Turns out, Colorado is cultivating more than aspen trees and kick ass snowboarders.
For the past 25 years, the town of Littleton, Colorado has been using the concept of economic gardening to grow its businesses and economy with amazing results.
The idea came about in 1987 when missile-manufacturing company Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) pulled their business out of the Denver suburb, leaving 7,800 people without jobs and one million square feet of abandoned industrial and office space.
So Littleton’s business director, Chris Gibbons, decided to work with a Denver think tank, the Center for the New West, to implement this experimental theory developed by MIT economist David Burch.
Instead of being dependent upon just one major company, economic gardening involves identifying State-2 businesses — those that employ 10 to 100 people and have an annual revenue of $1 million or more — and giving them additional resources to expand.
Implemented in the late 1980s, 25 years of economic gardening turned a crippled Littleton into a booming town. The population increased by 25 percent, the number of available jobs tripled, and the city’s sale tax revenue increased from $6 million to $21 million.
Inspired by these results, Gibbons left Littleton to help start the National Center for Economic Gardening, which is sponsored by the Michigan-based Edward Lowe Foundation. Its mission: to spread the word and the tools to implement economic gardening in other cities and states. So far, it has established programs in multiple locals, including Kansas, Florida and Michigan, among others.
The newest state to join these economic gardeners is Maryland. Advance Maryland, as the program is called, began in 2013. So far, five businesses have been accepted at a cost to the state of $5,000 each.
Littleton’s success with economic gardening demonstrates that while unique, this business strategy is a viable and sustainable option. Perhaps, it is time for other cities and states to roll up their sleeves, put on their gardening gloves and grow their economy.
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Tag: Colorado
When It Comes to Jobs, These Counties Are Booming
After the recent financial meltdown, many Americans probably know what it’s like to search and wonder where all the jobs are. Recently the Bureau of Labor Statistics provided a little more insight by releasing a report that analyzed the number of employed people in each of the largest 334 counties.
Topping the Bureau’s list is Weld County in Colorado, with 1,864 jobs gained in the year. The Bureau sites major increases in construction as the reason for its success. On the other hand, St. Clair County in Illinois experienced the largest decline.
In order to be considered a “large” county, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that a county needed to have an average annual employment level of at least 75,000 people. The study was conducted December 2012 through December 2013, a period in which the country gained 2.3 million jobs nationally—a 1.8 percent increase to 136.1 million jobs.
Another thing to celebrate: the country’s 10 largest counties all experienced an increase in employed people, particularly King County in Washington, which includes Seattle, with a 3.9 percent increase.
Although these numbers provide more insight into the employment arena, the numbers are not exempt from error. For instance, a county that experienced decreased employment is not necessarily a negative. Unemployment may not be going up, but, rather, more people are retiring. Such is the case with three counties in Virginia – Fairfax, Alexandria and Arlington. For these three counties, the number of employed people dropped, but so did the unemployment rate. Similarly, an increase in employment numbers might be because of a migration of working age people, not necessarily a strict decrease in unemployment.
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What’s Helping More Refugees Than Ever Build Businesses in Colorado?
In many states across the country, the economy is picking up after the long recession, making aspiring entrepreneurs eager to launch their small businesses. The only problem? Requirements for loans from traditional banks are still strict, leaving potential business owners, including many immigrants who may not have the credentials banks are looking for, with no capital to start their ventures.
In Colorado, the solution to this crunch has come through several microloan nonprofits that are able to lend smaller amounts than commercial banks do, and serve a wider variety of people, including refugees who want to open shops, home childcare businesses and restaurants.
Denver-based Somali refugee Abdullahi Shongolo was one beneficiary of these programs. Three years ago, a microloan enabled him to buy an international grocery store, leaving him with a rosy view of his adopted country. “If you try, this is America—you can,” Shongolo told Thad Moore of the Denver Post. “This is the country that went to the moon, man.”
According to Moore, microlending is booming in Colorado. Community Enterprise Development Services, a lender specializing in helping immigrants and refugees, increased the number of borrowers in the most recent fiscal year by 150 percent. None of the 51 loans the nonprofit has made since it opened in 2010 has defaulted.
“Refugees do not only bring a few bags of clothes and a few belongings,” Suleyman Abbgero, who used a microloan to open a coffee kiosk in an Aurora mall, told Moore. “They also bring a lot of ideas. If they are given the opportunity, they can do much more.”
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Could Denver’s Light Rail System be The Future of Public Transit?
As more urban planners across the country brace for a future where cities are densely populated, local officials are turning their attention to investing in enhancing public transit. And even historically car-centric cities like Denver are getting on board.
