Keeping jobs close to home full-time effort for Cody

LONGMONT — What Longmont needs now is jobs – primary jobs.

And that partly is what attracted John Cody to his job as president and chief executive officer of the Longmont Area Economic Council. Primary companies are the economic engine, Cody explains. Primary companies can provide much for a city’s economic base because the companies sell their products and services outside of the region and, therefore, have a larger set of consumers. Longmont is home to about 1,400 primary jobs and 200 primary companies, such as Seagate Technologies, Longmont Foods and Amgen Inc.

Cody is proud of that.

“It means less people have to commute to find jobs, it means we’re less dependent on other local economies to support our quality of life, and it also means we have a more stable economic base here,” he says.

According to the Boulder County Migration Study, the economical council’s biannual survey, Longmont has the highest percentage (55 to 65 percent) in Boulder County of the number of people who live and work locally. And Cody would like to boost that number with even more high-tech primary jobs.

Cody, 42, earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Mississippi. He took urban and regional planning courses during his undergraduate studies, so pursuing a master’s degree in that area seemed a natural progression. Economics also played a part.

“My undergraduate degree was in sociology, and when I got ready to graduate, I found out how much money I was going to be making,” he jokes.

Cody has worked in economic development for about 18 years. Before his work in Longmont, Cody was instrumental in bringing thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in capital investments to Adams County – one project being the expansion of Lucent Technologies in Westminster – as vice president of Adams County Economic Development Inc. Before that, he was owner of Planning & Development Consultants in Wyoming, and was assistant executive director of the Imperial Calcasieu Regional Planning and Development Commission in Louisiana.

Now in addition to his work for the Longmont economic council, Cody is professional chairman of Metro Denver Network, an alliance of economic development agencies that helps to market metro Denver as the next hotbed of high-tech activity.

“Most people who are from here realize we have a significant high-tech sector, but most places in the rest of the country do not,” he says. Case in point: a recent article in the Wall Street Journal article, he says “talked about high-tech centers around the country and Denver wasn’t even mentioned.

“Making people aware in other parts of the country of what we have to offer here in terms of an existing industry base, in terms of the quality of life in terms of the cost of living and of doing business – all of those things are part of my challenge.”

That’s not all.

Cody also plays guitar in band, T.C. and the Destroyers, a group of economic development officials who schedule gigs for small gatherings, usually other economic development or planning departments around metro Denver. The T.C. is former Boulder Chamber of Commerce head Tom Clark.

Cody is a great guitarist and singer, his colleagues say.

But then ask them what they miss most or laud most and that’s his expertise with computers.

“We really miss him,” says Debbie Woodward, now vice president of Adams County Economic Development Inc., based in Northglenn. “He could do just about anything in our office – from replacing motherboards to recreating innovative high-tech programs.”

“He’s knows those things inside and out,” adds Dick Henson with Aurora Economic Development, who’s worked with Cody as part of Metro Denver Network. “He knows how to hooks things up and knows how to troubleshoot. I’m talking hands-on technology.”

Cody also was one of the first people in economic development to implement a real estate database with statistics on commercial and industrial land in the metro Denver area, says Holli Baumunk, vice president of the Jefferson Economic Council. It’s like the economic development agencies have their own in-house multiple listing services, she says.

“It’s become so valuable that even the brokers come to our economic development organizations to access it,” Baumunk says.