BATON ROUGE — On Tuesday, Gov. Jeff Landry and LED Secretary Susan Bourgeois announced a $140 million state investment to prepare sites for corporations looking to buy or lease land.

Landry said the project would be called "Louisiana FastSites," saying it would be a way to prepare sites for major corporations looking to build new factories, plants and shipping centers.

Landry said the legislature created a $160 million fund known as the "Site Investment and Infrastructure Improvement Fund" that acts as a refillable savings account.

"First, the state invests money to prepare a site. Then, when a company buys or leases the land, the state gets the money back, and that same money goes back into the fund to prepare another site. So the dollars don't just disappear; they work, they come back, and then they work again."

LED Secretary Susan Bourgeois said the project focused on "site readiness and speed," as "that determines whether or not the state even makes the first cut in a selection opportunity."

"FastSites' investments focus strictly on components that unlock real-time value such as utilities, transportation, access, remediation; it's not speculative spending," Bourgeois said.

19 sites are moving forward in the first round of FastSites, Landry said. Among those, he mentioned Proof Works in East Baton Rouge Parish, the RiverPlex MegaPark Port project in Ascension Parish. 

"The sad part is other states have been doing this for years, and we haven't," Landry said. "Mississippi and Alabama have invested over $120 million in their site development, Virginia has invested hundreds of millions, Ohio has invested even more, so each time they invested and we didn't, that meant we were falling further behind. But we're not behind anymore, we're not waiting for the opportunity, we're preparing for it."