Early in her administration, Gov. Blanco set out to do just that. With a candor about the way things were at the time and a resolve to jet the job done, the governor made governmental ethics reform an early priority. Changing a reputation or image does not happen overnight, so there was no time to waste. Louisiana's image in the minds of too many site selectors was tarnished from previous state officials' ethics lapses to the point where the moniker "The Big Easy" applied less to

	General Motors manufactures the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon truck models at its Shreveport plant, which has seen more than $1 billion in investment in recent years. In late 2004, GM invested $250 million to tool the plant for production of the Hummer H3, shown here.

the City of New Orleans than to Louisiana state government.
      The governor was successful in getting some ethics reform legislation signed in the spring of 2004, and more is on the way. "I am working with a group of people now [in the legislature] who understand the sacrifices they need to make in order to get our image straight," Gov. Blanco told Site Selection in May 2004.
    Helping keep tabs on the administration's efforts in that arena is the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana Inc. (PAR), an independent research and public policy agency. Over the course of 2003, PAR issued a series of white papers designed to frame debate in the gubernatorial and legislative campaigns that year. Paper topics were higher education, state finance and taxation, education and governmental ethics.
      "We have lagged for years, for decades, in economic development, and we felt, as did the citizens of the state, that economic development was the most important issue in the governor's race," says Jim Brandt, PAR's president. "So we wanted some information out there that we felt would be helpful in holding the candidates to something that was realistic and provided a guideline or a direction for the state to pursue."
     The governmental ethics white paper, released in September 2003, offers 23 specific recommendations concerning a wide range of topics, including campaign contributions, lobbying, appointive positions and contracts for services. Four of PAR's recommendations made it into the reforms passed in early 2004. The first prohibits legislators from soliciting or receiving campaign contributions during a period beginning 30 days before a legislative session and ending 15 days after adjournment. The second provides penalties for making campaign contributions through or in the name of another. The third extends a lobbying law to cover lobbying of the executive branch. And the fourth creates a corruption hotline in the office of the attorney general.
      "Governor-elect Blanco embraced a number of the recommendations before she was even sworn in and committed very early on to support the governmental ethics reforms," says Brandt. "We were pleased that some of them were successfully enacted; others still need to be done. We were also very pleased that she moved very quickly early on to phase out some of the business taxes, which we had also recommended — a sales tax on manufacturing machinery and equipment and a corporate franchise tax were key planks in the state finance and taxation white paper."
     Brandt says his office continues to monitor the administration's progress in implementing more of PAR's recommendations. "But in many respects, the state is headed in the right direction in its continuation of what I think are the correct priorities," he adds. "These include a focus on higher education, improving the quality of our work force, dealing with the reputation the state has internally and in the rest of the country, as well as chipping away at the state's weaknesses."