Tamara Chuang

Business/Technology Reporter

Quick links: What happens to complaints | July unemployment rate | Take the poll | Denver inflation | Horizon Organic adds B Corp | 100 Comcast RISE winners

Before Rohit Chopra stepped foot into the city of Westminster, the director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said he did some research about local businesses.

He noticed that in the city, much like other cities across America, there were a lot of banks, grocery stores, pharmacies and other businesses linked to large corporate chains.

“Even here in Westminster,” Chopra said Thursday during an event hosted by the city, “it’s more and more banks that aren’t locally owned. And so the net result is that sometimes you go into a branch and there’s really no one who can actually help talk you through anything. You’re siphoned over to a 1-800 number or the person tells you to go online. And what happens is that everything is becoming a little bit more less-human.”

Chopra is trying to humanize our daily lives again by reducing the corporate callousness that can emerge with modern technology, like chatbots. As companies have grown larger through mergers and acquisitions, the effort to cut costs and increase profits has taken a toll on consumers and customer service. He’s especially interested in how banks and financial companies are treating people. As an independent agency inside the Federal Reserve, CFPB was a response to financial fraud that led to the Great Recession. Essentially, it enforces federal consumer protection law and keeps an eye out for financial mayhem that could hurt consumers.

During his stop in Colorado, Chopra talked a lot about junk fees and trying to rid the world of systems that might trick consumers into agreeing to them. He was joined by U.S. Reps. Brittany Pettersen and Yadira Caraveo and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who are in the same pursuit.

Chopra’s experience of contesting an issue with an airline ticket led him down an “endless loop” first with a chatbot and then through the airline’s phone system that transferred him from person to person.

“I think they want you to hang up,” he said to the audience. “They don’t want you to contest the fee or contest the problem. And I just think this is fundamentally wrong. There’s nothing more dehumanizing than being charged fees for fake or worthless services.”

The agency does get pushback. An effort to ban credit card late fees over $8 is now on hold after the U.S. banking industry opposed it. Prohibiting firms from charging new “convenience fees” to consumers paying off loans online or by phone, doesn’t mean companies abide by the law, causing CFPB to file an Amicus brief in support in such legal cases. Companies also don’t like that consumer complaints are published online and unvetted.

Got a problem? CFPB wants to know

But when consumers feel helpless, sometimes they don’t speak up. And now, there’s a federal agency that, he said, listens. On the online complaint page, CFPB says it sends companies about 25,000 complaints about financial products each week.

“When we get complaints at ConsumerFinance.gov, it doesn’t go into a black hole. We order the bank to reply to you and then we look into it,” Chopra said. “We also prioritize issues that we think could become a problem later. For example, we mentioned voice cloning, generative AI-related scams. … We’ll get six or seven complaints that sound exactly the same. And it turns out that 60,000 or 70,000 people have that problem.”

His other consumer tip? “If you’re in a dispute with a bank or a company, one of the things that often will get their attention is if you say to them or write to them, if you don’t solve this, I’m filing a complaint with the state AG or the CFPB,” he added. “Trust me, they will respond.”

In Colorado, Weiser said consumers can report scams, shady practices and other complaints at StopFraudColorado.gov. His team of lawyers and investigators don’t turn every complaint into a full-on court case but they look for trends. And sometimes, they’ll just send a letter to the accused company.

“We tend to look at either particularly egregious situations or patterns and sometimes we’re able to ask a few questions,” Weiser said. “And that actually does the trick.”

Resources:

➔ File a complaint about a financial product. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau takes complaints online or by phone on any consumer-financial problem, including credit cards, debt collection, mortgages, loans and credit reports. The federal agency says that each week, it sends 25,000 complaints to companies for a response and most companies respond within 15 days. >> consumerfinance.gov/complaint or 855-411-2372

➔ File a complaint with Colorado AG. The state’s highest-ranked law enforcement officer is the AG and he works with local and federal agencies to investigate violations of consumer protection laws, antitrust and other legal issues. >> coag.gov/file-complaint (also in Spanish)

➔ More places to get problems resolved. Another official resource is via USA.Gov, which is part of the U.S. General Services Administration. This page has links to where consumers can complain about online purchases, company products or services, text scams and robocalls, car-related issues and more. >> usa.gov/consumer-complaints

July unemployment rate up a bit to 3.9%

In July, Colorado’s unemployment rate reached its highest level since January 2022. At 3.9%, it was up one-tenth of a percentage point from June. But even though this means more Coloradans were unemployed last month (up 1,844 to 126,270 who were looking for a job), the state’s labor force grew, too.

According to preliminary data, the state’s labor force is the largest it’s ever been, with 3,242,918 employed or looking for work. The changes in July, though, are pretty slight and are in line or better than how the nation is doing, said Tim Wonhof, an economist at the state Department of Labor and Employment

“Our population in Colorado has been growing consistently over time and our labor force has been growing consistently,” Wonhof said. “We, on the whole, are still at very low unemployment rates. Do we have a high number of discouraged workers? We have 126,000 people who are out of work and about a fifth of those, I believe, would fall into that category. But do we have more than usual now? I wouldn’t say we do.”

Wonhof pointed to a state labor department chart (below) that shows Coloradans between the working ages of 25 to 54 years old are part of the workforce more so than they’ve ever been in the past two decades.

The state also continues to add more jobs each month, adding 4,800 in July, he said. Nearly half were government jobs. For private industries, manufacturing lost 1,000 jobs, while trade, transportation and utility industries gained 4,100.

“Normally, our four-month average in Colorado would be a gain of 3,300 jobs. Well, we gained 4,800 (in July) so we’re ahead. At the national level, the four-month average is 154,000 and this month, they’re 114,000, so they’re a little bit down. But last month, it was the other way around,” Wonhof said. “I don’t read too much into the monthly numbers.”

Compared with the rest of the nation, Colorado was in the bottom half for unemployment rates, and ranked 31st. The U.S. unemployment rate for July was 4.3%.

>> See the data: Colorado’s July jobs report

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Updates on big Colorado economy news

We reported on these stories earlier this week but there have been some updates. Keep reading.

➔ Denver-area inflation rate down to 1.9% in July. Prices are still rising, but inflation fell to its lowest 12-month increase in three years in Denver. That drop to a 1.9% inflation rate surprised a few local economists, especially since the U.S. rate is still at 2.9%, which was also the lowest in three years. So what’s causing the decline in Denver’s Consumer Price Index?

Prices here have fallen for some items, like gas, apparel and new and used cars. Grocery prices didn’t change at all. But other items continued to increase, including dining out, up 5.7%. Shelter was up 2.1%, and that’s a huge chunk of a consumer’s budget. Keep in mind, the official rate considers just the one-year change, not how much groceries cost today compared to five years ago. But yes, prices are much higher than five years ago.

Denver’s rate was also the lowest nationwide. But the Denver data appeared to be missing some key data points, like the change to costs of electricity and natural gas. I reached out to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to ask why and, essentially, they said they didn’t get enough responses. When there’s not enough, they don’t release the data, as in the case of the Denver energy index.

“The missing items will still impact the aggregate indexes they belong to,” said Justin Copple, a BLS spokesman. “The prices that were successfully collected are used to calculate an unpublishable CPI which is used to aggregate up to the larger expenditure categories all the way through to all items less food and energy and all items.”

Other items, like automobile insurance, have been removed entirely from Denver’s data. Auto insurance in Denver hasn’t been tracked since 2021. BLS officials said that, too, could be linked to low responses. In those cases, Denver’s auto insurance calculation would default to the national urban CPI, which was 18.6% higher in July.

>> Earlier: Denver inflation slowed faster than the national rate to 1.9%. Does it feel like it?

➔ New business filings dropped 21.7%. During her quarterly update on how many businesses there are in Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold said the rate of new filings dropped 21.7% in the second quarter, compared with a year earlier. Griswold attributed the decline to the end of a big discount around June 2023 that dropped filing fees to $1.

But there were other concerns about the data, including the growing number of delinquent filers. As reported earlier, delinquencies grew 91,000 in the quarter and now number more than 934,000. The Secretary of State’s Office said that the list includes years of businesses that never officially dissolved and it also includes owners who may be just a few weeks late in renewing their paperwork. I wondered how late? Here’s additional information, which I’ll track in future new business updates.

