Retired American Press editor Jim Beam blogs about the state’s economic development efforts to save a chicken processing plant in northeast Louisiana, placing the project in context of other efforts around the state:

Each of us has to learn to appreciate those things that are really important in the lives of citizens in other parts of the state.

The closing of the Pilgrim’s Pride chicken processing plant in Farmerville is just as critical to that area’s economy as the Superdome and the Saints are to New Orleans. And the state’s effort to save the chicken plant was eventually linked to the Shaw Group’s planned facility at the Port of Lake Charles that will manufacture modules for nuclear power plants.

Beam runs through the economic impact of each project and concludes:

The three developments discussed here prove beyond a doubt that when it comes to economic development, we are all in it together.

That premise faces another test this afternoon, when, according to this story in the Monroe News Star, the “Louisiana House Appropriations Committee meets at 1 p.m. today to consider a bill that would amend the rules of the state’s economic development megafund” to allow the chicken plant deal to proceed.