As 2024 gets off to a roaring start with new leaders in our region and State, it’s also worth reviewing what’s taken place, what’s not taken place, and look ahead to what next year might bring for the Bayou Region and our energy and coastal industries.

Before reflecting on the past year, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank outgoing SCIA Board President Mitch Marmande for his service not just to SCIA but to our community in the face of the tremendous uncertainties thrown at us trying to come out from COVID and the hardships of Hurricane Ida. Your steady leadership has really set the tone for how we go forward as an organization and a region. Thank you for your service to SCIA and your continuing work to deliver vital flood protection and resilience for our region.

SCIA remains vital to our region because of the leadership of the people who show up in the room every month at our monthly luncheons, the people who lead our industry, and the people who do the work that makes the Bayou Region the ancestral home of innovation and opportunities in the energy, maritime and coastal industries. Our people build, innovate, and DO the things that make our region one of the most valuable and yet underestimated places in the State and Nation.

Because of the importance of what our members do to power the Nation’s economy, our leaders have gone to Washington for decades and gotten them to meet us on vital issues like offshore energy production and revenue sharing, flood protection and resilience, transportation infrastructure, and national flood insurance.

As 2024 unfolds, SCIA will continue to work diligently to lead on these and other issues important to our region’s ability to continue to power our critical industrial base and improve the liveability of our communities so that the Bayou Region remains the best place to live and work in the Gulf Coast.

SCIA is an organization that matters in a region that continues to build the present and future of our state and nation. I am so proud and so grateful to be able to lead this organization in the coming year and be part of its history. I am profoundly grateful to past president Lori Davis – the first female president of SCIA a decade ago– so that I can just be the next one – and definitely not the last.

In 2023, we also saw the departure of our Executive Director, Christy Naquin Zeringue, and I would like to extend the warmest welcome to our new Executive Director, Hillary Charpentier. We are going to have a great year thanks to the years and the leaders who have gone before us, we are going to make a difference, and we are all going to be dangerous. Let’s geaux! 

Thank You,  
Joni Tuck.