "It’s location, location, location." Guess which side she's on.
- 'Welcome to the boomtown' discusses the suburban sprawl to the east of Baton Rouge, where a new "subdivision carves out a swath of land along La. Highway 447 across the road from a rustic scene of corrugated-metal-roofed shacks and black-and-white cows grazing in the grass," as I wrote. "It isn’t quite smart growth, but in this economy, most planners would be happy with the growth part."
Thanks for reading, folks. See you in a couple weeks.
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