Ben Manvel
for Fort Collins City Council
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Keeping Fort Collins Unique is Good Business
Economic concerns are, rightly, forefront in the minds of Fort Collins voters. And politics dictates that you should connect your agenda to whatever seems to be the most pressing problem, whether or not it actually has anything to do with that problem.
Therefore, special interests who want to strip away our laws that help plan and pay for growth are currently arguing that those laws harm our economy. Those folks have been repeating the "Fort Collins is unfriendly to business" mantra for the past twenty years.
Yet the awards keep piling up. In March of 2008 Forbes Magazine named Fort Collins the third best Place for Business and Career and the same month CNN/Money called us the 39th Best Place to Live and Launch a Business. Those followed similar awards from the Center for Digital Government, Fast Company Magazine, Business 2.0, and Entrepeneur Magazine in the last three years.
We have created a great place to live, and businesses love to locate where their employees will be happy. Employees and companies are more committed to the place and the job, and receive a “second salary” in quality-of-life benefits.
To sell people on our assets, since I joined Council four years ago we have created an Economic Advisory Commission, built a business web site with e-newsletter, expanded our technology incubator, added targeted industries, and completely revamped our Development Review Process.
We have worked to foster business developments including Front Range Village, AMD, Intel, the North College Marketplace, Custom Blending, and the Rocky Mountain Innovation Initiative. Our efforts continue on the Mason Corridor project, already acting as a powerful driver for desired infill and redevelopment. Downtown the excitement builds with the Downtown Alley Plan and the redone Oak Street Plaza.
New plans for North College Avenue, South College Avenue, the Dowtown River District, the Northwest Area, and the Mountain Vista Subarea present exciting visions for future development.
Still, the anti-government interests beat the drum, calling on us to cut standards and development impact fees to woo developers. In effect, they're asking taxpayers and existing businesses to subsidize new businesses. This might make sense if it were effective, but study after study shows that few businesses actually make location decisions based on impact fees or tax levels. Instead, such actions just stiff citizens with the bill as someone leaves the table with the profits. Our development impact fees are fair, designed to cover actual costs imposed by that business on our city. Our standards keep Fort Collins special.
Is now the time to go begging after any willing business? I think not, although some council candidates apparently disagree.
Instead of costly and ineffective desperation measures, we need to maintain our balanced approach and keep Fort Collins a special place. Quality attracts quality, as evidenced by the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Anheuser-Busch, LSI, In Situ, Intel, Front Range Village and AMD.
And we must do more. We need to continue to foster business efforts connected with CSU research in areas such as clean energy and the biosciences, build enterprise clusters, and lobby to maintain funding to CSU, our long-term economic bastion. We must focus on the keys to our long-term economic future: high-tech, the arts community, natural areas, Old Town, and our own very special local entrepreneurs.
If reelected to City Council, I will maintain and refine the approach we have to business and work to keep Fort Collins a special place to live. With careful, thoughtful planning, our economy can weather the economic storm and come out the other side even more vibrant than before.
-- Ben Manvel