City of Fort Collins wins 2017 Baldrige award

FORT COLLINS — The city of Fort Collins has won a 2017 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

It was the only city on the list of winners and the only Colorado entity to be honored this year.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced the winners Thursday afternoon. Winners included two small businesses and two health-care organizations, as well as Fort Collins.

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The award is named after late Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige, a proponent of quality management in the Reagan administration.

Past Colorado winners of the award include Boulder-based Elevations Credit Union, Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Monfort College of Business at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley and CH2M Hill Inc. of Denver.

The city of Fort Collins, led by city manager Darin Atteberry,  has an “Aaa” credit rating by Moody’s Investors Service, a rating maintained by only 4 percent of governments. It also ranks in the top 10 percent of cities nationally as a place to live and work, and for the quality of culture and recreation, job opportunities, air quality and attractiveness. It ranks in the top 1 percent for drinking water quality and emergency preparedness.

“This program is about much more than recognizing successful organizations or winning a single award,” Ross said in a prepared statement. “The organizations which are given the Baldrige Award embody the competitive spirit which drives the American economy forward.”

The Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology based in Boulder manages the Baldrige Award in cooperation with the private sector. An independent board of examiners recommended this year’s Baldrige Award recipients from a field of 24 applicants after evaluating them in seven areas: leadership; strategy; customers; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce; operations; and results.

Other winners of a 2017 Baldridge award are Bristol Tennessee Essential Services in, Bristol, Tenn.; Stellar Solutions in  Palo Alto, Calif., which also has operations in Colorado; Castle Medical Center in Kailua, Hawaii; and Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage, Alaska.