Economic partners plan for sustainable growth

The Colorado Springs City Council adopted an economicdevelopment strategy plan for the Colorado Springs metropolitan area at its meeting last week.

"The strategy was finished early this year," said Gary Cuddeback, director of economic development for the city. "This was a product of the economic

These partners came together last year to gather information about the economy of the Pikes Peak region and create an updated economic strategy.

The economic strategy group included representatives from the Greater Colorado Springs Economic Development Corp., the city's economic development office, the El Paso County Office of Economic Development, the Greater Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce, the Colorado Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau, and Teller County Commissioner Clarke Becker.

This oversight committee updated what was in the 1994 strategy plan the last time a strategy plan was devised, said Cuddeback. Substantial economic changes have taken place since then.

Along with focus group sessions conducted by Pikes Peak Community College targeted at both businesses and citizens in the community, a report was engineered outlining the business community's strengths and weaknesses. It also included recommendations for economic sustainability.

"This strategy is important because we want to sustain the economic growth we've experienced through most of the '90s, " said Cuddeback. "In the '90s, we were coming out of the recession and looking at ways to retain companies. The need for the strategy in the early '90s was to help get the economy on track. The strategy now is for more sustainable growth ... to make sure that we don't fall back into the highs and lows the economy 'experienced over time in Colorado and Colorado Springs."

Along with Vail-based consultant Ross Boyle of Growth Strategies Organization, the group took a comprehensive look at companies the city was trying to attract. The final 17 recommendations were presented in the strategic plan. (See sidebar, page 8.)

While the group did not yet outline how the recommendations would be implemented, the report sets the stage for discussions of that nature to ensue.

The main components include creating a formal partnership of key organizations to enforce the plan, reducing barriers for budding entrepreneurs, and creating a stronger pro-business environment.

"Some (of the recommendations) are quite detailed, others are fairly broad," said Cuddeback. "They (City Council) liked the tone ... the flavor of the 17 major (broad) recommendations of the business climate and target recommendations. But there were details that they didn't agree with or needed to be explained."

The City Council liked the idea of using incentives to grow, he continued. It also wanted to see affordable housing, land, and cost of wages mentioned in the infrastructure plans, Cuddeback said.

One issue of importance to the community addressed in the strategic plan is the lack of high-paying jobs, commensurate with skill levels. Despite a 4.3-percent increase in the number of people in the labor force in the past decade,

Colorado Springs' household buying income is still 14 percent below the national average for all metropolitan areas, the report said. Threefourths of all households have incomes of less than $50,000.

"We used to be known as a place where wages were low and real estate costs were low," said Cuddeback. "We were attractive because we were a low-cost place to do business. That's beginning to change. We're trying to take advantage of the industries that are going to bring in higher wages. That won't make us as comparable as in the past, but will increase the wealth of the people in the community.

"The price of real estate has been going up. We've gotta have the wages go up commensurately. We're not attractive the way we were before. What we need to do now is attract workers that can fill the jobs ... (and) have a high-quality community with high education standards and good quality of life."

Other areas addressed in the plan include increasing available office space, accommodating increased tourism, and establishing a stronger relationship with the state Legislature.

Not included in the 1994 plan but addressed this time was the medical community's needs and coordinating with the state's aerospace plans.

In the context of finance, transportation and wholesale trade (such as distribution centers), Cuddeback said those issues will require attention as well.

"We're not a big financial center," he said. "We have representative organizations. Every bank we have is a branch of somewhere else. Very few locally owned banks are here. We're not well located enough to be a transportation center (compared with Denver).

"If you take a picture of the economy, we're over-represented in (some) areas and under-represented in (others)."

The next step, said Cuddeback, is for the partner groups to meet and outline work elements of the strategy. Then they must "develop ideas of business retention and look at improving the community's image as a place to do business," said Cuddeback.