Jessica Erickson to depart Longmont Economic Development Partnership

LONGMONT — Longmont Economic Development Partnership president and CEO Jessica Erickson is leaving the organization, which is responsible for supporting key industries and attracting top-tier employers to the city, this month, and the LEDP board of directors is beginning the search for her replacement.

Erickson, whose last day is Nov. 23, announced her departure on Monday at the LEDP annual investors meeting. She will begin a new job next month as the director of business development at Sun Construction in Longmont.

“It’s a little bit bittersweet,” Erickson, who joined the LEDP in 2015 after a stint with the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, said of her impending departure, adding that she believes the LEDP will be left on solid footing. 

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“It’s not very often that these positions” are vacated during periods of organizational strength, she said. “Most times people leave a job like mine after some sort of fall from grace.”

The LEDP’s next leader won’t have to reinvent the wheel, Erickson said. They’ll be expected to “come in, not break anything and help us evolve and grow.”

During her nearly eight-year tenure, Erickson’s “helped attract or expand more than 150 businesses, brought more than $1 billion in new capital investment, and impacted the creation of more than 2,000 primary jobs,’ according to the LEDP.

Left Hand Brewing Co. co-founder and LEDP board chairman Eric Wallace said the organization has drafted a job description, determined a pay scale, and has begun to identify candidate targets for Erickson’s successor. 

“There are already people reaching out who are interested,” he said.

The LEDP board’s goal is “to have someone at least agreed to and decided upon by January,” Wallace said.

With the holidays only a couple of weeks away, LEDP officials are operating in a tight window. 

“January is aggressive, but I dont think it’s impossible,” Erickson said of hiring a new president. 

In the meantime, Stephanie Pitts-Noggle, who was hired as a business specialist by the LEDP in 2020 and soon after was installed as the leader of the city’s startup incubator program Innovate Longmont. 

According to her LEDP bio, Pitts-Noggle’s experience “includes serving as the data and reporting analyst at EnterpriseWorks, the startup incubator at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; building the business services program as the business specialist librarian at Champaign Public Library; and co-founding the Business Elevator, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that seeks to increase the share of successful minority-owned businesses.”