BATON ROUGE — Toyota Motors is interested in the state’s 1,425-acre industry-ready mega site near Monroe, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said this morning in an phone interview from Japan.
The company is sending “within the next week or so” a representative to inspect the site, which is located between Monroe and Rayville on I-20 and U.S. 80 in Richland Parish, she said.
The governor is on an industrial inducement tour of Japan, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong this week. Speaking from Tokyo at 10 p.m. Wednesday Japan time – 7 a.m. in Louisiana -- Blanco said she had met earlier Wednesday with Katsuhiro Nakagawa, vice chairman, and several executives of Japanese-based Toyota, which is looking for a U.S. site to build SUV’s.
“We definitely wanted them to know we were interested,” the governor said. “We told them about the mega site in Northeast Louisiana along I-20.”