Last week, Henry Florsheim, the chief executive officer at Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise, held a staff meeting to deliver some grave news.
Five employees were being laid off, the result of mid-year budget cuts coming down from the state totaling approximately $300,000 for the center. LITE employees being let go included three artists, an events coordinator and a staffer tasked with business development activities. (LITE is providing severance pay and assisting its former staffers in finding new work.) Other measures were also being taken, including surgical cuts to LITE’s economic development, travel, legal services, office supplies and building maintenance budgets. In addition, the center’s bright flashing lights, which illuminate its signature glass egg and light up the sky each night outside the center, were being extinguished. According to one source, Florsheim told the staff this last measure should serve as a memorial to those the center was having to let go.
The budget cut totaled just over $300,000, a major hit for a center whose 2009-2010 budget is $3.8 million. Just under 75 percent of LITE’s revenue comes from the state, via UL. The university is currently grappling with a mid-year $4.61 million budget reduction from the state. This comes on top of two other state funding cuts since January 2009, which all together total $16.45 million, approximately 17.5 percent of the university’s state funding. LITE took a slighter, 4.6 percent budget hit last January but then survived the fiscal year end cuts from UL.
“There’s not much wiggle room left in higher education,” says UL President Joe Savoie. “Our approach has been consistent from the first reduction last year. Our primary responsibility is to protect our core mission of providing a high quality academic experience for our students. In order to do that you have to protect those who are most responsible for providing it, which means faculty. Those areas become your priority and then everything else is secondary at that point.” Taking the brunt of this month’s mid-year budget cuts are the multiple economic development and research centers such as LITE, UL’s Small Business Development Center, the Center for Business and Information Technology and the Picard Center, among several others.
The immediate future doesn’t look any brighter. Officials are concerned higher ed may continue to bear the brunt of more year-end cuts to be decided this spring by the Legislature. A more serious concern is what will happen with higher ed funding once federal stimulus dollars run out in 2012. But despite the grim budget outlook from the state, LITE officials remain optimistic about the future.
This year, LITE will officially launch its technology business accelerator program. The Lafayette Economic Development Authority is picking up the majority of funding for the business incubator, designed to assist local startups as well as recruit established businesses to the area. Last year, LITE announced that visual effects company Pixel Magic, which has worked on Hollywood movies including Spiderman 2 and 300, and the upcoming Secretariat, would become the first tenant in the program. Pixel Magic chose to expand in Lafayette over several other potential locations, citing tax credit advantages as well as resources at LITE. The office should be up and running next month.
Three years after its launch, LITE is also preparing to adopt its first business plan. Bradd Clark, chairman of the LITE board of commissioners, has made the issue a priority since last year. The board formed a Strategic Planning Committee — made up of commissioners Bobby Vizier of Knight Oil Tools; Paula Carson, professor in UL’s College of Business Administration; and Mark Zappi, UL’s Engineering College dean — to oversee the process. They hope to have the business plan written and published by summer.
Clark explains it has taken time for LITE to find its identity and its proper place in the market. “You won’t find a center like this anywhere else,” he says. “And that affects you in all kinds of ways. The reality is you’re walking into a new environment where there’s all kinds of surprises.”
“There have been hiccups because of the fact that this is a brand spankin’ new idea,” he continues. “Soon, we’re going to see how this marriage will really start to push things forward for Lafayette.”
There are less than a dozen visualization centers, similar to LITE, in the world. LITE is unique in that it is publicly owned and operated through a partnership between local and state government, UL Lafayette, and LEDA. When it opened, the center was highly touted as a 21st century economic development engine, the potential of which has yet to be fully realized. The feature component of the center is a super-computer-powered 3-D visualization cave. The cave takes almost any form of complex data and turns it into an immersive 3-D environment that can easily be studied and manipulated. The technology has the potential to help facilitate anything from architectural planning to complex medical procedures to oil and gas drilling plans. LITE strives to sell its services in a way that enhances and helps grow local businesses without competing with them.
