Current Issue
February 2009 Issue
Cover Story
Against the wind
By Gary BainesDennis Lyon, manager of golf for the city of Aurora, didn’t know exactly what to expect when Aurora Golf recently sent out a survey to 25,000 people on its e-mail list, asking them if they planned to play more, less or the same amount of golf in 2009.
Given the state of the economy, and that people are watching their expenditures closer than usual, Lyon wouldn’t have been at all shocked to get a different consensus than the city received. But by a 12:1 margin, more people indicated they planned to play more rather than less this year. Out of 280 respondents, 133 said...
Articles
Against the wind
By Gary BainesDennis Lyon, manager of golf for the city of Aurora, didn’t know exactly what to expect when Aurora Golf recently sent out a survey to 25,000 people on its e-mail list, asking them if they planned to play more, less or the same amount of golf in 2009.
Given the state of the economy, and that people are watching their expenditures closer than usual, Lyon wouldn’t have been at all shocked to get a different consensus than the city received. But by a 12:1 margin, more people indicated they planned to play more rather than less this year. Out of 280 respondents, 133 said...
Brighton hopes good trumps bad and ugly
By David Lewis
Brighton either is half-empty or half-full, or both. The half-empty part is so obvious even the city’s public relations counsel Ken Parks brings the subject up right off the bat. Brighton home inventories “never have gotten really out of control,” says Parks, who also serves on the Brighton Economic Development Corp. board of directors. “So the slowdown happened and the foreclosures with that, but we have jobs coming in, so I just think one of the main things you look at is to stimulate home-building.” True, a look at Adams County and Brighton, its county seat,...
A dozen great places to play
By Gary BainesHere’s a look at costs and amenities offered for corporate events at a dozen courses along the Front Range. A sampling of public, private, semi-private and resort courses is included. Price quotes are for a summer outing and generally include greens fees, carts, practice balls and gift certificates/credit for merchandise in the golf shop.
Broadmoor Golf Club
Colorado Springs
Combines beauty — sitting at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain — with a rich history. Most recently, the 90-year-old Broadmoor East course hosted the 2008 U.S. Senior Open, and the course will be the...
Executive edge: Charlie Woolley
By Lynn BronikowskiOn a frigid night in December, Denver developer Charlie Woolley gathered business leaders and commercial real estate colleagues in a LoDo building under renovation to give them a taste of what being homeless is like. The president and CEO of St. Charles Town Co. announced he was pledging $100,000 of his own money in matching funds to kick off the Commercial Real Estate Initiative to support Denver’s Road Home. Never mind that the stock market had dropped as low as the temperatures. Woolley was confident Denver’s commercial real estate community could raise $500,000...
Notes from a futurist: Trends for business in 2009 and beyond
By Thomas FreyEditor’s note: This is the first of two articles presenting business predictions from the DaVinci Institute’s senior futurist. Look for the second installment next month. In a world in which systems and technologies propel changes at lightning speed, disaster came upon us like a storm, causing our financial systems to collapse. Now we face a future much like that of a damaged ship. We have been torn from our moorings and flung into a rip tide that is whisking us away to unknown seas. The disarray that we find ourselves in cries out for answers — a view to the...
A public broadcaster battles the recession and the evolving media world
By Wick RowlandHow does a small nonprofit public broadcaster survive – and thrive – in a down economy? One answer: with a clear sense of purpose, a compelling vision and a comprehensive strategic plan.
KBDI was founded by a group of television visionaries. They were citizens, volunteers, community activists and media organizers who imagined a different kind of public television, one dedicated to serving diverse populations throughout Colorado, providing vigorous community affairs debate and giving voice to independent, underrepresented and frequently unpopular views. They wanted to...
Cheap is nice but unsustainable
By Jeff RundlesWe couldn’t believe it. My wife and I did grocery shopping sometime over the holiday period and spent a considerable sum, and Safeway offered us an extraordinary discount on gasoline as a way of saying Thank You!