Of those 934,437 delinquent filings in the second quarter, here’s how late they were as of Aug. 14, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

• Less than 30 days: 14,034
• 30 to 59 days: 10,717
• 60 to 89 days: 14,591
• 90 days or more: 903,971

>> Earlier: Number of new Colorado businesses drops 21.7% nearly a year after filing-fee discount ends

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ Colorado food banks may soon run out of the federal funds they use to buy local produce. Colorado received close to $10 million in pandemic-era funding to help food banks buy local produce, but the money is running low with no replacement in sight >> Read story

➔ Colorado governor calls special session on property taxes to avoid ballot measure fight in November. The special session will allow lawmakers to advance a deal under which the conservative supporters of Initiatives 50 and 108 will pull their measures from the ballot >> Read story

➔ With rising rents, theater companies are renting a Denver office space to rehearse. The new Three Leaches Theatre on Colfax will house two theater companies and a gallery, and hopes to lessen the burden on the few affordable rehearsal spaces left in Denver >> Read story

➔ The economics of eating out have some of Denver’s top chefs dismayed, discouraged and looking elsewhere. Some of the city’s award-winning chefs get specific about their love/hate relationship of being part of Colorado’s largest dining scene >> Read story

➔ Geothermal developers to get $1M from Icelandic investors, energy office to tap resource deep under Chaffee County. Investors will match a $500,000 grant from the Colorado Energy Office, which Mt. Princeton Geothermal will put toward testing its well site near Buena Vista >> Read story

Other working bits

➔ Horizon Organic becomes a B Corp (again). The Broomfield dairy brand has provided organic milk since 1991. But only last month did it receive B Corp Certification, a designation that the for-profit company has met stringent tests and is deemed beneficial to all stakeholders, which includes employees, suppliers and the community. That’s the same with sister company Wallaby, which makes Greek yogurt. So, why only now? It had to reapply after its former parent, Danone sold the brands to Platinum Equity in April. Danone is one of the world’s largest B Corps.

“Following the acquisition,” said Tyler Holm, CEO of the two brands, in an email, “it was important to pursue independent B Corp certification to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to redefining success in business as a force for good. As a result, all Horizon Organic and Wallaby products will continue to carry the B Corp seal.”

Certified by the B Lab organization, companies must pass tests that score what their value and benefits are as a business, to the environment and the community. >> Horizon’s B Corp score

➔ Cost of health insurance is top challenge for small businesses. This shouldn’t be a surprise for members of the National Federation of Independent Business, which advocates for small business owners. Health insurance has been the top issue since 1986, according to the organization, which published its 2024 report called “Small Business Programs & Priorities.” Top Colorado-specific issues weren’t available, said state director Tony Gagliardi but “the threat of a massive federal tax hike in 2025 exacerbates the uncertainty Main Street Coloradans are feeling,” he said in a news release. He’s pushing for Congress to make the 20% Small Business Deduction permanent. >> Read report

➔ Comcast awards 100 southern Colorado companies a 30-second commercial and $5,000. The state’s dominant cable TV provider unveiled winners of its RISE awards, which isn’t an acronym but a program that launched in 2020 to support minority-owned small businesses impacted by the pandemic. The 100 winners in Colorado are all in the southern half of the state and include RAD Hostel in Colorado Springs, The Walter Brewing Company in Pueblo and Armadillo Ranch in Manitou Springs.

Comcast focused on southern Colorado because of the growth in small businesses which “account for over 90% of total employment,” said Wendy Artman, a Comcast spokesperson. “This is an area where this program can make a big difference.”

Recipients receive $5,000, a tech makeover and a fully produced TV commercial (from Comcast’s advertising sales division Effectv) that will air on local cable channels. >> The winners

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• Market recovers but here’s why Colorado job growth is slowing
• As food-insecurity funds end, Colorado farmers focus on food hub
• Colorado top-paying and lowest-paying jobs
• Repurposing old stuff in Colorado can be profitable
• Despite setbacks, a Durango builder is framing affordable houses in under a month
• What consumers and businesses need to know about Colorado’s “Do not sell my data” law
• Colorado employers may finally have found enough workers
• How a Denver company is fighting the problem of underemployment

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join

The Colorado Sun is part of The Trust Project. Read our policies.

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Tamara Chuang

Business/Technology Reporter

As investors dealt with stock market chaos triggered by last week’s weak U.S. job report, local economists who track the job market noted nearly the same thing: the response was overblown.

“I think the initial market response wasn’t really justified by the U.S. jobs report — the increase in the unemployment rate was driven by more job-seekers, not a decrease in the number of people who are working,” said Bill Craighead, executive director of the University of Colorado Colorado Springs Economic Forum.

The national report was underwhelming as the U.S. unemployment rate in July rose to 4.3%, more than a half a percentage point from its low in the past year. That’s the trigger for a recession, according to the so-called Sahm Rule, named for the former Fed economist Claudia Sahm. The rule says that by the time there’s been a half-point rise, “a recession is almost always already underway,” though Sahm said last week a recession isn’t imminent, AP reported.

Colorado’s July numbers should be out next week. The state’s June unemployment rate was 3.8%, the same as May, but already past the Sahm Rule since the jobless rate was 3.2% in July 2023. Monthly reports are preliminary though and tend to get revised.

Colorado has also seen a job-growth slowdown this year, but that’s been expected. Much of the rapid growth in the past three years was about recovering jobs lost in the first two months of the pandemic. The state’s back to where it was before the pandemic and still seeing some growth.

“These job growth numbers have a large margin of error. So most any reaction done to the numbers is an overreaction,” said Jeffrey Zax, an economics professor and associate chair of the undergraduate Department of Economics at University of Colorado Boulder. “And these numbers get revised. … My belief is that the stock market, as you can see from this past week, sometimes responds with great volatility to the initial reports. They don’t respond to the corrections.”

On Friday, the U.S. stock market was up again. The S&P 500, which had plummeted 3% on Monday, recovered most of Monday’s losses by Friday’s close.

The 30-year fixed mortgage rate has fallen to 6.54%, about where it was two years ago, according to Mortgage News Daily.

Colorado’s labor market is still considered tight, even just below 4%. If employers can’t find enough people to fill job openings, the business either increases wages or adjusts operations to rely on fewer employees. But that can limit the company’s own growth. 

“Remember,” Zax added, “job growth is only one piece of the equation. If everybody’s already got a job then jobs grow even further, that’s certainly good for workers. It makes their wages go up. But it’s not great for businesses because that means that their costs are going up as well.”

The 3.8% unemployment rate in June translates to 124,400 unemployed Coloradans looking for a job compared with 3.1 million who have one. Back in June 2015 when the state’s rate was again at 3.8%, there were 106,790 unemployed workers looking for work compared with 2.7 million people who had a job.

Craighead said he also looks at who is working. In the 25-to-54-year-old age group — considered the “prime working age” of the employment population — 80.9% of the U.S. population is employed, “the highest since 2001,” he said, though he pointed out that June and July 2023 also hit 80.9%.

Colorado’s rate was 84.3% in the 12-months ending in June, according to state Department of Labor and Employment data. It had dropped to 79.9% in 2020 during the pandemic.

He’s “cautiously optimistic” that we’ll avoid a recession, but that may depend on the Federal Reserve deciding how fast to cut interest rates.

“That said, there are still definite signs of the national labor market cooling, with slowing wage growth and fewer job openings,” Craighead said. “While that was needed to some extent, you don’t want it to go too far. I think it’s also pretty clear that inflation is under control. So, I think the Fed missed an opportunity by not cutting rates.”

More Colorado job news:

➔ Unemployment claims: Approximately, 2,785 Coloradans filed an initial claim for unemployment during the week ended Aug. 3, or 60 more than a week prior. That compared with a weekly average of 1,900 in 2019. Continued claims, which are approved initial claims, grew by 998 to 28,155 for the week ended July 27, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. In 2019, continued claims averaged 18,600 a week.

➔ Where have Colorado’s construction workers gone? The state lost 4,200 construction jobs between June 2023 to June 2024. Denver economist Ryan Gedney wondered why in his The Stat Guy newsletter. One possible reason: Colorado wages are pretty high compared with other states (sixth-highest among private employers), but when it comes to average construction pay, we’re ranked 15th or 16th. The state’s median pay for construction work ranked 19th. >> Read

➔ TIAA gives 1,000 workers a 2-year heads up that it’s leaving Denver. Financial services company TIAA told its employees Tuesday that it’s moving the operation to its headquarters in Frisco, Texas, The Denver Post reported first. In an email to The Colorado Sun, TIAA spokesman Mike Tetuan said the lease for part of the 36-story building on Broadway ends in 2029, so vacating in 2026 “will provide substantial savings in rent and operational costs — savings which TIAA can then invest in business needs and serve the best interests of our clients.” He didn’t answer a question about whether savings would be even greater if they moved out earlier, but added that this gives employees a two-year heads-up. Most roles will move to Texas and “with associates having the option to relocate,” he said.

