When Dustin Yates and other founders pushed to incorporate their own city, they imagined a lean, privatized government built on business principles like customer service and cost control.
Now, more than a year after St. George marked its first birthday, Mayor Yates says he is watching that vision take shape — not through a traditional city workforce, but through a private company whose employees are tasked with creating a government from scratch.
“The easiest way to explain it is it’s like building a house,” Yates said. “If you’re going to build a house, you hire a general contractor.”
While Yates and some of his elected colleagues might serve as the architects for the new city, a company named Institute for Building Technology and Safety is serving as the developer, contractor and laborers — not just in building St. George, but in running it too.
Since the ’90s, the company has served as private contractor for government services throughout the country. Its leadership says they can provide a leaner government than what many are used to seeing.
“How much innovation do you ever regularly see in government?” said IBTS Program Director for St. George Scot Byrd. “But how much innovation do you see in the private sector? It’s every day.”
The Company of St. George
St. George’s new city hall building on Proverbs Avenue does not look like a government building, and it wasn’t built to be one. IBTS has started to convert space inside to a city council meeting room and make other changes, but the two-story office building still looks like the home of a startup company more than a mayor and city council.
But the look might fit what Yates and others wanted: a privatized local government that embraces efficiency, employs the use of subcontractors and isn’t bogged down by a bloated system.
“If you do a great job here, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. If you don’t do a great job here, we’re going to find somebody else that can,” Yates said. “That’s just the reality. It was the first conversation with Scot when he was brought on as a program director. And that’s exactly what I tell everybody else.”
Scot Byrd, Program Director, points out where council members’ offices will be during a tour at the new St. George City Hall building on Thursday, October 2, 2025.
The company now has offices where it operates governments in New York, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, Missouri, near Washington D.C. and elsewhere.
IBTS’ office in St. George is the company’s second operation in East Baton Rouge Parish — they also run the privatized government in the city of Central.
A few months after the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of St. George last year and the city was up and running, IBTS was contracted to run early city services like permitting, inspections, planning and zoning.
The team is now focused on setting up the Department of Public Works in St. George. The city has put out multiple bids to contract for services like planning and zoning, permitting and IBTS was the only bidder, documents show.
The two parties are still negotiations, but the city has budgeted $20 million annually for public works for the 2025-26 fiscal year.
That contract will be in addition to the current $12.8-million annual cost St. George is paying IBTS to operate the administration, development, finance, permit and inspection, planning and zoning, engineering, code enforcement, business development and emergency services.
St. George expects $58.7 million in revenues for the fiscal year. About $2.5 million is budgeted for the city’s administrative and executive costs.
Fully formed, IBTS’ team will be about 100 people working for St. George, Byrd said. On Thursday, applicants for the team’s public works group were being interviewed, though much of the work will be done by other companies.
“A lot of it will be subcontractors,” Byrd said. “They’ll do things like trimming trees back from roads. And all of the things that primarily come with streets and drainage, we will be using a lot of subcontractors to do that work.”
‘It’s just more nimble’
Around 15 years ago, IBTS won the contract for services in Central. Since then, Mayor Wade Evans says the “100% privatized” city hasn’t looked back.
“Obviously, we always go out to rebid, but it’s very hard to compete with a company who has the understanding of what it takes, because they have the internal benchmark,” he said.
In Evans’ view, local governments often get to a point where the cost of services given to constituents surpasses the value of what those services are. As example, Evans points to the high costs East Baton Rouge Parish puts into retirement legacy costs for its employees.
“The machine itself consumes the resources and gets in the way of delivering the services,” he said. “You end up with a with a system that has to basically continue to consume itself. And the people that suffer are the citizens who need services delivered to them, like roads, ditches, potholes — all the things that government should be worried about taking care of.”
The new St. George City Hall building pictured on Thursday, October 2, 2025.
Evans, a former contractor and homebuilder, said one of the biggest advantages of privatized government is flexibility. In the private sector, underperforming employees can be replaced quickly, without the hoops and red tape that slow traditional government — a freedom he sees as a major benefit.
“It’s just more nimble,” Evans said. “And for that lack of job security, Central’s employees are rewarded in pay, because our laborers make considerably more than a typical entry-level government position. And they have benefits, vacation and everything else, but the one thing they also have is an understanding that if you don’t perform, you don’t have a job.”
Privatizing change
As IBTS beefs up its operation in St. George, constituent services have moved off the shoulders of the city-parish government and onto Louisiana’s fifth-largest city. On Oct. 16, permits and inspections, planning and zoning and occupational licensing will now be handled by the St. George through IBTS.
Yates and other leaders were recently presented options from tech companies for the city’s own 311 portal that constituents will be able to use to report potholes, blighted properties, missed trash pickups and more.
Though he calls the work of putting together a city brick by brick challenging, Byrd said creating something new instills an “entrepreneurial vibe” for himself and the rest of the IBTS.
Mayor Dustin Yates and Scot Byrd, Program Director, speak together during an interview at the new St. George City Hall building on Thursday, October 2, 2025.
Overseeing it all, Yates echoed that creating a city from scratch is not as easy and added that there is an added pressure that comes with making decisions that will impact people for an unknowable amount of years to come.
But it also comes with an excitement more akin to the private sector, he says, where do things a little differently and reject what he calls the “government of probability” that many are used to where choices are made based on what’s most likely to work or least likely to upset votes. Instead, Yates said privatization offers St. George a chance to be a “government of possibility” where leaders can take some calculated risks and offer services to people more efficiently.
“We don’t know until we explore it. We don’t know unless we take some risks,” Yates said. “Eventually you’ve got to put yourself out there, right? You’ve got to take some calculated risks if you really want to move things forward, or you’re just going to be in the same spot as you always have been.”
