Economic Development Policy
Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Agritourism May Be Growing, But Is It Sustainable?
The Rocky Mountain West’s tourism industry is worth billions of dollars. In 2006, Montana raked in $3 billion from non-resident vacationers, Wyoming $2 billion and Utah $5 billion. An increasing number of these visitors are leaving behind their jobs and worries for a few days not only to fish blue ribbon streams or ski the perfect powder. They are coming West to don a pair of spurs, rustle some livestock and sleep in a farmhouse on working farms and ranches.
From 2000 to 2001, 62 million adults visited farms and ranches across America according to the United States Department of Agriculture. This agricultural tourism, better known as agritourism, includes farm tours, you-pick operations or country stores as well as farms that provide accommodations. From New Mexico's El Rancho Nido de las Golondrinas to Brush Creek Ranch in Wyoming, places of work are becoming places of play and respite.
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Monday Business Roundup
Small Towns Grapple With SuccessAcross the West, small-town business leaders, city officials, and local residents are dealing with the consequences of success. Downtowns once marked by decaying storefronts, "For Sale" signs and empty apartments are now thriving, and the questions now are not about how to revive commerce and contemporary housing, but how to define the limits of growth.
In Golden, next month's city elections will largely be a referendum on how to "balance Golden's small-town feel with new opportunities to liven up the downtown."
Feeling the overflow from the tycoon's paradise of Aspen, Basalt has successfully implemented a master plan that confines development to the town's tiny downtown area, while Lakewood, once your basic bedroom community for Denver, is now becoming a self-contained town of its own.
In other business news: ski resorts pour billions into lavish makeovers; bid to amend outdated mining law gathers steam; and a constitutional amendment to make Colorado a "right to work" state nears the '08 ballot.
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'NEW ENERGY FUTURE?'
Colorado Leads West in Renewable Energy Push
Thanks to new wind farms, a massive solar plant, a wind turbine blade factory and an ambitious governor and legislature, Colorado has become a rising star in developing renewable energy. Its work has attracted international attention and put Gov. Bill Ritter in the national spotlight.
While Colorado stands at the forefront of these issues in the Rockies, though, it doesn’t stand alone. Long a supplier of fossil fuels like coal, oil, natural gas, even uranium, the West increasingly sees its energy future in the sun, wind and earth.
“The West does have some of the best wind, geothermal and solar resources in the country,” says Doug Larson, executive director of the Western Interstate Energy Board, the energy arm of the Western Governors’ Association.
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Experimental or Inevitable?
Salt Lake, San Francisco Go DarkTurn out the lights.
A number of cities around the world, including Sydney, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City, have or are planning events that encourage everyone to turn off non-safety-related lighting for an hour at night, primarily as a symbol of energy reduction.
Meanwhile, a similar but unrelated effort is encouraging cities to reduce unnecessary lighting so that people can continue to see the stars. Two Idaho cities, Hailey and Ketchum, designated themselves in 2003 as "dark sky" cities, requiring developers to use certain kinds of lighting to reduce light pollution.
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The Endless Water War
H2O Deficit Strikes AgainEditor's Note: Denver's southern suburbs must spend $1 billion between now and 2020 to meet their water needs, according to a plan presented at Tuesday's water summit by the South Metro Water Supply Authority. Earlier this summer Diary of Mad Voter contributor Joan McCarter reconsidered the long history of water disputes in the West and the latest developers' scheme in Idaho.
Water again.
That signature two word phrase uttered by private detective Jake Gittes in Polanski's masterpiece Chinatown initiated one of the the complicated and intertwined mysteries of the film, a plotline loosely based on the early 20th century scandal of the Owens Valley land grab. Not just land of course, but water.
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Monday Business Roundup
‘New Urban’ Islands Dot the WestDespite its sprawling geography and its reputation for car-oriented, Phoenix-style suburbs, the Mountain West is in reality becoming an ocean of thinly populated rural areas and small towns dotted by islands of dense, "new urban" centers.