➔ Larimer County’s mental health center lays off 75 people, blames rise in uninsured and Medicaid reform. Three of Colorado’s community mental health centers have laid off employees this summer. >> Read story

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ All the new minimum wages in Colorado that kick in Jan. 1. Here’s why they go up every year in Denver, Boulder County, Edgewater and the whole state of Colorado. >> Read story

➔ Plan to drill 166 wells near Aurora Reservoir OK’d with requirement to use cleaner, quieter electric equipment. Lowry Ranch neighbors aren’t ending the fight, saying they will pressure Colorado regulators on safety, noise and wildlife disturbances as the individual drilling sites are considered. >> Read story

➔ Colorado once again breaks tourism records with 31% increase in travelers in the last decade. Colorado hosted 93.3 million visitors who spent $28.3 billion in 2023. Spending by tourists supported 188,000 jobs and generated $1.8 billion in state and local tax revenue in 2023. >> Read story

➔ Colorado resort communities want to impose a vacancy tax on unoccupied homes. The legislative agenda for the Colorado Association of Ski Towns includes a first-ever vacancy tax as well as a real estate transfer fee on all property sales to help fund affordable housing. >> Read story

➔ A Denver pediatrician helped make some of the biggest pandemic vaccine decisions. Here’s what he thinks now. Dr. Matthew Daley ended his term on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in June. The committee makes recommendations about whether and how vaccines should be given. >> Read story

➔ Births in metro Denver are falling faster than much of the country. Here’s what it means for the future. >> Read story

Other working bits

➔ More Colorado locations eligible for broadband funding. After challenges were made, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration gave its final approval to Colorado locations eligible for broadband investment. That means internet providers hoping to tackle the infrastructure in those communities can start making plans and ultimately, pitch the Colorado Broadband Office. See the list here. The state received $826.5 million in federal funding for the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program, which was part of the Infrastructure Act, passed by Congress in 2021. >> Details

➔ The $600-per-classroom grant gets 9,000 applicants. But Colorado can only fund 5,000 of them, according to the Governor’s Office, which earlier this week announced $2.7 million was available for Colorado educators to buy supplies for their classrooms. The program, in partnership with DonorsChoose, had 9,000 projects submitted in the first 24 hours. What the state can’t cover will be funded by the DonorsChoose network of individuals and corporate partners. >> Details

➔ Denver janitors agree on new contract. Pushing negotiations to the nearly the end of their contract, janitors who clean 1,500 buildings in the Denver metro area came to a tentative agreement with their employers. The new contract provides “historic wage increases of 16% to 18% across the Denver Metro,” as well as guaranteed paid sick leave and workplace safety protections, according to union organizers at Service Employees International Union Local 105. >> Details

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Note: This story was updated at 8:19 a.m. on August 10, 2024 to clarify the labor force participation rate of U.S. and Colorado workers between ages 25 to 54.

Miss a column? Catch up:

• As food-insecurity funds end, Colorado farmers focus on food hub
• Colorado top-paying and lowest-paying jobs
• Repurposing old stuff in Colorado can be profitable
• Despite setbacks, a Durango builder is framing affordable houses in under a month
• What consumers and businesses need to know about Colorado’s “Do not sell my data” law
• Colorado employers may finally have found enough workers
• How a Denver company is fighting the problem of underemployment
• Why Colorado could start attracting more filmmakers

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join

The Colorado Sun is part of The Trust Project. Read our policies.

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Parker Yamasaki

Reporter

Note from this newsletter’s usual author: After meeting Roberto Meza at this 528-person dinner table, I connected him to my colleague Parker Yamasaki to dig into how his little farm in Bennett became a founding leg of the East Denver Food Hub and more. Enjoy! ~ tamara

Roberto Meza doesn’t need to close his eyes to visualize a changing food system anymore, he’s watching it happen week to week. The latest evidence: 600 containers of microgreens delivered to the Aurora Public Schools for the district’s “Farm Fresh Fridays” program.

“That is awesome,” Meza said. “What once was just a garnish in upscale fine dining is now replacing lettuce for students. They get way more nutrition and crunch and flavor. Now I know that’s possible. The goal is to replicate it.”

When Meza talks about changing the food system, he really means the whole system, including government subsidies that drive prices and guide institutional decision-making. Decisions like what schools are going to feed students.

The Colorado Sun first visited Meza and his cofounder, David Demerling, five years ago, as the two fresh-eyed, first generation farmers were gaining traction with their microgreen farm, Emerald Gardens.

Then the pandemic ripped through the restaurant industry. Until that point, Emerald Gardens was sustained by the food industry, so Meza and Demerling shifted their focus. They’d always had an eye on social justice and food equity, but the sudden vulnerability kicked them into high gear.

Filling the food system gaps

It started with food boxes for shelters and WIC recipients — a federal program that subsidizes healthy food for women, infants and children.

They prototyped the program in a shipping container on their land, and quickly realized “this is a whole separate thing,” Meza said. In March 2021, they moved into a 14,000-square-foot warehouse in northeastern Denver and opened the East Denver Food Hub.

A “hub” is the perfect way to describe their venture. The warehouse is currently a headquarters for three food supply businesses: Meza and Demerling’s Food Hub, their new nonprofit, the Ag and Food Lab, and a Mexican grocery store distributor, Altitude Produce. There are also rows of shelves reserved for Ela Family Farms, a back wall used by Ekar Farm, a room stacked high with sacks of beans (about 100,000 pounds by Meza’s estimate, from a farmer in Boulder), and a side room occupied by the Village Exchange Center.

“It’s kind of like this food ecosystem,” Meza said, standing in the middle of the warehouse, while two men loaded pallets of onions into the back of a semitruck. “That’s partly what has allowed us to understand the full food system so well. So our work moves forward through the gaps that we see.”

When they started the Food Hub in 2021, that gap was connecting underserved populations to fresh food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture noticed this gap too, and in December of that year authorized more than $400 million in American Rescue Plan Assistance, or ARPA funds, for states to procure local food —food grown within 400 miles — for underserved communities. The USDA strongly encouraged states to spend their funds on “socially disadvantaged producers,” which they defined as a group whose members have been discriminated against due to race, sex, age, disability or a number of other factors.

Colorado was the first state to sign onto the federal program, a mouthful known as the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, or LFPA for short. The state received nearly $4 million in funds during the first round of handouts. As the program expanded over the past two years, the federal government sent out close to $900 million total, and Colorado received close to $12 million.

Those funds were distributed to 34 applicants in the state and have been used to purchase food from over 100 local producers. The money also had a huge impact on places like the East Denver Food Hub, which received funds directly and through the purchases by food banks and shelters that received LFPA money.

But the funds are set to expire in April 2025, and according to the Colorado Department of Human Services, there is currently no way to continue the program.

“We don’t have a pandemic, but we didn’t solve hunger”

With the federal funds receding, Meza and Demerling are getting ready to pivot, again.

“We don’t have a pandemic, but we didn’t solve hunger,” Meza said. “What we learned during that time is that local procurement, investing in local infrastructure and workforce development, that’s how you solve hunger. It’s not just through donations of food.”

Meza envisions a system that addresses food insecurity and equity while also accounting for the health of “all beings” along the supply chain, he said. But that requires a big shift in cultural attitudes toward food and a heavy lift from government subsidies. It’s a project that the LFPA started, but it still has a long way to go.

“Whether we like it or not, we’re competing against a highly subsidized industrial food system,” Meza said. “It operates on low costs at the expense of labor practices, sustainable operations and animal welfare.”

In fall 2023, Meza and Demerling founded a nonprofit organization, the Ag and Food Lab, to help new farmers incubate their businesses. The farmers work on the Emerald Gardens land in Bennett and receive infrastructure and business help through the Lab. When the crops are ready to go, they become part of East Denver Food Hub’s procurements, heading out to pantries, shelters, schools and hospitals, as well as high-end restaurants like The Wolf’s Tailor, which received one of Colorado’s first Michelin stars last year.

Farming can be isolating, Meza said, and part of the incentive for starting the lab was to make sure new and immigrant farmers have a support network and access to chefs who can showcase their products.

But it is also about economics. When Meza and Demerling shifted from solely growing microgreens to running a full food hub, they focused largely on food justice initiatives. And the initiatives, “as necessary as they are, can’t affect our bottom line,” Meza said.

“The world is not prepared for the food system that we’re practicing, so we kind of have to do both at the same time,” he said, about operating for-profit and nonprofit businesses alongside each other. “This is our time to really rebuild the foundation. And there’s no reason why we can’t adjust our economics to accommodate that, knowing that it’s actually going to benefit everybody.”

Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter

If you’ve benefited from the LFPA, or know producers or distributors that are working to make local food more accessible, please email Parker at parker@coloradosun.com.

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ The Colorado community of Stagecoach is paradise to its residents. A luxury resort could turn it upside down. The same developers that turned Big Sky, Montana, into a resort town for billionaires are moving ahead with plans to bring luxury homes and a golf course to northwestern Colorado. Those who live there are raising concerns. >> Read story

➔ A new Colorado hospital opens this weekend. It’s built with the lessons of COVID in mind. Lutheran Medical Center is moving from its longtime home in Wheat Ridge to a new campus near Interstate 70 and West 40th Avenue. >> Read story

➔ Alarming reports about PERA’s finances spark questions about future of the state’s pension. A legislative oversight panel is considering whether to recommend further reforms to the Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association. >> Read story

➔ Colorado water officials dream big, team up after feds drop $450 million for water projects. The surge of funds paves the way for large, multibenefit projects addressing drought and water conservation in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. >> Read story

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Other working bits

➔ Denver’s minimum wage increasing to $18.81 in January. The city of Denver just released how much its minimum wage is going up in 2025: 52 cents. That’s 2.8% higher than the existing $18.29. While this is expected because the city’s wage is based on inflation, this also translates into a 69.5% increase since 2019, when Denver broke away from the state to set its own minimum wage. Colorado’s wage next year is set to go up as well, though officials have not announced the new amount. It’ll likely be similar to Denver’s increase, which would put Colorado’s minimum wage in 2025 at around $14.82 an hour. >> Denver’s wage update

➔ Denver airport traffic up 9.2% in first six months of 2024. Numbers-wise, that translates into 39,937,380 passengers who came, went or just passed through Denver International Airport, aka DEN. Each month also set a record, airport officials said. International traffic also grew, up 17.2% compared with the same period a year ago. But DEN does expect growth to slow for the rest of the year because it may be hard to top 2023’s huge travel year (remember the passport delays that even had a Colorado senator asking for answers?). Based on the first five months of this year, Denver ranked as the nation’s third busiest airport by the Airports Council International, and sixth busiest in the world.

• Related: The airport has 300 job openings. And there’s going to be an in-person job fair to fill them. Scheduled for Aug. 13 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., around 50 airport-related employers are expected with openings at airlines, airport food and restaurants, rental car companies and more (massage therapists!). To check it out, take the RTD A Line, which will lead right to the job fair, located on the plaza between the Westin Hotel and Jeppesen Terminal near the south security checkpoint. Otherwise, airport parking is $7 an hour. >> Details and registration

➔ LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman headlining Denver’s AI event. The upcoming DenAI Summit, a first city-led conference on artificial intelligence, just named more speakers who will be at the Sept. 19 event at the Colorado Convention Center. Besides Hoffman, who will join Denver Mayor Mike Johnston in a fireside chat, there’s also Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Promise, a California payment processor for utilities and governments, and two CEOs from Denver companies: Bryan Leach, with retail app Ibotta, and Bijal Shah, with Guild, which connects everyday workers to educational opportunities. >> Details

➔ Disaster prep? SBA shares guide for small businesses. The guide includes best practices and templates to help small business owners plan and recover from disasters. >> Find it here

➔ Want to paint a mural along Denver trails? Denver Parks & Recreation has an open call for mural artists to paint something cool along the city’s trail system. Three artists will be chosen based on how they’d interpret Denver’s natural resources when it comes to water, urban forest, landscape transformation, habitat protection and environmental stewardship. Commissions pay $6,000 each. Submit a proposal by Aug. 25 because the installations start “Summer/Fall 2024,” which is … now! >> Details at denvergov.org/nature

Section by Tamara Chuang | Business/Technology Reporter

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• Colorado top-paying and lowest-paying jobs
• Repurposing old stuff in Colorado can be profitable
• Despite setbacks, a Durango builder is framing affordable houses in under a month
• What consumers and businesses need to know about Colorado’s “Do not sell my data” law
• Colorado employers may finally have found enough workers
• How a Denver company is fighting the problem of underemployment
• Why Colorado could start attracting more filmmakers
• New broadband laws to help Colorado streamline distribution of $800+ million

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join

The Colorado Sun is part of The Trust Project. Read our policies.

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Tamara Chuang

Business/Technology Reporter

Quick links: Highest and lowest wages | FAMLI updates | Denver janitors may strike | Kroger/Albertson’s merger paused

Fast food cooks kept the top spot as Colorado’s lowest-paid occupation by averaging an annual wage of $33,251 last year. On the opposite end, neurologists retained their top rank as the highest, averaging $409,685, according to the latest wage report from the state’s labor department.

The annual report, based on Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data, offers one of the most comprehensive looks at how much workers in Colorado earn. State labor department analysts just released their take on it, providing a plethora of charts for additional context. One insight? They looked at how hourly wages changed between 2013 and 2023, as seen in the chart below.

For food preparation and serving-related jobs, those average wages soared 78.1% in 10 years, and had the highest growth rate of all major occupations for wage growth. When adjusted for employer costs, the historic increase dropped to 18.58%, which was still one of the highest pay bumps for all occupations, said Barb Wills, lead technical analyst for the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment OEWS program.

“You kind of expect high wage occupational groups to (be) increasing so this was encouraging,” she said. “It was nice to see them catching up.”

The most obvious contributor is the state’s higher minimum wage, which is pegged to inflation. In that same 10-year period, the state’s minimum wage has shot up 75.4%, while in Denver, where the majority of food workers are, the minimum wage is up 122.2%.

There’s more to it, said Ryan Gedney, a Denver economist known as “The Stat Guy.” Colorado’s tight labor market before the pandemic was a big contributor as demand for workers pushed salaries higher. 

In Gedney’s calculations of wage data, Colorado’s overall median annual income rose 21.9% between 2015 and 2019, ranking the state third highest nationwide. But between 2019 and 2023, income growth of 20.8% “was outpaced by 32 other states,” he noted online.

“I think Colorado’s fall in ranking between 2019 and 2023 could be a reflection of other states increasing their minimum wages and having tighter labor markets than Colorado post-pandemic,” Gedney said in an email. “While Colorado’s minimum wage continued to increase through 2023 (and onward due to indexing), that gain was only 23% between 2019 and 2023. Additionally, Colorado’s openings-to-unemployed ratio bounced around significantly in 2022 and 2023, with rankings as low as sixth but as high as 36th. That said, I don’t see Colorado’s relatively low rank between 2019-2023 as discouraging.”

Other highlights from the state’s OEWS report:

• The Boulder metro area had the highest annual average and median wages in the state, at $87,221 and $64,753, respectively. Eastern and southern Colorado areas had the lowest average wage at $54,205 and median wage of $45,220.
• The majority of the state’s labor force is in the Denver metro area, at 56.7%, or nearly 1.6 million workers. The Colorado Springs metro is second with 11.1%, or 310,390 workers.
• Colorado has 10 times more astronomers than the rest of the nation, thanks to the federal labs and universities located in the state.  

We’ve graphed the data to give you a visual on the top-paying and lowest-paying occupations in Colorado:

Who’s eligible for paid FAMLI leave?

There are roughly 3.2 million people in Colorado’s labor force. Of those, 3.2 million are eligible for the state’s new paid family leave program. So, pretty much everyone who works in Colorado is eligible.

So, why is demand lower than projected? Tracy Marshall, division director for the state’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance program, says that folks are still learning about it and don’t realize they’re eligible.

To make sure workers learn about it, her agency continues to publicize the perk. They hosted a webinar Tuesday, which can be viewed here. Future events are posted on the FAMLI website. And she’s hoping that word spreads, so if you’re reading this and know someone who needs time off to care for a new child or serious health issue, send them to the FAMLI portal at famli.colorado.gov.

“For the remainder of this year, we will be identifying more target approaches with a focus on rural Colorado, low wage earners and small business. Continuing our partnerships with business groups will help us reach those who are still learning about FAMLI,” Marshall said.

There are some eligibility rules. Most workers can take leave if they’ve earned at least $2,500 in wages subject to FAMLI premiums over a period of about a year. You also have to apply for benefits (start here).

About 3,500 applications have been denied for “a variety of reasons,” Marshall said. Those include failure to verify one’s identity or meet the wage requirements. Also, workers who are already covered by a private plan (those must be approved by the state) are ineligible. Workers also need to get their serious health condition certified by a licensed health provider.

