BUSINESS PROFILE

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Boulder County Business Report interviewed Frances Draper, the new executive director of the Boulder Economic Council. Draper spent 14 years in banking in Denver as a senior executive and served on the board of the Downtown Denver Partnership. She also has worked in the private sector as a vice president of financing for a public company and in marketing/relationship management. She started her new job as executive director of the council in October 2006.

Question: What is the Boulder Economic Council?

Draper: It’s been in existence for about 10 years. It was started by Tom Clark, and it was a reasonably casual group of a dozen people in the community who Tom could use as ambassadors to advocate certain issues to the city and the community.

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It has been fairly loosely structured over the years and has been driven somewhat by the personality of the chamber president, based on how much each one wanted to be involved.

Sean Maher came in about two years ago to direct the economic council and tried to redirect what it was doing to be more project oriented and make inroads in certain areas where perhaps the city wasn’t as developed, for instance, economic incentives. We have all these economic incentives around us, what should we do in regards to that?

At the same time, the city lacked a director of economic development. He created a contract with (City Manager) Frank Bruno to essentially fill that role, and then Liz Hanson came on, and a lot of those projects got finished. About the time I came on a lot of those projects were coming pretty much to completion. And so part of what we’ve been doing in the last three months since I’ve come on board is defining why do people belong to this organization and where we want to take it.

Q: How is the economic council funded, and what is the approximate budget for 2007?

A: The economic council is funded by the members who pay to belong. The city has had a contract with the economic council for about 18 months, which began in June 2005 and ran until the end of last year. We are talking about whether we re-establish that or not. There have some things they’d like us to do for them because they have very limited staff. And so that helps us work collaboratively to get some things done. And the third thing we had is some county funds to be used for economic development for all of the communities in the county.

Q: Do you have a dollar amount on that?

A: I have an estimated budget for 2007, which includes a number of variables. We hope to be working with $200,000 to $300,000 this year.

Q: How much does it cost to become a member?

A: Five thousand dollars a year. Which, by the way, is comparatively quite low compared to other economic development entities. For example, to be at the table in Denver, the minimum contribution is $25,000.

Q: Why would a company or individual want to be an investor in the Boulder Economic Council?

A: We’re reformulating our vision and strategy. But the key element is, there has been a lot of assessment that Boulder essentially is on a trajectory to become more of a high-end bedroom community: nice retail, restaurants, dry cleaners and such. In order to keep what the Boulder Economic Council views as an economically vibrant community where you have businesses that hire people at good salary rates and can utilize the educational base we have here, to provide jobs so people can earn a living. Ideally we throw out an anchor and swing the trajectory a bit to keep the economic vibrancy.

We would tell businesses, if you would like to be in a community where businesses are thriving and growing and you’re part of that, it probably behooves you to be a part of this group and help create some direction that retains that. Because if all of our office buildings are converted into nice condos, and businesses are actively driven out – I think the one remaining business over there by the development on Arapahoe is being approached to move out so it can be developed into condos – we’ve got to take some action as a community if we want to keep businesses to grow and thrive here.

Q: Around the time that you came on board as director last year, you learned that the Boulder Economic Council had made a donation to a political campaign, an act that violated city rules. The situation was rectified by the BEC withdrawing the donation. But with that in mind, will the economic council change the way it works with the city’s economic vitality efforts?

A: One of the things the economic council members were asked in a recent survey was how do you want to work with the city? Do you want to have a contract or not? And secondly, do you want to be making political campaign contributions directly out of the BEC? The high majority said no, we don’t want to make campaign contributions directly out of BEC, and we do want a close working relationship with the city. Whether that’s through a contract or just a close relationship, we’re still figuring out. But part of what the Boulder Economic Council wants to do is to be able to be an advocate. So anything that would muzzle us from expressing our opinions would probably keep us from doing a contract.

Q: What are one or two of the top short-term goals of the BEC?

A: One is to put together sufficient data so we can speak intelligently about the city and what’s happening to jobs, companies and real estate.

Q: How do you plan to achieve that?

A: It’s in its infancy, but put together a group in the near term that can come up with a plan to create repeatable, reliable data to evaluate how we are doing. There is a group starting on that.

Q: Boulder has said it needs to focus on, as far as industry sectors go, natural products, aerospace, bio- and high-tech, software and data storage. These all are fairly strong sectors right now. Do you see any other important sectors emerging?

A: One sector that is often talked about but I don’t think we necessarily focus on as business entities, there is quite a holistic health group here under our nose. But I think we’re pretty consistent with your list.

Q: As director of the BEC, how do you view the news that Cheyenne, Wyo. beat out Boulder and Colorado for a federal supercomputer center?

A: Bad. That is something we would have liked to have kept here. We’ll have to double our efforts to keep everything else.

Q: What do you see as the BEC’s biggest challenge in keeping the local economy healthy over the next several years?

A: Growing and retaining businesses, finding that niche that we can exist in where Boulder can build on our strong sectors. We have a number of entities working with those sectors. We have CU, and the labs and the Leeds School of Entrepreneurship. So there is a lot to build on, and to get that into a working machine that helps businesses grow and retain them. And there will be certain businesses that it won’t be economical for them to stay here when they’ve created a huge manufacturing facility, but there may be elements of those kinds of businesses we can retain. The real focus is to grow and retain.