The Western hub has spent the last decade planning an ambitious blueprint for a major regional light rail system. Denver’s FasTracks program first was defeated in a 1997 referendum only to return in 2004, when voters got behind the $4.7 billion project to add 121 miles of commuter and light-rail tracks, 18 miles of bus rapid transit lanes, 57 new rapid transit stations and 21,000 park-and-ride spots, according to the Atlantic CityLab.
Now a decade later, the Regional Transportation District (RTD), metro Denver’s rail provider, boasts the makings of one of the nation’s greatest public transit systems. Although a work in progress, last year FasTracks introduced the West Rail Line, which runs through some of Denver’s lowest income communities to its terminus in Jefferson County. The program is aiming to expand the East Rail Line to the airport and the Gold Line out west to Arvada by 2016, both powered by overheard catenary wires. Local officials are also targeting 2016 to add a bus-rapid transit system to the university community of Boulder.
Nine of the 10 FasTracks lines are projected to be completed by 2018, connecting 3 million spread across 2,340 square miles, and will include 18 miles of bus rapid transit and 95 stations.
“You’ll wheel your suitcase out of Denver International Airport, ride the train to Union Station, and hop a Car2Go — or even a B-Cycle if you’re traveling light — to your house or hotel. All using one card,” said Phil Washington, RTD’s general manager.
While the city remains a car-heavy town — only about 6 percent use bus or light rail — daily light-rail boardings shot up 15 percent between 2012 and 2013. Though cars are still a mainstay, more residents are embracing the potential.
“From the start, we made it clear we weren’t competing with the car,” Washington said. “And we explained, to the average Joe, that for only four cents on most ten dollar purchases, he’d be getting a whole lot of new transportation.”
Melinda Pollack, a founding member behind local nonprofit Mile High Connects has become a system supporter. Her group coordinates efforts to bring affordable development near transit, and hopes to build 2,000 units of affordable housing near the forthcoming stations in the next 10 years.
“When all the lines open, it’s really going to change connectivity for people,” she said. “We’re trying to make sure that low-income people don’t get pushed away from the stations.”
Indeed, FasTracks investment has seen an addition of 7 million square feet of new office space, 5.5 million square feet of new retail and 27,000 new residential units, The downtown area has increased its residential population 142 percent to 17,500 people since 2000.
“The system is developing and merging,” said University of Denver transportation scholar Andrew Goetz. “ The connectivity we’re going to see as a result is going to be quite impressive.”
Could Denver outpace the transit-praised cities of Portland or Washington, D.C.? By building an expansive system that not only serves urban areas but reaches the sprawling outlying communities where commuters work, Denver officials are not only betting on yes, they’re aiming to reshape American public transit system.
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Is Crowdfunding the New Way to Pay for Important Scientific Studies?
Even if you don’t know much about fracking (the process through which oil and gas companies pump water, sand, and chemicals into the ground to release oil or natural gas), you probably know that, politically-speaking, it’s a controversial topic.
Many people who live close to fracking operations fear that the process or its byproducts could harm them or the environment. But because of its polarizing nature, it’s difficult to land funding for non-biased scientific research on fracking.
Studies funded by industry groups have (of course) found no potential harm to humans from the practice. Citizens of several Colorado towns are skeptical, however, and have passed bans on fracking within their communities’ borders that may or may not hold up in court.
Nelson Harvey writes for High Country News that “the government’s own research on fracking is coming under fire from both sides of the political spectrum,” with the EPA recently responding to criticism by backing away from results of a 2011 study that found fracking to be the cause of the pollution of an aquifer in Wyoming. The state of Wyoming will continue the study, but it will now be funded by EnCana, the oil company responsible for fracking in the area.
Outside of industry-sponsored research, there’s little funding available to study fracking as federal grants for such studies have been slashed. So this year, at least four scientists have turned to crowdfunding to finance their research.
Dr. Susan Nagel of the University of Missouri is currently seeking to raise $25,000 through Experiment.com for her study: “Does fracking contaminate water with hormone disrupting chemicals?” She’s already gained $19,000 in backing, so apparently many people have the same question.
Harvey notes that, so far this year, University of Washington researchers successfully raised $12,000 through Experiment.com to study fracking’s effects on air pollution in Utah and scientists from Juniata College collected $10,000 through crowdfunding to research fracking’s impacts on streams in Pennsylvania. However, one fracking study proposed by a University of Colorado biologist failed to garner the necessary backers.
