Northern Colorado eyes Wyoming for new revenue

CHEYENNE – Most of the Fort Collins staff of JCL Architecture Inc. will be at the firm’s new Cheyenne office on the evening of March 19, playing host to Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce members at a Business After Hours event.

That mere fact is reflective of how Northern Colorado businesses are more and more inclined to slip across the Wyoming state line for business opportunities. It’s also an indicator of Wyoming’s interest in bringing a growing number of so-called “greenies” into the fold.

While North Front Range construction companies have long known that they can’t ignore a potentially large chunk of business lying to the north in energy tax-rich Wyoming, other business sectors are also finding ways into the growing Cowboy State economy.

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Just ask Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Dale Steenbergen, who in his 18 months on the job has seen dozens of Colorado businesses, such as JCL, join his group as new members.

“I can think of five just in the last month,” he said. “The last one was someone from Colorado who just walked into our luncheon on Friday and signed on.”

The business ties that link Wyoming’s southern tier and Colorado’s northern region have become more binding in just the past two years. A watershed event in the process was the announcement in January 2007 that the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research had chosen Wyoming over possible sites in Boulder and Fort Collins for its $60 million supercomputer center.

The computer complex will take shape on 26 acres of land that economic development agency Cheyenne LEADS owns at the North Range Business Park in west Cheyenne.

Ripples of interest from other technology companies, eager to perch next to one of the most sophisticated computing facilities in the world, come with each bit of news about the project, as they did in early March when Denver-based H+L Architecture was selected to design the center.

‘One big economy’

“Any time there’s an announcement of any kind about the project, we get a flurry of inquiries from outside our region,´ said Ben Avery, business and industry division director at the Wyoming Business Council. “These are coming from major players in the technology sector. It shows that we’re becoming more and more one big economy.”

Colorado business-service companies, such as accounting firms and advertising agencies, are also making forays into Wyoming. The growing number of opportunities in the state is outstripping the capacity of native businesses to take advantage of them, prospectors have said.

“We find a lot of work, especially in the medical field,´ said Doug Larson, founder and president of the Sage Marketing Group, a Fort Collins marketing and public relations company that recently signed the Cheyenne Women’s Clinic as a client. “The number of marketing communication firms up there is very small. It makes sense for us to be there, and we’ll be spending more and more time up there.”

While Northern Colorado companies seek economic gain on the high plains, Wyoming makes its own pitch for advantage, too. Denver radio stations in early March began carrying a 30-second commercial for the Cheyenne LEADS economic development group, beseeching Colorado industrial employers to consider relocating to Cheyenne, a state that has no personal or corporate income tax and offers lucrative incentives for newcomers.

“We’ve been reluctant in the past to make that kind of a direct appeal,” Cheyenne LEADS president Randy Bruns said. “We’ve been careful about how we go about this. But if you’re trying to survive, and trying to cut costs, and trying to keep your doors open and not lay anybody off, you want to look at alternatives. We represent an alternative. That’s all we’re saying.”

Recruiting magnet

The supercomputer deal illustrates the power Wyoming wields as a business recruiter. The NCAR center got $20 million up front in state funds, including $10 million from the University of Wyoming endowment, plus a guarantee of another $1 million annually for operations. The total of $40 million in incentives was $15 million more than Colorado could muster.

Wyoming’s swollen budget surpluses, fed by severance tax money from the coal, oil and natural gas industries, in the past three years have contributed to a multi-billion-dollar building boom that continues even after the biggest tax boom has subsided.

The state legislative session that ended in February resulted in funding for even more projects, with the University of Wyoming a focus.

Gaye Stockman, president and CEO of the Laramie Economic Development Corp., said UW projects had spawned a whole new economy in the college town, and that Northern Colorado was taking notice.

“There’s a lot of synergy these days between Northern Colorado and southern Wyoming,´ said Stockman, whose career has included economic development positions in Colorado, most recently as president of the Loveland Chamber of Commerce. “In the past, people always talked about the border in a different way. The perception was that on the other side of the border lie monsters.”

Opportunities presented by the university’s expansion drew Fort Collins developer Fred Croci to Laramie 11 years ago, when he first envisioned a mixed-use development near the campus’ eastern edge.

Behold, the ‘greenies’

Croci and his late partner, developer Bill Neal, launched the UW Plaza project shortly before Neal’s death in 2004. It now features office space, retail stores, condominiums and a new hotel and conference center on Grand Avenue on the eastern edge of the campus.

“We’re still ‘greenies,’ and they’re still getting used to having us around,” Croci said of his business relationship with Laramie and the university. “This is a much smaller market than we have in Colorado, and it’s easy to overbuild. We all have to be careful about what we do here.”

JCL Architecture founder and president Justin Larson said his UW business pipeline is growing, with new projects lined up including an energy-efficiency upgrade at the Wyoming Union student center.

“Our most financially successful projects have all come out of Wyoming,” Larson said. “It was a tough call between Cheyenne and Laramie when we decided on an office up here.” A Laramie office remains a strong possibility for the firm, he added. “We might have three offices before much longer.”

Steenbergen of the Cheyenne chamber said the drive toward regionalizing the southern Wyoming and Northern Colorado economy would continue because it is in the interests of both locations to pursue it.

“I’m a big regionalism guy,” he said. “When I came here there was an undercurrent in that, but now it’s become our strategy. We are, and want to be, a regional organization. We don’t care where a state line is. We care about what’s going to be good for business.”