➔ ICYMI: Demand for Colorado’s paid-family and medical leave 44% less than expected

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ FTC chair, Colorado AG pledge to crack down on “abusive and predatory practices” of corporate landlords. The tenant roundtable focused on hidden fees, habitability and rent-setting algorithms accused of driving up the cost of housing >> Read story

➔ Meet Colorado’s hardest-working investigator trained to sniff out suspicious fires. Ash, the 16-month Labrador retriever, is trained to help firefighters pinpoint the cause of fires around the state. >> Read story

➔ Stalled by massive theft, Argo Mill gondola gets going again. “Don’t ever count Mary Jane out,” Idaho Springs mayor says. >> Read story

➔ Two Coloradans join first-ever commercial spacewalk to research ways for people to live on Mars. The four-person crew of Polaris Dawn plans to conduct nearly 40 science experiments that could help regular people with regular health problems live on the moon or Mars. >> Read story

➔ Two Colorado agencies are fighting over information. Now, one is charging the other a $30-per-hour research fee. The dispute between the state child welfare division and the child protection ombudsman centers around documents about caseworkers who falsify records. >> Read story

➔ Boulder’s Outdoor Industry Association ends 30-year partnership with Outdoor Retailer trade show. It’s unclear how once-crucial trade shows will fit in the maturing outdoor industry as businesses move away from national buying and selling gatherings. >> Read story

Other working bits

➔ Denver janitors vote to strike. Their contract ends Sunday and if a new one isn’t reached, 2,400 Denver-area janitors may walk out the door as union members authorized a strike this week, said union reps at Service Employees International Union Local 105. That would impact the cleaning at more than 1,500 buildings in Denver, Boulder, Golden, Cherry Creek and the Denver Tech Center. The majority of janitors work for CCS Commercial Cleaning Services and ABM Industries, which did not respond to requests for comment.

“The major issues the janitors want to address include equitable and livable wages that match the rising costs of living in all areas of the Denver Metro. They also want to address workload issues, as many janitors have seen personnel cut in half since the pandemic, while the number of floors and job duties have sometimes doubled,” SEIU’s David Fernandez said in an email.

➔ Kroger/Albertsons merger on pause in Colorado. The pending union of two of the nation’s largest grocery chains hit another snag Thursday after a Colorado judge ordered a temporary block to the proposed $25 billion merger. The order was in response to a lawsuit opposing the deal filed by the Colorado Attorney General’s office that said the union would violate the state’s antitrust laws. The Federal Trade Commission filed a similar lawsuit. Kroger owns King Soopers and City Markets in Colorado.

“This is great news for shoppers, workers, farmers, and other suppliers, who can rest assured that this mega-merger will not go into effect during harvest season and while kids are headed back to school,” AG Phil Weiser said in a statement, adding that the trial is scheduled to start Sept. 30. >> Earlier story

➔ Colorado’s AI job growth lags other tech-centric states. A new report from the Colorado Chamber of Commerce and Aspen Technology Labs found that job openings for artificial-intelligence workers grew a mere 3.3% compared with a year ago. Nationwide, growth was 19.5%. But in California — home to leading generative-AI companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta — the growth in AI job openings was 83.7%. Did Colorado’s new AI law to put guardrails on policies have something to do with that? A Chamber spokeswoman said it was too early to link the two since the law — which had enough opposition from the tech industry after it passed that Gov. Jared Polis announced plans to revise it — won’t take effect until 2026. >> View report

➔ Up to $100,000 in grants for apprenticeship programs in construction. The state’s official Apprenticeship Colorado program has made its BuildUp Grants: Round 2 available to applicants in the construction and building industry. Grants of up to $100,000 can be used to offset costs of training apprentices, support services and outreach. The deadline is before midnight Aug. 29. A virtual informational session is scheduled for July 30 at 11 a.m. (register for webinar). >> Details, Apply

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up: 

• Repurposing old stuff in Colorado can be profitable
• Despite setbacks, a Durango builder is framing affordable houses in under a month
• What consumers and businesses need to know about Colorado’s “Do not sell my data” law
• Colorado employers may finally have found enough workers
• How a Denver company is fighting the problem of underemployment
• Why Colorado could start attracting more filmmakers
• New broadband laws to help Colorado streamline distribution of $800+ million
• Nearly 55,000 Coloradans now have a retirement account after law went into effect

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join

The Colorado Sun is part of The Trust Project. Read our policies.

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Tamara Chuang

Business/Technology Reporter

Quick links: Finding profit | Where does Colorado recycling go | Nicotine pouch maker picks Aurora | LogRhythm layoffs| Colorado unemployment rate stays at 3.8%

Reduce, reuse and recycle are the three R’s in the world of sustainability. Damon Carson has a fourth one: Repurpose. That’s not the same as reuse, he says.

“A typical reuse is if you own a boat and decide you don’t want it anymore, you put it on Craigslist or Facebook marketplace and somebody buys it. There’s a 99% chance they’re going to use it as a boat,” said Carson, founder of Westminster-based RepurposedMaterials. “Repurposing is reuse but life No. 2 is very different from No. 1.”

Carson takes a different approach toward sustainability compared to recyclers in Colorado, which process waste plastic, tires, mattresses and other materials into something new. 

He, instead, has assembled a playground of items filled with potential new purposes at a warehouse in Lafayette. Yards of old fire hoses. Tons of steel grates. Multitudes of whisky barrels, carpet samples, and even remnants of the old RTD bus station at Civic Center in Denver, according to an employee. 

In the past, one bride repurposed white military cargo parachutes into a canopy for her outdoor wedding. Another customer used wood planks reclaimed from an old bowling alley and turned them into kitchen countertops. Spent vinyl billboard signs became unique dresses for a “Trashion” fashion show.

There are all sorts of random and large items to inspire local DIYers, plus signs with pictures for inspiration, and customers have gifted the company some of their projects, including an old ski lift chair with a seat made of repurposed rope.

“We call ourselves an industrial thrift store,” Carson said. “There’s lots of stuff that should go to the landfill and that seems like the only option. (But) there is an amazing amount of stuff in America from industry that still has value if you apply some effort into thinking about an alternate second life for it.”

There’s profit in repurposing

Carson’s been promoting the notion of repurposing old industrial objects for more than a decade. His company shares clever updates made by fans with fans via a newsletter. But it’s not really his hobby. It’s his business. And he’s found that connecting unwanted industrial and commercial items from companies with buyers who find new uses for the stuff is profitable. It has to be, he said.

“The only way we keep the lights on, the only way we keep propane on in the forklifts and employees paid is if we buy something for $1, we have to sell it for $2,” he said. “But they are not going to donate steel I beams to us because they can sell it to a recycler for 10 cents a pound.”

It’s a for-profit business that has expanded to locations in six states and 25 employees nationwide. He’d passed the million-dollar revenue mark a decade ago though he won’t say what sales are today other than it’s “definitely above $1.6M in revenue now,” he said. And he’s proud that he’s survived in the sustainability world without taking any grants or public subsidies.

But just like the recycling industry, there can be challenges when it comes to giving life to old stuff.

Carson has had to hone his business and negotiating skills. For metal, he may offer 12 cents a pound if a scrap metal buyer offers 10 cents. He benefits if customers realize that it is cheaper to donate items to him than send it to a landfill, which charges dumping fees.

He has to be picky though. He’s not about to buy 100 covered wagons, he joked. But he did take a gamble a few years ago when someone asked if he could take enormous pieces of glass.

“So Apple, the famous Apple company, they were replacing some skylights. They were really big — 7-feet wide, 30-feet long, 14 of them, at one of their stores in Palo Alto, California,” he said. “They could have thrown it into the landfill but it’s Apple. There was consumer pressure and shareholder pressure, ‘Hey, you make billions of dollars. Be a good steward.’ So they reached out to us through a middleman.”

Apple donated the glass and paid to transport it to RepurposedMaterials’ Arizona facility, he said. (Apple did not respond to a request to confirm the donation.)

“Then the game’s on for us,” he said. “If I can’t rehome those and can’t find someone to repurpose them, we’re going to send them to the landfill and it’s going to cost us money. We’re going to lose $2,000 or $3,000. Fortunately in that case, we were able to rehome (everything). And we did make a profit that allows us to live another day.”

Where does recycling in Colorado go?

In case you missed it, earlier this week I reported on four companies processing recycling in the state. They don’t just collect recycled waste, but they buy it and turn it into something new — and make a profit. They’ve joined a statewide effort called Circular Colorado to figure out a better plan to make sure consumer, business and industrial recycling doesn’t end up in landfills. The highlights:

• Old tires: Denver-based Pretred processes old tires into road barriers. Each 1,700-pound, 6-foot-wide barrier contains 70 old tires. >> More
• Most plastics: Direct Polymers rebooted the economics of recycling plastic to make a profit. Some of the secret is just transportation efficiency. The Denver recycler is also working on recycled-plastic railroad ties, which offers higher margins. >> More
• Thin plastic: Pueblo-based Driven Plastics turns flimsy plastic bags into a road pavement additive that’s already part of some roads in Pueblo. >> More

➔ READ: Recycling can feel pointless. Here are Colorado companies changing that.