In Idaho, reports Lee Vander Boegh in IQ Idaho magazine, "Thirty-three years after being compared to a bombing range, downtown Boise is driving commerce and the community." In Bozeman, the Story Mill project is an urban infill development "led by a socially responsible developer with a vision that provides an alternative to sprawling fields of high-priced, single-family homes." Even Cheyenne has been recognized with two consecutive "National Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Metropolitan Transportation Planning" for cities under 200,000 in population.
In Denver, meanwhile, developers can't build enough high-priced downtown condos.
In other business news: Colorado's economy remains strong in the face of a national slowdown; the state passes Texas as the No. 2 aerospace economy in the nation; and Wild Oats stores learn their fate under new ownership.
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Few New Nukes
Atomic Energy Forecast Still CloudyUranium producers in the West are not the only ones foreseeing a nuclear-energy renaissance in the United States; big energy companies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and manufacturers like Westinghouse and GE also look forward to new reactors sprouting across the landscape.
With abundant fuel and almost zero greenhouse-gas emissions, atomic energy is considered by many experts the only viable solution to global warming. Nuclear plants currently supply some 20 percent of U.S. electricity.
Having seen its prospects destroyed in 1979 by a lousy Jane Fonda movie and an accident that harmed no one and caused no damage outside the plant itself, the nuclear industry itself is at once newly confident and pessimistic.
In other energy news: API study says the owners of U.S. oil companies are mostly you and me and our neighbors; Aspen enacts "no carbon footprint" rule for new commercial development; and the Energy Dept. approves drilling near underground nuclear blast site in western Colorado.
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Gallatin Valley Nonprofit Profile Series
Local Nonprofits Come Together Tonight at EmersonThe Gallatin Valley is home to a plethora of nonprofits. From American Indians to biomimicry to cottonwoods, Gallatin Valley nonprofits have their bases covered. This Thursday night, September 13th, nonprofit executive directors from across the county will be meeting in the Weaver Room of the Emerson Cultural Center from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in hopes of forming a common group to bring more communication and networking between the many nonprofits.
There are 5,677 certified 501(c)(3) nonprofits in Montana and nearly 500 in the Gallatin Valley alone. Next week NewWest.Net/Bozeman will begin profiling one non-profit each week. Groups will be randomly selected from our magic hat and subjected to a fixed set of grueling and not-so grueling questions about their organizations’ operations and missions.
As Brian Magee, executive director of the Montana Nonprofit Association (MNA) explains, despite a wide array of groups and missions, there is much in common among community nonprofits.
“Whether you’re an art museum, a fire department or a group helping children with disabilities, although there is immense diversity in mission, there is immense commonality in challenges and hopes for their community,” Magee says.
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Lunch Becomes a Delicious Lesson with Farm to School Programs
No matter who you sit with at the cafeteria lunch table, if you eat the school lunch you are likely tasting the same chicken-fried steak, potato-based, pizza on Friday meal as every other kid in America. For more than thirty years most lunchrooms around the country have been serving processed and pre-cooked food in an effort to make decreasing school lunch budgets go further and still meet federal nutrition requirements.
But as kids around America return to school this year, more are finding unexpected delicacies like fresh broccoli and home-made chili on the lunch menu, thanks to Farm to School programs.
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New West Energy Grok
New Solar Plant for Ft. CollinsCapitalizing on the growing market for electricity from advanced solar technology, a Fort Collins startup plans to open a factory to make so-called "thin-film" solar panels that could produce power at costs close to those of conventional fossil-fuel plants. Spun off from research by CSU mechanical engineering professor W.S. Sampath, AVA Solar Inc. could create up to 500 jobs – the largest new employer in the area in two decades according to local officials.
AVA Solar is backed, says Sampath, by "tens of millions" of dollars in venture funding plus a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar America Initiative.
In other energy news: "E85" ethanol pumps proliferate across Colorado; controversial power lines approved for Longmont; and Xcel keeps pushing to build a rail spur for coal delivery in the Yampa Valley.
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