We took the van down there, where the retail price on gas was something like $1.50, and we were surprised – pleasantly – that we were able to fill up for 89.9 cents a gallon. It was unreal; I haven’t paid so little for gas in several years and never thought I’d see a sub-dollar price again, even on special.
It would have amazed me a year ago or two years ago,...
Colorado cool stuff
By Eric Peterson
BELLE BABY CARRIERS
Seth Murray was working on a master’s in engineering management at CU-Boulder and came up with a business plan for a baby-carrier manufacturer for a class project. “I just kept at it after the class,” says Murray, a veteran of the outdoor industry. He worked with industrial designer Mark LeBeau, then his co-worker at Trango, a Louisville-based climbing-gear manufacturer. “Together we designed over 50 climbing products,” Murray says. “We’d been in the outdoor industry and had seen so many great backpacks, so we wanted to make a cool baby carrier.”...
We can get it done here like nowhere else in the world! Let’s keep it that way
By Pat WiesnerThe U.S. has the reputation all over the world of being the one place where you can get a sure return on your own hard work. Everyone everywhere knows that if they can get to the U.S., they have a chance to make it big. These days while we are trying to change our economy and recapitalizing and rewriting our laws, we should be careful to preserve our essence.
Ingenuity. Recently on the evening news, there was a story of a young man who had just graduated from college and couldn’t find a job even though he seemed like a bright product of our educational system. (The...
State of the state: February
By Mike Cote[REAL ESTATE]
Riding out the recession
Colorado’s resilience in the economic downturn recently caught the attention of the New York Times in a story that used the example of the Spire, a 42-story condo and retail tower under construction in downtown Denver by the Nichols Partnership, as evidence the city still has growth on its mind. “A number of elements are cited as keeping this region afloat as other areas founder: investments in public transportation, aggressive economic development and, most significant, a two-decade campaign to diversify the region’s economic...
Speaker of the House ready for ‘legendary’ session
By Mike CoteOver the past few years, Greenberg Traurig’s legislative preview luncheon has become an annual event, where Colorado House and Senate leaders of both parties offer an informal discussion about their priorities. This year, the law firm had one of its own on the panel: attorney and Democratic state Rep. Terrance Carroll, who was sworn in last month as the first black speaker of the House in Colorado history. Seated to Carroll’s left that day was Sen. Peter Groff, who last year became the first black president of the Senate. Carroll has been trying to take the magnitude...
MBA students vie for best business plan
By Mike TaylorWith $5,000 in prizes up for grabs, four teams of second-year MBA students squared off in mid-January to see who could write the best business plan and present it most convincingly, as if to a panel of venture capitalists. In fact, the judges were venture capitalists.
Instructor Frank Moyes from the CU Leeds School of Business called the competition “as close to a real-world environment as you can get.” The real world? The one with a 7.2 percent unemployment rate and a net loss of 2.6 million jobs nationwide in 2008? Yikes.
Liz Lowry, one of the finalists in the...
Small biz tech-startup: ColdQuanta Inc.
By Eric PetersonINITIAL LIGHT BULB: A fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, Dana Z. Anderson worked with the 1995 Nobel Laureates in physics. He helped prove an old Einstein theory correct: At very cold temperatures – just a millionth of a degree or so above Absolute Zero – gas condenses into a “quantum state” and behaves like a single atom.
After selling his California-based software company in 1999, Rainer Kunz became interested in physics and wanted his next...
Federal Reserve aims to preserve system, curb pain
By Tucker Hart AdamsWhat is the Federal Reserve trying to accomplish? To prevent the implosion of the international financial system to lessen the depth and severity of the recession.
With a little luck, the first has been accomplished, although things are still fragile. We’ll never know for sure about the second, since there is no way to know what the alternative was. The Fed has three primary tools at its disposal:
• Buying and selling government bonds in the open market, just as you and I do when we call our broker to purchase or sell a Treasury bond. This is the most important and...
