Margaret Jackson’s report on how marijuana grow operations have changed the industrial real estate market in Denver lays bare, again, the essential truth from legalization: collectively, we were unprepared to deal with its consequences, intended or otherwise. That we have a reasonably functioning marijuana industry sector is really a testament to the ingenuity of lawmakers […]
It would be misleading to look at manufacturing job gains in places like Utah and Colorado without also considering what was lost the prior decades. Neither state has rebounded to pre-recession levels of manufacturing employment and moreover, job losses in industrial centers like Indiana were of a different scale entirely. Indiana had 513,200 manufacturing jobs […]
Regardless the outcome of next week’s individual statewide races, a more enduring electoral shift is underway. Colorado’s regional divide is widening, reflecting new alliances, interests, and economic realities. In recent years, candidates running for statewide office have managed Colorado’s split electoral personality in a fairly straightforward way: Denver/Boulder and the liberal mountain redoubts were predictably […]
CompanyWeek is pushing across the West at a time regional manufacturing is on the ascent. In Colorado manufacturing employment is up 2.7% through September this year, and the past four months has outpaced overall employment growth in the state. How significant are the numbers? Better than to be caught in the vortex of duplicate tough […]
Chris Mogridge could tell his family’s Oxford, Mississippi real estate development business was in for tougher times as the financial crises of the late 2000’s deepened. “I was on the financing side of the business and could tell things were getting harder. No matter how much advertising I would do, sales were starting to slip. […]
Can two unrelated, contrasting events portend opportunity for Colorado manufacturing? Last Wednesday Ken Lund, Colorado’s chief economic development official, rolled out details of a $6.6 million Department of Defense award, what the state calls SMART, to a group of high-tech manufacturers, educators, trade and service. SMART is short for Strengthening Manufacturing by Accelerating Research and […]
As a modern manufacturing economy takes shape, a rush is on to identify who’s part of the community and how growth and progress should be measured. Our lens, our perspective, is the regional, multi-industry manufacturing economy we report on every week. Today we’re providing one tool to track it’s progress. With the help of Deloitte […]
A year ago, we launched CompanyWeek to begin providing sustained media coverage of Colorado manufacturers. This week we reach an important milestone – regional expansion to become a media voice for the dynamic and growing Utah manufacturing economy with CompanyWeek/Utah. Utah’s always been in the plans. We set out in September 2013 to begin a […]
One measure of today’s political dysfunction is the inability of elected officials to govern at the margins. For business, immigration is a stark example. Last year the U.S. Senate passed the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act”, Senate Bill 744. Today it sits idle in the House, stalled indefinitely and its meaningful pieces […]
Later this month in Colorado Springs, over 1000 high-school age kids and 500 or so community college students will visit the Southern Colorado Manufacturing Expo & Conference to view demonstrations and interact with industry, suppliers and service. It’s what manufacturer’s have been asking for – and need: visibility to a next-generation workforce. How many of […]