Donaldsonville, Louisiana, isn’t the type of city used to seeing major investments.
The town of about 7,000 sits on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Ascension Parish, and while Ascension is one of the fastest-growing parishes in the state, nearly all of that growth has happened on the other side of the river. Kate MacArthur, CEO of the Ascension Economic Development Corp., says the community has been trying to spur development on the west bank for about a decade, largely to no avail.
All the efforts boiled down to a central question, she says: “How can we replicate the east side of the river on the west?”
Hyundai Steel, an affiliate of automotive giant Hyundai Motor Group, turned out to be the answer. The company is investing $5.8B to build Hyundai’s first steel plant in North America, lured by an incentive package worth roughly $2.6B, according to reporting from the Times-Picayune.
Hyundai officially announced in March 2025 that it would open a steel plant in the region, which is expected to bring approximately 1,300 jobs with an average salary of $95K, more than quadruple the town’s current median household income. State officials estimate another 4,100 indirect jobs will follow.
All in all, it’s an opportunity many states, counties, and cities across the U.S. would bend over backwards for, yet the prize ultimately came to Donaldsonville.
The region’s geography and investments in critical infrastructure, including deep draft docks along the Mississippi River, played major roles. So too did the state’s commitment to invest in workforce development, says Jayson Newell, senior vice president of business investment at the Greater Baton Rouge Economic Partnership. Most of the new jobs at Hyundai will require an associate degree or less, but more than a high school diploma. And the state helped clinch the deal with a promise to build a $30M training center, anchored by River Parishes Community College.
The town had lost out on past projects, Newell says, in part because it didn’t have training pipelines that employers needed.
“They helped us figure out that workforce was just as important as the site itself,” he says.
‘A True Emphasis on the Talent Pipeline’
This time, the region’s community college was at the table early on, with Hyundai representatives visiting RPCC’s campus twice during the site selection process. College leaders showed Hyundai examples of programs it developed with other companies, including an apprenticeship and training prorgram with Dow Chemical Company. RPCC and BASF Corp., a chemical producer, also collaborate on the Technical Training Center in Gonzales, La.
“When you put all of that together, I think we make the case that we put a true emphasis on the talent pipeline,” says Quintin Taylor, chancellor of RPCC. The new training center in Donaldsonville will offer a tailored, bootcamp-style program specific to Hyundai Steel’s employee needs. But most of the programs will be broader, preparing students for a range of jobs in instrumentation, electrical, industrial maintenance, and process technology.
That approach helps bridge the gap between wider workforce training needs and Hyundai’s specific requirements, Taylor says. The training center will also be centrally located in Donaldsonville, rather than at the gates of the new plant.
“It’s a way for not just the community to get trained, but also for others around,” Newell says. “It’s a real investment in the middle of Donaldsonville.”
In that sense, the project echoes a model typically seen in booming urban areas: the community college campus as a community and workforce hub, with employers embedded in its design. Austin Community College and Dallas College have both launched versions of the concept in recent years. Donaldsonville’s center is a test of whether the same model can anchor a rural community that industry left behind five decades ago.
Similar investments the state made in northern Louisiana a decade ago have paid off. There, Bossier Parish Community College partnered with Benteler Steel/Tube in 2014 to open a $22M Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering Technology. The state committed $21Mto the facility as part of the incentive package that landed Benteler’s nearly $1B steel tube plant. BPCC’s center trained Benteler’s workforce first, then opened up to other manufacturers across northwest Louisiana.
Donaldsonville is already seeing signs it might repeat that success. Shortly after the Hyundai Steel announcement, CF Industries committed to invest $4B to build a low-carbon ammonia facility at the same RiverPlex MegaPark.
“That’s the multiplier effect we all talk about,” MacArthur says.
Now, the priority is on getting the infrastructure in place, housing built for future workers, and the plant up and running, Newell says. Site work is slated to begin later this year, and Hyundai’s plant is expected to be operational by the end of the decade.
“The announcements are great,” Newell says, “but steel in the ground… is what you want.”