To attract businesses, companies say, New Orleans needs to change the way it deals with them

The headquarters of Intermarine Inc. exist in New Orleans in name only.

The company's chief executive, chief financial officer and most of its senior staff live and work in Houston. Most of the company's clients are in Houston, too.

"The official headquarters is in New Orleans. There is no desire to change the headquarters," said Mike Dumas, the company's chief financial officer. "But now most of our employees are in Texas. Most key personnel is in Texas, and we're hiring mostly from within the Texas area. At the end of the day, we have to attract high-quality employees who are comfortable with the living environment."

In order to do that, the company has slowly and relatively quietly moved its base of operations to the neighboring state.

Intermarine is one in a long list of companies that -- citing concerns about infrastructure, corruption, crime, taxes and work force -- have shifted operations from the metro area. Katrina exacerbated those pre-existing issues.

Since 2005, the New Orleans area has lost nearly a dozen publicly traded companies. Among them is Ruth's Chris, which moved its headquarters to Orlando, Fla., after Hurricane Katrina devastated its Metairie headquarters and its local restaurants. Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold moved its headquarters to Phoenix. And International Shipholding Corp. moved its longtime Poydras Street headquarters to Mobile.

Still, business leaders are hopeful that the city will seize on what they believe is a unique opportunity to transform the way it retains and recruits businesses.

"There has to be a focus on business retention," said Gregory Rusovich, president of shipping and maritime logistics company Transoceanic Shipping Company Inc., and a member of the Business Council of New Orleans and the River Region. "We can't afford to lose more businesses."

Katrina made it worse

Before Katrina, the metro area's job base was flat. From 1999 to 2004, the five years before the storm, average monthly nonfarm employment in the metro area fell from 616,000 to 614,000, a drop of about 0.3 percent....