But I didn’t mention everything since the focus was processes doing the work in Colorado. Seattle.-based Ridwell offers recycling pickup service for Denver residents and partners with multiple recyclers nationwide to process unwanted items into something new. Circular Colorado is also adding new partners though the goal for this organization is to help Colorado process recycling locally so items needn’t be transported out of state. That’s a work in progress, but here are other efforts worth mentioning:

Flimsy plastic bags: Besides Driven Plastics — which has a bin outside its Pueblo facility and just partnered with Pueblo’s RecycleWorks at 1595 Stockyard Road to accept bags — there’s also Trex, which makes composite decking and accepts plastic bags. Find NexTrex recycling bins at King Soopers and other stores.

Shingles: Malvern, Pennsylvania-based CertainTeed, which is part of building-materials giant Saint-Gobain, recycles shingle waste into asphalt paving mix. It joined Circular Colorado’s effort to create a network in the state in September.

Paper and packaging: Colorado’s Producer Responsibility Program for Statewide Recycling Act (House Bill 1355), which passed in 2022, put the financial responsibility of recycling paper and packaging on the producers. In essence, they pay to make sure the packaging use gets recycled. Still underway, the program is run by the nonprofit Circular Action Alliance. By Jan. 1, producers start paying dues if they’re using paper or other covered materials.

➔ MORE: How to recycle old mattresses, couches, furniture, appliances, construction materials, vinyl banners, computers and electronics, baby and kids gear, paint and everything else that’s hard to recycle. >> Story

➔ Get rid of old paint this weekend. Paint recycler GreenSheen is hosting an event Saturday with the Arapahoe High School baseball team. The four-hour event starts at 10 a.m. at 2201 E. Dry Creek Road, in Centennial. The Denver-based GreenSheen processes old latex paint into a premium latex paint that is sold in 18 colors at vendors nationwide. There’s also no charge, thanks to Colorado’s paint stewardship law, which charges a fee at time of purchase. If you can’t get to the event, GreenSheen accepts paint at its Jason Street facility and has a bunch of other local collection events scheduled. >> Event details

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ Colorado is steering affordable housing money to the middle class — and away from the working poor. Using affordable housing dollars once reserved exclusively for low-income residents, the state has begun subsidizing rental units for middle-income families who make as much as $170,000 >> Read story

➔ Stegosaurus fossil from Colorado fetches nearly $45M, setting record for dinosaur auctions. The price blew past a pre-sale estimate of $4 million to $6 million and past a prior auction record for dinosaur fossils >> Read story

➔ Xcel Energy is unsure it can meet Colorado’s clean-energy goals at the cost it promised. The utility wants more time, but regulators and consumer advocates worry delays will only boost the $12 billion price tag even higher >> Read story

➔ Individual health insurance rates in Colorado could see below-average increase in 2025. Premiums on the individual market could rise 5.5% next year, while premiums for Colorado Option plans look set for a smaller increase >> Read story

➔ Should all Colorado substitute teachers be members of PERA? The question is headed to court >> Read story

➔ Colorado’s ham radio operators are ready for an emergency — just don’t call them amateurs. A passionate group of amateur radio operators maintain a durable network that can keep communication flowing in good times and bad >> Read story

Other working bits

➔ Smokeless ZYN nicotine manufacturer picks Aurora, plans to hire 500. That’s courtesy of tobacco company Philip Morris International. PMI affiliate company Swedish Match announced a $600 million investment in the city of Aurora, and it includes building a manufacturing plant and hiring 500 workers. The plant is expected to ramp up to regular production in 2026. By then, hiring will be well underway and have an average annual salary of $90,000.

While company officials didn’t answer what starting pay for entry-level jobs would be, PMI spokesman Matthew Sheaff said in an email, “Opportunities at the new facility will cover a wide range of skill levels including positions such as engineers, production staff, technicians and quality control.” The Zyn pouches, which don’t contain tobacco leaves, do contain nicotine, an addictive chemical.

➔ 80 jobs cut as Broomfield firm merges. The merger of Colorado’s homegrown cybersecurity firm LogRhythm with Exabeam in Foster City, California, was completed Thursday. The company will be known as Exabeam. With the merger, 80 employees at LogRhythm’s headquarters in Broomfield will lose their jobs, effective Sept. 14, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification letter to the state’s Department of Labor and Employment.

While the Broomfield location will remain open, Exabeam officials declined to comment on its Colorado operations. “It is our aim to be operationally efficient and retain as much talent as possible for the success of the company. We will not disclose specific details regarding headcount,” an Exabeam representative said in an email. On its website, LogRhythm said it has “over 500” employees globally. Chris O’Malley, who joined LogRhythm as its CEO two years ago, was named CEO of the combined company.

➔ Colorado jobless rate remains at 3.8%. While the state had 800 more workers who were unemployed last month, the June unemployment rate was unchanged from May due to rounding. The nation’s rate inched up again by one-tenth to 4.1%. In June, the state added 1,400 nonfarm payroll jobs. More than half were government jobs. The state’s May job data was also revised down to 6,400 instead of 9,800 as more responses from businesses came in. Construction saw the largest decline in jobs, by about 1,100. For the year, public and private employers added 40,900 jobs putting job growth at 1.4%, below the nation’s 1.7%, according to state labor data. >> Labor department update

➔ Federal contracts 101 for women-owned businesses in Colorado Springs. The Small Business Administration is co-sponsoring the ChallengeHER event Aug. 22 in Colorado Springs to encourage participation in its Women-Owned Small Business Federal Contract program. The free event includes training, mentoring and networking with government buyers and public agencies. >> Details

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• What consumers and businesses need to know about Colorado’s “Do not sell my data” law
• Colorado employers may finally have found enough workers
• How a Denver company is fighting the problem of underemployment
• Why Colorado could start attracting more filmmakers
• New broadband laws to help Colorado streamline distribution of $800+ million
• Nearly 55,000 Coloradans now have a retirement account after law went into effect
• Growing older in Colorado? You’ll be interested in these new laws

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join

The Colorado Sun is part of The Trust Project. Read our policies.

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Tracy Ross

Reporter

When it comes to attempting to solve Colorado’s housing crisis, any success story seems worth noting.

So it was fun to learn about a company that has overcome challenges to start getting work done.

Ethan Deffenbaugh and Nick Lemmer own Higher Purpose Homes, a startup construction company that builds houses modeled on a computer and pre-fabricated in a warehouse on the outskirts of Durango.

The idea is to get homes built more quickly, to get more in the market, to increase affordability.

In February, they believed they were on the verge of winning an $8 million grant from the state Office of Economic Development and International Trade to go toward buying land, building a warehouse and starting to chip away at the housing crisis by constructing high-quality homes faster and more efficiently.

Their plan was innovative. Homes could be designed and built with data sent to a machine Lemmer created called a cut station, which pushes lumber into the correct position to create walls, floors and roofs. Workers would then assemble the pisces using a jig designed by Lemmer. The homes could be outfitted with the customer’s chosen finishes and wrapped for transport — all in six to eight weeks.

But they ended up not getting the grant and their future was uncertain. Only for a few days, though.

Because a couple in Durango heard about them after a story appeared in The Colorado Sun and hired them to build a 2,000-square-foot ranch house with three bedrooms and two baths to place on their property with views of the La Plata Mountains.

The couple hired Durango architect Dean Brookie to design the home. Then Higher Purpose got to work framing the shell with materials costing around $21 per square foot and labor in the range of $16.50 a square foot.

Lemmer says the house is rectangular, with giant windows framing soaring views. “It’s got some pretty big decks on there, and some beautiful covered porch areas,” he adds, and the customers seem more than satisfied. They prefer not to be named but in an interview said Lemmer and Deffenbauh’s “work ethic, punctuality, creativity, problem-solving and flexibility provided a quality product in an amazingly short period of time.”

Outside of excavating the site and building a foundation — jobs done by Lazy K dirt work company and Rosso Concrete Company, respectively — that time period was about a month from start to finish. Lemmer says they built the walls over two weeks in the factory, and constructed the roof and floors over one week at the site. “It took couple of days for the crane to come in and lift the roof off of the floor, put the walls up and put the roof back,” he added, “and we had a crew of three: me, Deffenbaugh and our building expert, who’s been a framer for over 15 years now. And then the customer was out there helping, because he was really excited to see it happen.”

