Republican gubernatorial candidate Stephen Waguespack said it’s time for Louisianians to roll up their sleeves, find common ground and reach common-sense solutions.

Waguespack — who previously served on the state board of education, spent five years as a senior official for former Gov. Bobby Jindal and 10 years as the CEO of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry — recently spoke with the American Press editorial board about his plan to fight for jobs and economic growth.

“I grew up in Gonzales in the ’70s and ’80s, and the ’70s were a boom time for Louisiana and the ’80s were a tough crash,” he said. “Our family was one of the families that got caught in the pinch. My dad ran the local hospital and my mom was a school teacher. My dad’s hospital closed in the ’80s and he was out of work for about a year and a half and my mom quit her teaching job to start a small business to try and make things work.”

He said his dad was finally able to find work, but it came at a price — moving to Missouri.

“That’s really been kind of a defining part for me my entire career,” Waguespack said. “I’m someone who loves being from Louisiana, loves all the things that make us special and I’ve been frustrated since I was a kid that we lose good families decade after decade. We tolerate boom-and-bust cycles and just think that’s the way it is.”

Waguespack said he’s spent his entire career being a “public policy guy” to solve those issues.

“I like systemic growth. I like stability. I like cruise control growth that other states have,” he said. “We have never had it here.”

Waguespack said after graduating high school in Missouri he returned to Louisiana to attend LSU. After graduation, he moved to Washington, D.C., and worked on Capitol Hill by day and attended law school at night.

When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit in 2005, his wife’s family — who are from the New Orleans area — were displaced and Waguespack said the urge to return home was too great to ignore.

“She and I wanted to come home and be part of the rebuild of the state,” he said. “We wanted to be home, we wanted to help the state when it needed it so we moved back home.”

As a member of Jindal’s staff, Waguespack served as a policy maker, executive council and was chief of staff by the end of the governor’s first term.

“During that time we had the national recession hit, the crash of oil prices, the housing crash, had all the Katrina and Rita money go away; it was a pretty challenging, tough time,” he said. “At the same time, we were also doing some heroic stuff on workforce development, we were moving up the economic development charts. That’s when you saw the southwest part of the state have major developments announced. These big entities were looking at Louisiana to create jobs. There were a lot of good moments in a tough time.”

Waguespack said he stepped down after Jindal’s first term because he was recruited to lead LABI.

“During that tenure I’ve gone around the state, meeting with businesses, hearing their challenges and how we can make better economic conditions to grow their business,” he said. “What I’ve learned over that life cycle is what separates us is way less than what I think can unite us. When I talk to businesses and families, it’s really the same issue — they want good schools, a trained workforce, a tax climate that doesn’t punish them and allows them to go out and start small businesses. We all agree on 90 percent of stuff, but on politics everyone spends so much time arguing and fighting and yelling they can’t get to the stuff we agree upon.”

Waguespack said southern states are booming post-COVID, but Louisiana isn’t one of them.

“We’re the only southern state going backwards and we’ve got to stop that,” he said. “What the other states are doing is they are training their kids for the jobs of today. They’re putting some of that technical education into the high schools. They’re teaching kids how to be productive workers so they don’t have to leave for other states. They have a tax climate that is fair — low, flat and bare.”

Louisiana’s high levels of generational poverty have challenged our communities for too long, Waguespack said.

“I believe the single best path out of poverty is a good education that leads to a quality job with competitive wages,” he said. “We have to double down on early education, mentorship, career guidance, and reading and writing. We also need to revamp the high school experience in this state. By the time a kid is in seventh or eighth grade, you pretty much have a feel if they’re destined for a four-year college, a two-year program, straight to the workforce or maybe they’re in a fourth category like a special needs issue or a mental health issue. Whatever category, we have to have a high school that’s prepared to put them on a productive path for success in Louisiana.”

He said by a student’s junior year, they need to have the opportunity for apprenticeship programs and certificate courses so they’re ready to go to work sooner rather than later.

“We have to catch kids in high school,” he said. “That’s the last time we have kids in a controlled environment. We need to bring those life experiences into the high school. That means we need to revamp the accountability system and revamp the incentive formula to encourage high schools to bring in partners. Look at colleges like Sowela and their secret to success. They bring in industry and they put the instrumentation and the manuals in front of students. Every person who takes a course at Sowela knows that what they’re learning today will lead to a job in the factory down the street. We have to do that in our high schools. If we do that, we’ll stop losing kids to Texas and, quite frankly, we’ll stop losing kids to crime because they don’t know what else to do.”

He said the state offers a good quality of life, a good cost of living, natural resources, and industry knowledge.

“The biggest incentive companies are looking for is workforce,” he said. “We have to fix that workforce pipeline. If we go to industry and say, ‘I can provide people ready to work.’ They’re going to come.”

Waguespack said though Louisiana has a low unemployment rate right now, it’s an incomplete picture.

“We have the lowest percentage we’ve ever had of people looking for work,” he said “We need to get more people looking for work. We have a qualified workforce sitting at home right now. There are great jobs to be had and we don’t have people looking for them. There’s so many open spots for nurses right now and you get the baseline credentialing at a two-year school. I want the preliminary teaching done in high school, feed it right to a two-year program, we can start filling a lot of those nursing slots. There’s kids in Louisiana who don’t even know that’s a possibility.”

Waguespack said Louisiana must also continue its thriving oil and gas industry.

“Right now, our biggest challenge is the federal government doesn’t seem to like American energy very much,” he said. “That’s a problem. We have to have an aggressive advocate to tell the story of what Louisiana does. Louisiana knows how to produce natural resources here, we know how to do it cleaner than anywhere else. The traditional energy sector that we see here in Louisiana are also the ones putting the research and development into the new clean energy of tomorrow.”

Waguespack said he also wants to “tweak” the Industrial Tax Exemption Program, which gives large corporations tax exemptions on their properties, because property taxes are a primary source of revenue for local governments to pay for public schools, law enforcement, road maintenance and other community services.

“I support local governments getting upfront investment from that,” he said. “I like the 80-20 split. I think locals deserve that 20 percent on the front end for those projects because when you get those big facilities law enforcement has to provide patrols, schools have to handle more students, roads get impacted. If we can clean up that approval process and guarantee upfront investment for local governments then we’ll have a good balance on investment and also the clean ability to recruit investment here.”

Waguespack said as governor, he’ll take a look at exemptions and credits and “if they’re not moving the needle, then we’ll remove those and lower the rates responsibly.”

Small businesses shouldn’t have to go through the maze of dealing with exemptions and credits, he said. It’s too complicated. Other states are regulated more fairly and their tax codes are more compliant.

“That’s what we need to be doing here,” he said. “That’s why I’m in this race — to stop the brain drain, improve our workforce development, to make it easy for a great idea to turn into a small business and that small business to grow into a big business, and to try and remove as much of the politics as possible from people’s lives and let them live how they want to live,” he said. “Politics has become a garbage dump of fighting and yelling and arguing. I’ve had a front-row seat watching it over the years and I hate it. I felt it was time for me to step up, try to be a solution-oriented candidate, be someone who can rise above the political fights and bring policy solutions out there.”

Waguespack said his leadership style brings people together to the table. He said he’s a good listener and recognizes that on any given day someone might walk in with a better idea than what he has and he is ready to pivot when needed.

“I want to be the chief listener for the state,” he said. “I want to be the guy that can bring people together so we can start solving some of these problems and we can start competing in the South because if we don’t start keeping our young families here we’re going to lose another congressional seat, we’ll continue to shrink our economy, we’ll lose businesses and we don’t have enough to lose going forward. We have to draw a line in the sand and start winning again.”