When a combination of budget cuts and political pressure makes it hard to study a certain topic, perhaps seeking donations from the questioning public is the best way to find answers to some of science’s most pressing questions.
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These Towns Show What Even Temporary Urban Renewal Can Bring
Have you ever passed by an uninspiring stretch of your city and thought, ‘What this place needs is a beer garden?’
The citizens of several cities in Colorado did, and now they’re taking urban renewal into their own hands, creating temporary spruce-ups of blighted areas to show what is possible — and perhaps inspire permanent changes in the future. In Golden, community members zeroed in on a couple of blocks of a street named Miners Alley. That particular stretch was just steps away from downtown, but the spaces weren’t being put to any inspiring use. As Colleen O’Connor writes for the Denver Post, the street is “mostly used for deliveries to businesses that front bustling Washington Avenue.” But during the first weekend of June, citizens threw a street party called Better Block Golden there.
The volunteer-run event featured a pop-up beer garden, bands, art projects for kids, new landscaping, a vibrant Aspen tree mural, café seating and plenty to eat and drink. “If we like it, we can start making some permanent changes,” Golden’s Mayor Marjorie Sloan told O’Connor.
The project was inspired by The Better Block, a website that tracks and encourages such local improvements to urban landscapes across the country and around the world. Elsewhere, Street Plans Collaborative, an urban planning firm, offers a free guide on how to pull off quick city transformations like “guerilla gardening” and “pavement-to-parks” on its website.
Several other Colorado cities are getting in on the block-improvement movement, including Colorado Springs, where the group Colorado Springs Urban Intervention is hanging signs pointing the way for pedestrians to find easy and safe urban places to walk. They also transformed an ill-used block into the site of Curbside Cuisine, a gathering of food trucks.
“We wanted to change the dialogue on Colorado Springs,” co-founder of Colorado Spring Urban Intervention John Olson told O’Connor. “Instead of dreaming about things, let’s do it. Stop the chatter, and show that it will work. We heard too many times that Colorado Springs isn’t Portland, and it won’t work. But it’s doing fantastic.”
So the next time you walk past a blighted block, don’t be surprised by the transformations yet to come.
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The Bicycle Is Not Just for Exercising Anymore
The summer slide isn’t a piece of playground equipment or even a toy at the local town pool.
While it sounds like something fun, it’s anything but that. Rather, the summer slide is something that parents need to fight against during these warm months.
The summer slide is the well-documented decrease in reading ability that occurs when kids don’t engage in learning over the summer. When children take a break from reading, their abilities recede and as that loss compounds over the years, some kids are left years behind their actual grade level.
To combat the summer slide, one community is looking to a bright yellow bicycle for answers. The city of Longmont, Colorado is launching a book-bicycle-centered outreach effort to try to reach kids whose parents don’t bring them to the library. Friends of the Longmont Library funded the $6,000 BookCycle that features a bubble machine and handle-mounted pinwheels, as well as a cargo hold for dozens of books and a Wi-Fi station that anyone can use.
Library employees will pedal the BookCycle to public events this summer, where they will host story times; they’ll also have the ability to make library cards on the spot. “We’re hoping the mobility will allow us to reach underserved areas and bring the books straight to them,” Elektra Greer, head of Longmont Library’s children and teens department, told Whitney Bryen of the Longmont Times-Call.
People in this Rocky Mountain community can expect to find the BookCycle at the farmer’s market, free public concerts, the First Friday Art Walk on Main Street, and many other events.
Now the librarians just need to learn to steer it — which can be difficult when the BookCycle is loaded up with books. So in preparation for pedaling season, the staff is taking lessons from Longmont Bicycles.
With any luck, they will return to the library from each of their outings with an empty BookCycle, leaving behind many kids with their noses buried in books.
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The Two-Wheeler to the Rescue
Jim Turner sees the world through bicycle-shaped lenses.
He’s a two-time Motorcross National Champion who left an engineering job at Ford Motor Company to found the Boulder, Colorado-based company Optibike (which designs and manufactures electric bikes), and he’s the author of a book — The Electric Bike Book — which is about bikes (naturally).
So it’s not really a surprise that in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy struck the East Cost, Turner began thinking about how electric bikes might be useful for recovery efforts.
Inspiration kicked into high gear (pun intended!) when the Colorado floods of September 2013 stranded Turner and his family. The roads to his community were washed out, and the only way to get out or bring supplies in was on foot or by bike. (Or by unicycle, as one goofy video demonstrated.)
