Each year, a group of business and civic leaders from Denver travels to another city on a “leadership exchange” trip led by the Denver Metro Chamber Foundation, an affiliate of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.
Last month, 150 participants went to Dallas – at a trip cost of $2,650 apiece – to learn from key leaders there about a metro area with more than double the population of metro Denver.
The Denver Post asked six participants for their impressions and lessons they brought back.
Denver must tout setting as icing, not the cake
High levels of economic activity, vast public and private resources, and pro-business culture in Dallas were apparent throughout our exchange. Construction cranes and new developments fill the downtown horizon, blind to the wide inventory of existing and vacant buildings. Clearly, newer and bigger means better. For 7-Eleven Inc., the decision to “stay downtown” includes a new headquarters.
Dallas seems to overcome a few shortcomings in natural aesthetics when it comes to attracting business and economic activity. It confirmed the comments made by one site selector who, during a recent event in Denver, said that Denver’s beauty and backdrop “don’t put the city on the map” for emerging industry clusters or companies looking to relocate.
Any community with natural assets, he explained, will tout its lakes, parks, mountains or climate in one way or the other. For metro Denver to compete with cities like Dallas, Chicago, Seattle or Shanghai, it must tout its Rocky Mountain setting as the icing rather than the cake.
Business incentives, a homegrown skilled and educated workforce, and sophisticated, integrated transit systems – all clear priorities in Dallas – top the lists when companies scan the globe for a place to land.
Sizable endowment helps universities thrive
The biggest difference between the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School is the huge advantage Southwestern has in state support and endowment; $99.1 million of its $887 million budget came from state sources in 2003-04. The comparable figure for us is $13.9 million out of $696 million.
Southwestern has more than $650 million in endowment – more than five times ours. What would an endowment of that size do for Colorado? Having a sizable endowment would free the medical school from the unpredictability of the state’s economy. To take advantage of the incredible opportunity of the new Fitzsimons campus and the adjacent bioscience park, it is essential that our school stabilize its funding streams to be able to make solid business decisions and continue to thrive.
The CU School of Medicine is Colorado’s best return on investment. This year, the school receives $11.4 million from the state; from that investment, our faculty generates nearly $700million, including $300 million in research income and $225million in clinical income.
Education plays key role in empowerment
Education takes place as a combination of the home, the community and school. During our trip to Dallas, it was reinforced how Colorado and Texas are both concentrating their efforts on increasing college interest and participation rates.
Education remains the key to both economic and political empowerment, and we all have a responsibility in educating our children. We visited the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts: a comprehensive high school and career development center that attracts students throughout the Dallas metro area, affording them the opportunity to explore the demands of an artistic career along with required courses for graduation.
The former mayor of Dallas, Ron Kirk, emphasized to us that competitiveness plays a significant role in business recruitment and retention. Even more, he emphasized how the private and public sectors have to work together to generate economic income for their city, housing, jobs, and also to have a strategic partnership with the schools.
Economic development requires proper funding
We always hear how everything is bigger in Texas, and the economic development efforts in Dallas are no exception. Texas has appropriated upwards of $400 million in two or more enterprise funds to support economic development in the Lone Star State. These dollars are managed through the governor’s office and are rolled out based on the ability of recipients to generate jobs in Texas.
We compete with Dallas, and other key Texas cities, every day for new jobs. While we cannot compete with this level of funding – in fact, Colorado’s funding for economic development pales in comparison – it was clear to me that our process of coordinating and supporting our efforts through strong business leadership and the leadership of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. is superior in many ways. What we lack in dollars we make up for in a strong metro-area cooperative spirit and a private and public partnership that makes us uniquely competitive. These two factors will be key to our continued success in economic development.
Workforce must meet demands of diversity
The leadership exchange trip was eye-opening in respect to workforce development and its demands of our future labor force. The message was that we are not being responsive to the changing labor market needs. In today’s market, employers compete globally.
The challenges increase even more with the ever-changing rise in diversity in our cities, especially in the Hispanic community. In Dallas, as well as in many of our U.S. cities, there is a growing Hispanic community that will surpass 50 percent of the workforce in the future.
We need to be responsive to these demands by developing a planning process that will require time, deliberation and widespread involvement of education and business. Leadership development is the key to advancing our workforce and economic development of our communities in the future.
Denver on right track with transit upgrades
The passage of FasTracks (metro Denver’s $4.9 billion transit expansion plan) and the addition of 119 miles of rail transit and 58 new transit stations in the next 12 years has given Denver a unique opportunity. There are great lessons to be learned from cities that have started before us. DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit) and Dallas have used vision, collaboration and creativity to team transit and land use. We learned that:
Over the past 10 years, property values for residential and office land served by transit stations have increased 39 to 53 percent more than land not served by transit.
Transit can serve as a significant catalyst. A functionally obsolete Sears warehouse in an old industrial area has become a trendy 1,000-loft project with free ground-floor exhibit space for young resident artists. The next phase is a boutique hotel and townhomes. From the rooftop terrace, you can see the new district police headquarters, employing 1,000 people and built on land donated by the loft developer. These projects are the result of the adjacent light rail station.
The DART system has fostered community connectivity between the downtown and West End (think LoDo) – both of which are “new urbanism” testing grounds – as well as the burgeoning arts district.