Since its launch, LITE has struggled to ween itself off state dollars and become more self-sufficient. Originally, seismic analysis for oil and gas companies was seen as one the biggest potential revenue generators for LITE, but the business never materialized. What has emerged is work with the film industry, which now accounts for some of LITE’s biggest clients. The center’s film work involves developing custom computer solutions to render computer-generated images into video. The center has also found success with architectural modeling and digital media work. LITE is still hopeful that it will one day generate business through creating immersive images for the oil and gas industry and the medical industry.
Florsheim, who was named CEO after a national search last year, says LITE is having to find ways to better leverage its resources. “We’re going to have to be much more focused in our business development and take less of a shotgun approach,” he says. While he recognizes a need for more self-generated revenue, he also stresses that LITE’s success can’t be measured solely by profit. “We need a good mix [of public and private revenue],” he says. “We definitely don’t want to be relying as much on state dollars, but LITE was built to create opportunities. If your goal is economic development, you can’t be a total profit center.”
MAY 23 Here's a story in the Picayune about some statistics that must come as a blow to folks who believe that any private school can do a better job of educating kids than any public school: Danielle Dreilinger reports that only 30 percent of the voucher kids are passing. That's less than half of the state wide average, she says. It's an interesting statistic because most of the schools (if not all) taking voucher kids have never had their students' standardized test scores released to the public before.
MAY 23 Stephen Sabludowsky blogs on Bayou Buzz about auditor requests here. Recently the state GOP started crowing about a request from the Legislative Auditor, claiming they were being targeted because of their anti-tax stance. (Uh, your what?) Denial and hyperbole aside, the state Democratic party blew holes in that theory with an email announcing they'd received the same request, Sabludowsky writes here.
MAY 23 Jim Brown blogs about the senate race in this post. He says that, given Bobby Jindal's "lack of traction" on the national stage, it might make more sense for the governor to consider running against Mary Landrieu for the senate seat. Since Tim Teeple left the Cassidy team, it makes sense he might land on a Jindal for Senate team, Brown opines.
MAY 23 In this Louisiana Voice post, blogger Tom Aswell writes of rumors that his nemesis, state Superintendent of Education John White, may be soon departing Louisiana for a federal post. It's hard to believe, given his performance, Aswell says, but stranger things have happened. An anti-White BESE member says that, if true, White is quitting before he can be fired.
MAY 23 In this post on American Zombie, blogger Jason Berry writes about the Mother's Day shooting. Mayor Landrieu said that "this is not who we are," but the fact is, this is New Orleans, Berry writes. The violence infused in the city is the result of a culture created by "sins of omission or sins of commission," Berry writes. It's not a problem that can be solved by legislating, policing, praying or publicizing, he says: Someone's got to understand what's happening first.
MAY 23 This post in the Westside Journal tells us what Port Allen Mayor Deedy has been up to lately: vetoing ordinances, apparently. This story is most interesting, however, when it delves into a petition that has been circulating around the city lately. It accuses the former mayor of a lot of nasty things; the former mayor says it is full of lies and "broken syntax" which may be a larger offense in his eyes.
MAY 23 This editorial posted in The Advocate is a bit confusing. The writing is poor - definitely not up to the usual editorial writing standard there - and the point is hard to grasp. Apparently, the writer is saying that privatization of state efforts is OK, as long as there is oversight and transparency, but Jindal's not good at that, and the legislature shouldn't over-react. Okey Dokey. Can't they get one of them Pulitzer-winning people to write an editorial?
MAY 23 This post on The Lens gives you links to a new Google Earth tool that allows you to see any spot on earth transform over the past 30 years. Bob Marshall, who covers the coast for the paper, says that in the case of Louisiana's coastline, it's possibly something you don't want to see, because it's not a pretty picture. There are several clips here, showing critical areas erode away. For Marshall, it was vindication for all those times he was met with eye-rolling when he talked about erosion.
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