FC chamber issues eco-devo agenda

FORT COLLINS – Everybody says Fort Collins is a nice place to live, but the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce feels it will take much more than quality of life to regain the thousands of jobs lost during the recession.

To that end, the chamber board recently released a 34-page economic agenda to start a community-wide dialogue about the city’s future in an increasingly competitive environment.

“We’ve often talked in board meetings about the need for supporting good jobs,´ said Dan Gasper, regional manager for Wells Fargo and a longtime member of the chamber’s board. “We’ve got a lot of things going for us in this community, but it’s becoming more and more competitive out there.”

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At this year’s planning retreat, the board resoundingly articulated that the job agenda was its top priority.

Chamber President David May explained there is a big difference between community development – making Fort Collins a great place to live – and economic development – making it a great place to do business.

“It’s not good enough to just be a nice place to be,” he said. “Every community sells a great quality of life, so that can’t be our sole economic development strategy.”

A 2009 study by Area Development Magazine showed that seven of the 10 most important factors for companies’ relocation site selection deal directly with the cost of doing business. Quality-of-life factors did not break into that top 10.

This isn’t the first time the Fort Collins Area Chamber has issued a call to improve the local economy. In 2003, in the midst of the tech-led recession, the chamber issued a 12-point paper.

“As a chamber, we were looking at what was happening in the community at that time, and there were some obvious things that needed to be done. Since then, a lot has happened,” May said. “Looking back, I’d say so far, so good. The city has done a good job of getting the development review process in order.”

This most recent effort came about, again, due to recession and the more than 6,000 net jobs Larimer County lost from 2008 to 2009, which will take at least three years to replace.

“We have some lost ground to make up,” May said.

Renewed commitment

May also noted the city’s intensified focus on business retention and expansion since the last recession. The new agenda is meant to build on that progress, and renew the community’s commitment to active and focused economic development, he said.

The agenda separates recommendations and action items into four broad categories: community readiness for jobs, educated people, market the community and grow our own. Many contain a call to action to a variety of stakeholders in the community.

One of those stakeholders – probably the most important – is the city of Fort Collins. CFO Mike Freeman said that the city is reviewing the agenda and working on a formal response.

Fort Collins does not have a formally adopted economic plan, unlike Loveland and Greeley which put theirs in place in September 2008 and March 2009, respectively. Fort Collins does have a vision for the economic growth of the city, according to Freeman.

“We have an economic strategy that we review with the council a couple of times per year,” he said.

Now, the city’s strategy places retention as the top priority, followed by expansion, incubation and then attraction. Freeman added that the only big difference between Fort Collins and the other major cities in Northern Colorado is that Fort Collins doesn’t post a specific set of economic incentives. Instead of defining available tools, the city negotiates economic incentives on a case-by-case basis.

In recent months, it has worked out agreements with Hewlett Packard Co., for a tax incentive package to retrofit a facility for new workers, and Integware, for a private activity bond package to build a new facility on Harmony Road. Freeman said the incentives are always reviewed in terms of how they fit into the city’s economic strategy.

Keeping to that strategy, the city has looked into getting certain sites development-ready with proper zoning, as it did with the Anheuser-Busch InBev land in north Fort Collins. But Freeman points out that there is a limit to what the city can do, given strained financial resources.

Comprehensive study

The chamber’s economic agenda recommends a comprehensive study of the city’s strengths and weaknesses in attracting jobs. Freeman concedes that this would be a great tool to have, but that the city would not be able to take on such an endeavor alone.

Gasper said that it isn’t necessarily a question of increasing resources for economic development, but rather properly managing and marshaling the resources available. To do that, there needs to be community consensus that economic development is an important and worthwhile effort. The chamber’s economic agenda coincides with a major planning effort by the city – which almost didn’t include a separate economic development component.

The chamber was already well under way crafting its economic agenda when the city launched Plan Fort Collins – a community-based initiative to update City Plan and the Transportation Master Plan. The process includes a variety of focus-group discussions of specific community issues, from infrastructure and transportation to health and wellness. But, as the chamber pointed out, there was no focus group dedicated to the economy or economic development. In response, the city added one.

Leveraging resources is a theme among many of the agenda’s recommendations. There are already other entities and organizations working to promote the economy in Fort Collins, including the Northern Colorado Economic Development Corp.

“This is complimentary to what NCEDC is doing,” May said. One of the recommendations made in the agenda is for NCEDC to be strengthened financially and to further its strategic relationship with its Weld County counterpart, Upstate Colorado Economic Development.

“This is about making sure this part of the region that they are marketing is as prepared as possible,” May said. “This isn’t about them adopting our plan. It’s about opening a conversation.”