As for future projects, they’re currently in talks to prefab a house for a customer in Pueblo. Then they’d like to expand by working with builders and developers who have their own framing crews.

“One of the biggest things right now is finding labor, and so by doing a lot of the labor in a factory setting, we can kind of alleviate the need for the on-site labor,” Lemmer says. “But let’s say a developer has enough labor to frame out a couple houses in a year. By using our method, they should be able to greatly expand that.”

“The concept we’re doing here is we are providing a product that is the same as what everybody’s used to, but eliminating the need for the skilled labor on-site and greatly reducing the time that it takes to get a house framed in,” he adds. “So for developers and builders out there who are struggling to find framing crews and get jobs done, we can provide a majority of the heavy lifting so that framing crews can do more for them and they can rely less on skilled labor to make all of that happen.”

That could help Colorado’s lagging construction market, which some say is slowing in part because there are too few workers.

This week’s report comes from Colorado Sun rural reporter Tracy Ross. If you enjoy her monthly updates on the more rural parts of the state, let her know at tracy@coloradosun.com

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ Colorado AG steps into battle over a fence that’s pitted San Luis Valley locals against a billionaire. Attorney General Phil Weiser visited the small town of San Luis to meet with local residents who are trying to stop construction of the wire-grid fence. >> Read story

➔ Southern Ute Indian Tribe sues Colorado governor, gaming division over sports betting. Southern Ute Indian Tribe calls actions by Gov. Jared Polis and the Division of Gaming “bad faith” and “anti-sovereign,” alleging the state seeks to freeze them from the online sports betting market. >> Read story

➔ The Colorado Sun discusses insurance costs, climate change and weather events. Environmental reporter Michael Booth spoke with a panel of experts about how wildfires, hail floods and more are costing Coloradans billions in higher insurance rates. >> Watch

➔ Slaughterhouse ban on Denver ballot targets one 70-year-old business. An animal rights group got a slaughterhouse ban on the November ballot. The head of the state livestock association wants activists to stop messing with agriculture. >> Read story

➔ Xcel should be ordered to get moving on home solar hookups, state regulators and industry groups say. Colorado’s largest utility promised eight months ago to set fees, deadlines, procedures and a connection timeline but has not delivered. >> Read story

➔ Despite 70% opt-out rate, Keep Colorado Wild Passes program delivers more revenue than forecast. Adding a $29 fee to license plate bills sent almost $41 million to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, plus money for avalanche forecasting and search and rescue groups. >> Read story

Other working bits

➔ $311 million paid as Colorado workers tap into state’s paid family leave. Colorado’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance program paid out more than $311 million to fill 62,632 claims in the first half of 2024, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. The program began paying benefits in January but started a year earlier, as eligible workers — and their employers — contributed a portion of their paycheck to the FAMLI insurance fund. By the end of 2023, the fund had $775 million. The benefits are meant to provide a partial paycheck for workers to care for a new child or a serious family health issue. Some stats, as of July 1:

• 38,510 claims were to take care of personal or family health issues. 
• 32,834 claims were to bond with a new child. 
• The average leave was 53.3 days and the payment was $915.30. 
• More than two-thirds of the workers have already returned to work. 

>> News release; Earlier story

HELP US: Did you benefit from the state’s new family leave program or have employees who did? Tell us more by emailing tamara@coloradosun.com

➔ Colorado home sales sink as active listings increase. June numbers are in and according to the Colorado Association of Realtors called it a “stalemate” between buyers and sellers as the number of houses sold fell 11.6% statewide and median sales price edged up 3.1% to $599,000 compared to a year ago, which is still near all-time highs. The number of houses for sale, or active listings, rose 19% with more than 18,373 for sale last month. “Buying conditions have collapsed to levels seen only twice since 1960. Those years were 1974 and 1980, per Game of Trades reporting. We have also seen multifamily default numbers not seen in a decade,” Patrick Muldoon, a Realtor in the Colorado Springs-area, said in a news release. “Are we entering a corrective phase? It appears many indicators are pointing in that direction.” In metro Denver, home sales fell 8.2% and the median sales price rose 1.1% to $637,000 from a year ago. >> See CAR data: Colorado, Metro Denver

➔ More federal money for Colorado’s apprenticeship program. The U.S. Department of Labor awarded $839,094 “to expand, modernize and diversify” Colorado’s Registered Apprenticeship program, which is overseen by the state’s Department of Labor and Employment. Colorado was one of 46 states to receive a portion of the $39 million in grants to support apprenticeships. >> Awards by state

Section by Tamara Chuang | Business/Technology Reporter

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Thanks for sticking with us for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• What consumers and businesses need to know about Colorado’s “Do not sell my data” law
• Colorado employers may finally have found enough workers
• How a Denver company is fighting the problem of underemployment
• Why Colorado could start attracting more filmmakers
• New broadband laws to help Colorado streamline distribution of $800+ million
• Nearly 55,000 Coloradans now have a retirement account after law went into effect
• Colorado added a mere 300 jobs in April
• Growing older in Colorado? You’ll be interested in these new laws

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Tamara Chuang

Business/Technology Reporter

Quick links: How to opt-out for consumers | What businesses need to do to comply | Not just Colorado | Retirement poll results | DenAI is coming

Websites that interact with Colorado residents have been required to give visitors a choice that often looks like this:

“Do not sell or share my personal information”

or

“OK” (which could mean, yes, sell it and tell the world!)

But consumers may start seeing fewer of these messages starting Monday because of a law that kicks in to make a user’s default privacy settings well known to websites. There’s action needed by consumers, as well as by companies to get their websites in compliance.

The message stems from the Colorado Privacy Act, which passed in 2021, and has been in effect for the past year. The law gives Colorado consumers more control of their personal data that companies may have collected or are still collecting. This includes the right to:

• Know if personal data is being collected
• See what data was collected
• Ask that it be deleted or corrected, or downloaded and removed to transfer it to another site
• Opt out of its sale or its use for targeted advertising and profiling 

The law is already a year old but one last part comes due July 1, 2024.

By Monday, websites that attract Colorado visitors must be able to detect a visitor’s privacy preferences using a tool created by Global Privacy Control, which the Colorado Attorney General’s Office approved after a public comment period. GPC is a consortium of universities, tech firms, consumer advocates and media companies, including The New York Times. More tools could be approved but for now, this is the only one.

The point behind this so-called Universal Opt-Out Mechanism, or UOOM, is that it’s annoying for consumers to have to configure privacy settings for every site. They only need to do it once, thanks to the GPC standard.

“When your browser is configured to set GPC, every single website you go to includes the instruction, ‘Don’t sell my data’ or ‘Don’t share my data.’ It’s like a little flag that the website has to go look for” and respond, said Justin Brookman, director of technology policy at Consumer Reports as well as editor of the GPC spec. “It’s like wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘Don’t hug me,’ and walking around the public so everyone can see it and make choices about whether to hug you or not.”

What consumers need to do

For this to work, consumers must use a tool that talks to GPC. Those are plentiful and free.

Internet browsers like Firefox, DuckDuckGo and Brave have the no-sharing-data options built in, with the latter two turned on by default. For Firefox, you’ll need to add a checkmark next to the the privacy preference, as seen in the image below (find it by pressing the menu button in the browser’s upper right, then Settings and then Privacy & Security):

Chrome, Microsoft Edge, FireFox and Opera browser users can add a browser extension, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger or OptMeowt, from the Wesleyan University math department’s Privacy-Tech-Lab.

Several options are also mentioned on GPC’s site — at globalprivacycontrol.org/orgs — that would help businesses honor GPC and maintain consumer privacy options.

Some of the privacy tools go a step further by configuring which cookies or ads to allow or block per site.

Here’s an example of what my Privacy Badger within the Chrome browser looks like on the Colorado AG’s page about the opt-out options. There are four potential trackers, plus three other cookies that don’t appear to be tracking users.

When a consumer rejects all cookies, some sites do warn that this could break the website’s experience and log users out of accounts so they have to always log back in.

But rejecting all doesn’t always mean all cookies are rejected. It’s more like “reject most,” said Brookman, who almost always hits the “reject all” option.

“They largely reserve the right to set cookies that they call functional cookies or basic operational cookies to remember who you are from page to page,” he said. “These days, very little breaks when you reject all. But a lot of sites don’t offer that option to you. They’re not legally required to offer that in the United States. European law kind of requires it and a lot of companies do it in Europe and are starting to do it more in America. But it’s also kind of annoying and that’s why universal controls are better.”

What do businesses need to do?

