Gov. John Hickenlooper threw his full political weight behind a new statewide economic-development plan Wednesday.
“The state is speaking in one voice,” he said. “We have to be more pro-business.”
Hickenlooper held news conferences in Denver, Windsor and Fort Morgan to promote the comprehensive plan, which fulfills a campaign promise to take a bottom-up approach to lifting the economy.
The “Colorado Blueprint” is the result of more than 50 meetings and comments from more than 13,000 people in all of the state’s 64 counties.
The plan consists of six initiatives with four action items each, such as cutting red tape and making small- business loans easier to obtain.
Officials said the plan, which is open to public comment over the next three months, is flexible and can change as conditions warrant.
Hickenlooper compared the plan to his initiative as mayor of Denver to end homelessness in 10 years. He has put a trusted aide, chief legal counsel Ken Lund, in charge of its implementation.
Lund will replace Dwayne Romero, who is stepping down as executive director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade.
The blueprint will work alongside other administration reform efforts, such as scrubbing unnecessary or redundant state regulations and improving outdated state technology.
Although many of the 24 action items in the plan come with deadlines, the plan doesn’t anchor itself to specifics such as creating a certain number of jobs or boosting average incomes by a certain amount.
“We don’t have any set of rewards or penalties set up, other than putting people’s name on it in black and white and committing them to getting the job done,” Lund said.
That partly reflects the process of seeking local input. Although some counties such as Weld and Larimer provided specific counts for job creation, most didn’t, Romero said.
Given the unreliability of economic forecasts in recent years, Hickenlooper said, attaching a set target for jobs created would be arbitrary.
“We would have been guessing,” he said. “The people of Colorado will hold us accountable.”
Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com
Colorado Blueprint
| Initiatives of the economic-development plan:
•Create a business-friendly environment
•Recruit, grow and retain businesses
•Increase access to capital
•Create and market the Colorado brand
•Educate and train the workforce of the future
•Cultivate innovation, technology
Source: Colorado Blueprint
