An exit interview: Greater Lafayette Commerce’s Scott Walker
After a decade with GLC, Walker offers up the easiest things to sell about Greater Lafayette, along with the hardest, as he heads for a similar economic development role in southwest Louisiana.
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AN EXIT INTERVIEW: GREATER LAFAYETTE COMMERCE’S SCOTT WALKER
Scott Walker, who has run point on economic development with Greater Lafayette Commerce for what has been by all accounts a busy decade in that department, is heading for a similar role as CEO of the Southwest Louisiana Economic Development Alliance and Chamber, based in Lake Charles.
Last week, after his final day as GLC’s president and CEO, Walker met for an exit interview over coffee at The Lobby in downtown Lafayette, talking between shifts at home packing to head south about how his assignment went here, what got done, what didn’t get done since he landed in 2015 and what the selling points were for Lafayette, West Lafayette and Purdue.
The conversation picks up here, with a discussion about how time in the auto industry early in his career – in the early-2000s era of author Micheline Maynard’s “The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market” – led the Flint, Michigan, native into the economic development world, starting in Midland, Michigan, in 2004, before coming to Lafayette.
Scott Walker: I had the opportunity to help close four plants in Michigan during that time period, as we moved production south to Mexico and Brazil, and GM was pushing us to build plants in China. I saw a job opportunity in economic development, and I thought it would be great to keep investment in the Midwest and that that would be more fun to do than ship it overseas or into Mexico. So, I jumped into that opportunity in Midland. I learned a lot about economic development. Michigan was in a single-state recession, essentially, for 10 years. We lost population, the GDP declined, so it was really tough work from that standpoint. But I learned a lot about economic development, economic gardening and working with entrepreneurs and trying to grow companies, as well as doing site selection work.
Question: What was the assignment, as you understood it, when you came to Lafayette and Greater Lafayette Commerce?
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