Turner decided to turn his early ideas into a learning experience for the industrial design students at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. (David Klein, a friend of Turner’s, is a professor there.) Turner challenged students in Klein’s class to design prototypes for a Bicycle Emergency Response Trailer (or BERT). The contest had a few parameters: The trailer had to be light enough that an Optibike could pull it, it needed to run on solar power, and it had to be narrow enough to fit on a small trail.
Students came up with designs that included solar panels for charging cellphones when a community’s power is out, emergency lights, water filters, fold-out tents, and drawers for medical supplies. One team’s BERT folded out into a table that emergency crews could use for a staging area, while another doubled as a stretcher.
Turner told Jason Blevins of the Denver Post, “It reminds me of the beginning of Optibike. This is something that hasn’t been done before. There’s so much room to be creative.” He said of the student designs, “Every one of them, I see something I like.”
So in a few years, when disaster-stranded people are in need of rescue, don’t be surprised if a fleet of electric bicycles and emergency trailers are their saviors.
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This Innovative Business Keeps Open Land and Western Traditions Alive
Rent grassland, save the cowboys.
That’s the aim of a new Colorado program creatively circumventing the staggeringly high price of real estate to stave off development and keep a traditional lifestyle alive — and creating a foodie favorite so in demand that Whole Foods can’t keep the shelves stocked.
The solution started, as solutions often do, with a problem. Tai Jacober saw his family’s land divided and sold after his grandfather died. And he and his brothers couldn’t afford to buy a ranch.
“You can’t buy ag land in Colorado,” Jacober, a third-generation rancher, told Kelly Bastone of 5280. The cost of maintaining undeveloped pasturelands has become too high for many ranching families in Colorado. What used to be open acreage now holds second homes and resorts.
Since he couldn’t buy, Jacober decided to rent.
Crystal River Meats of Carbondale, Colo., leases pasture land on a large scale. It’s a win-win — Jacober and ranchers like him get to keep their livelihood, while landowners get to support traditional ranching culture and snag agricultural tax credits without having to run cattle themselves.
Farmers and ranchers have leased land before, but Crystal River Meats does it wholesale, renting 250,000 acres dotted throughout various communities. And their local, humanely-produced beef flies off the Whole Foods shelves.
Jacober has big dreams for his rental business, dreams that stretch far beyond Carbondale’s cows. He wants Crystal River Meats to serve as a blueprint for other communities across the state to preserve that Western ideal of open land and cattlemen, especially near the state’s popular ski towns.
“There’s a cultural benefit to having a viable ag operation that preserves the rural look — and the cowboys that come with that,” Jacober says.
Thanks to projects like Jacober’s, the open vistas of the West might just have a chance.
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Will Providing Drivers’ Licenses to Undocumented Immigrants Improve Safety?
According to the New York Times, there are around 11.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, many of them driving — regardless of whether or not they are licensed. Which is a somewhat scary situation facing the rest of us out on the roads.
In response, a growing number of states (including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Washington) have begun to issue driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. According to the Seattle Times, as of last year all but two states — Arizona and Nebraska — had altered their laws to at least allow immigrants brought here as children to obtain driver’s licenses.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., told Andrea Billups of NewsMax, “It doesn’t given them any legal status, but by giving them a government-issued ID, it helps them imbed in society.”
As for the rest of the states who haven’t given driver’s license privileges to undocumented people yet, it might make financial sense to do so. According to Hispanically Speaking News, when the Massachusetts legislature was debating this idea in March, the head of the state’s Registry of Motor Vehicles, Celia Blue, said licensing undocumented drivers “would generate nearly $15 million in state revenue through license fees and other charges, plus $7.5 million in renewal fees every five years.” Massachusetts state senator Joseph Vital said, “This isn’t to excuse the fact that they’re undocumented. But they’re on the roads. They’re driving. Many uninsured.”
When Colorado passed a law allowing for the licensing of undocumented immigrants last June, the bill’s sponsor, state Senator Jessie Ulibarri, said that law enforcement supported the legislation, according to Reuters. “Our roads will be safer when we can properly identify everyone who drives on them. We estimate that thousands more Colorado drivers will get insured because of this law.”
Sarah E. Hendricks of Drake University wrote in her April report “Living in Car Culture Without a License: The Ripple Effects of Withholding Driver’s Licenses from Unauthorized Immigrants,” published by the Immigration Policy Center, “States that do not offer driver’s licenses to unauthorized immigrants will limit the contributions that immigrant communities as a whole can potentially make, are likely to face negative economic and public safety consequences, and tend to fail in attempts to use such restrictive state-level policies to reduce the presence of unauthorized immigrants.”
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