Year: 2015

My Christmas List for 2016

Dear Santa,

It was great to see you a couple of days ago! Spending time with you never grows old. Say, speaking of old, I seem to grow older every year, but you never do. You really are magical!

With the post-Christmas stories about how hard it was for the Postal and delivery services to get packages delivered on time, I thought I’d resend my list just on the chance that you, too, had issues. So, here you go:

•An additional lane each way on Interstate 25 between Colorado Highway 14 ...

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2015 a Winner for Chamber

Let me start by saying ‘thank you’ for being part of the Chamber family and wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. It’s hard to believe another year has flashed by so quickly.

I wanted to provide you with a report on the Chamber’s work and results over the past year. The short summary is that 2015 was a great year for the Chamber and the community.

In 2015:

Funds to widen North I-25. The Chamber is a key leader in the effort to secure the money to widen I-25 to 3 lan...

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Kicking Over the Transportation Funding Beehive

Last week I wrote about the progress being made toward getting I-25 widened.

Since then we had the Regional Issues Summit last Friday at the Embassy Suites in Loveland. The Summit was hosted by the Northern Colorado Legislative Alliance (NCLA, www.ncla.biz), which is a joint committee of the Fort Collins, Greeley and Loveland Chambers of Commerce and Upstate Colorado Economic Development Corporation and Leadership Northern Colorado (www.LeadershipNorthernColorado.com), which is a joint projec...

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Progress Being Made on I-25

The ‘North I-25 experience’ continues to be a mixed bag of free-flowing and frustrating stop-and-slow traffic. The bad news: don’t expect that to change anytime soon. More bad news is that it will get worse over the next few years.

But, in the season of hope, let’s get to the good news.

Next spring CDOT will start two projects. The one that should provide some short-term congestion relief on I-25 is a third lane southbound from the Berthoud exit. The 2-plus mile hill is a significa...

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Fort Collins a Top-Ranked Destination for College Students

You may recall the ‘dueling soapboxes’ in the Coloradoan a couple of months ago about the benefit of community rankings produced by various publications and websites.  A prominent local government leader took the side that they are positive validation of a community doing things right; the opposing view was offered by a dedicated stop-all-growth-at-any-cost activist.

Well, the latter guy got another dose of (from his perspective) bad news in the form of an index published last week by th...

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Successful Moving Fort Collins Forward! Campaign Buys Impact and Quality

As you know from the update in today’s Chamber SmartBrief e-Weekly, the Chamber’s annual Moving Fort Collins Forward! campaign is over and was very successful. When the residual pledges and numbers finish coming in, campaign volunteers will have raised over $700,000 and recruited 100 new members in just 11 weeks. Very impressive!

But while we measure progress with numbers, what do they really mean?

First of all, as I’ve said in this space before, we don’t raise money for the sake o...

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Get Something From or Done Through Your Chamber

What do you want to get out of your chamber of commerce?

A comprehensive study by the Greater Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber in Ontario looked at participation and member motivation styles. They found that some people are motivated to get something done through their chamber while others are motivated to get something from their chamber. Some people were community-focused and others were enterprise-focused, meaning wanting to get direct benefits from the chamber.

The nearby chart has four quad...

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Is Boulder Contagious?

It’s Election Day around the country. In Fort Collins it’s relatively quiet with school board elections, a city measure asking to opt out of state law regarding municipal broadband and a state measure about the state retaining tax refunds from marijuana sales.

The interesting election action is in Boulder. There years of suppressed demand have given way to a building boom, which has sparked a Boulderesqe-type no-growth backlash with two stop-growth measures on the ballot.

The first is ...

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$25B Tax Increase Headed to Next Year’s November Ballot

The Internet is a wonderful, dreadful place. You can find information on basically any topic. That’s the plus. The negative? You can find at least two sets of ‘facts’ on almost any topic.

So it is with health care reform. The Affordable Care Act (aka ‘Obamacare’) is either invincible and permanent or imploding under its own incompetence and bureaucratic weight. It is either great for all Americans or it’s the largest, most unfair wealth redistribution scheme yet devised by governm...

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Funding Options for North I-25

To keep you in the loop on efforts to widen I-25, here’s the latest.

First, to quickly restate the issue, the 26 mile stretch between Highway 14 (Mulberry) in Fort Collins to Highway 66 north of Longmont is increasingly congested. This is especially true between Harmony Road and Highway 34 in Loveland. The Colorado Department of Transportation does not have the $1 billion it will take to widen I-25 in what is the fastest growing part of the state. Unless addressed, within 15 years it will r...

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