If your company has someone running IT, getting into compliance should be relatively easy. GPC offers instructions complete with the code to drop into a site. It’s also free. Essentially, website owners add a folder to the base level of their site and call it “.well-known” and drop in a text file that indicates GPC is true and the date, like this (page 4 of the guide):

Adding this sends the machine-readable signal to the outside world that the site respects GPC, said Sebastian Zimmeck, an assistant professor at Wesleyan University’s Mathematics and Computer Science Department and worked with students on OptMeowt. He also cofounded Global Privacy Control and cowrote the implementation manual.

But not all sites recognize this well-known option. Zimmeck shared the spec on how to add it to a site’s header (section 3.3 of the spec) or the more popular JavaScript option (section 3.4) so the server hosting the website would look for the request and act on it. The code to add to the server side is on GPC’s spec interaction page under “Server-side detection.”

“Speaking more generally, the technical implementation of GPC is easy,” Zimmeck said in an email exchange with The Colorado Sun. “The more difficult question for site owners to answer is their business model. If they are reliant on personalized ads based on tracking people, they would need to rethink their practice and come up with new ideas (e.g., do general ads without tracking, use new mechanisms like Google’s Topics API etc.).”

Consent Management Providers

There are services to help companies comply with state privacy policies and the European one, called GDPR, short for General Data Protection Regulation. Those are called Consent Management Providers, or CMPs, and include companies like OneTrust, WireWheel, Complianz, Didomi, SourcePoint and TrustArc.

“CMPs essentially give site owners a piece of code that they put on their website to make them compliant with privacy laws. Once they put this code on their website, they can access a CMP dashboard where they can turn on GPC and make other privacy settings,” Zimmeck said. “For example, WireWheel is a CMP and they provide instructions.”

Colorado is only the second state to require universal opt-out, though a number of states have passed privacy laws that are not yet in effect. A plethora of state privacy policies can make it challenging for companies that do business in multiple states. That’s where a CMP can help businesses control what visitors from multiple states see, said Brookman, with Consumer Reports.

“Some companies have said we’re going to follow the heart of the strictest law, like Microsoft. But a lot of these tools do offer granularity. So, like for California, you can do X, Y and Z but for other states, you can do different things. You can pick the state that you want to honor GPC in,” he said. “But most companies that have to comply with the Colorado law will already have had to be in compliance with the California law and should know what they’re supposed to be doing. The laws are slightly different, but the general gist is the same: People have the right to turn off on a universal basis, sharing of targeted ads.”

Add a privacy policy

As for privacy policies, there are a lot of examples online — GPC links to The New York Times. Companies should probably get them vetted by a lawyer. But for smaller companies with fewer resources, Zimmeck suggested low-cost policy generator iubenda, “which is sort of the main solution in that space.”

He’s also been working with his students on PrivacyFlash Pro, “a minor hit in the iOS developer community,” he added. “Basically, PrivacyFlash Pro is a computer program that takes (a) developer’s iOS app and from the code of the app generates a privacy policy that developers can use as a starting point and further modify it.”

Follow the rest of the law or face fines of up to $50,000

Not all companies are required to abide by the new law. It applies to businesses that process data (i.e., use, sell, store, delete or modify personal information linked to a consumer) of 100,000 Colorado residents or more, or receive revenues from personal data of 25,000 or more people. It doesn’t apply to the personal data of employees or job applicants.

Colorado AG Phil Weiser has told What’s Working that companies found in violation have 60 days to fix the issue, but his office is working with companies to make compliance easier, with a grace period at least through January. Under a separate law, the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, the AG could seek penalties of $20,000 per violation and $50,000 if the victim is an elderly person.

“And for those businesses who make honest mistakes, we will work to enable them to comply with the law,” Weiser said previously. “(While) for those willfully violating the law, we will work to enforce it vigorously.”

Not just Colorado

California led the U.S. with the first consumer privacy laws when it passed the Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. It provides consumers the same rights as what Colorado’s law does today. California’s AG began enforcement after the law went into effect in 2020. Beauty product seller Sephora was one of the first to get socked with violating CCPA and in 2022 agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle the case.

Besides Colorado, several other states have passed consumer privacy protection laws that require universal opt-out tools, including Texas, Connecticut, Montana, Oregon, Delaware and New Jersey, according to the Future of Privacy Forum. At least five others — Virginia, Utah, Iowa, Tennessee and Indiana — don’t require a UOOM tool but still have passed laws.

“Colorado’s privacy law went into effect in the middle of last year (and) there’s like 15 other states now that have similar opt-out provisions,” Brookman said. Without a UOOM, “very few people take advantage of this because they’re really hard to use. As a consumer, you don’t want to have to go to the bottom of every single page, find the privacy controls and click it.”

Consumer advocates like Danny Katz, executive director of CoPIRG, a consumer advocacy organization, advises consumers to reject all cookies “because more often than not, there is information being gathered that you don’t know is being gathered or is going to be used for purposes that don’t relate to the services on the website that you’re on.”

But ultimately, he hopes companies change their ways when it comes to using or abusing consumer data.

“So many business practices rely on the collection of consumer data and using consumer data,” Katz said. “And yes, if this is truly protecting our data then there will be an impact on business models moving forward. I think that’s a good thing for consumers because it means that increasingly, you’ll have to opt in if you want companies to have and use information about you. Most people would agree that we should be able to choose if you want this information shared or not.”

➔ View the GPC guide: How to implement Global Privacy Control for publishers

➔ Have questions? CoPIRG is having a joint webinar with Weiser on Monday to help consumers better understand the tools and what’s at stake. Log in at this link at noon Monday. >> AG/CoPIRG webinar (ID: 97709700791; Password: 0UuFZ9w&)

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ Kansas forced Colorado to stop irrigating 25,000 acres of farmland. Was it too soon to put them in the same room? Farmers’ water wounds still fresh as senators convene gathering near the Republican River Basin >> Read story

➔ This former dumping ground in Nederland is being turned into an eco-friendly nature center. Wild Bear Nature Center — a nearly 30-year-old nonprofit — will open an eco-friendly nature center by fall next year as a place where people can “rewild” >> Read story

➔ Xcel says it needs $1.9 billion to prevent future wildfires as it faces nearly 300 lawsuits over Marshall fire. The utility filed its wildfire mitigation plan with Colorado regulators on Thursday >> Read story

➔ Most Colorado oil and gas wells do not generate enough cash to ensure they will be cleaned up, study says. Only a handful of basins in the state have wells profitable enough to cover the cost of remediation, leaving 27,000 wells at risk, a Carbon Tracker analysis finds. >> Read story

➔ $75 million in federal funds flow into Colorado Springs to expand computer chip manufacturing. Entegris, which makes cases for silicon chips, picked the city because of CHIPS Act incentives. >> Read story

➔ Colorado resort communities want more focus on residents, less emphasis on tourism, survey shows. Residents, part-timers and second homeowners in Eagle, Grand, Pitkin, Routt and Summit counties see their quality of life in decline and view their communities as overcrowded with “too many visitors” >> Read story

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Poll results: How folks plan to retire

A recent column about the state’s retirement plan for workers who don’t have one also offered a reader poll asking “Are you ready to retire?”

The vast majority, at 76.7% out of 116 responses, said yes, they are financially ready! Or they’re already retired so there could be mixed feelings there. That makes sense since the main topic of these weekly economic stories attract readers with an interest in money, jobs and the economy so readers have been preparing for this. 

While reader polls are mostly for fun and help inform future reporting, the rate of those who are prepared for retirement is higher than the national average, according to a variety of reports. Fidelity’s America’s Retirement Score measurement has 48% on track but only 32% on target for saving enough to cover retirement costs. A recent AARP survey found that 1 in 5 adults over 50 has no retirement savings and more than half worry they don’t have enough.

Of course, being retired already doesn’t mean someone was financially ready for it. Health care costs and the plight of Social Security were big concerns. “How long will my body hold up,” asked one person who is in their 70s.

“I’m staying in CO as long as I can, but I’m fully prepared to sell my house and cash out when the time arrives,” said another respondent, who added that they’ve only saved up half of what is traditionally advised for someone in their 60s.

Other results to share: Of those who have a retirement account, 56% have been saving up their whole working life. But 24.1% don’t feel like it’s going to be enough. Another 6.9% say, “All good. I’m rich!”

New poll: Hard to find a job or hire workers?

➔ Please share your experience for this newest poll at cosun.co/wwjolts24

Other working bits

➔ Hot topic of AI to be focus at new Denver event. The city of Denver announced that it’ll convene the first DenAI Summit at the Colorado Convention Center on Sept. 19 to 20. The speaker list is yet to be finalized but Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and the city’s Chief Information Officer Suma Nallapati will be two speakers. “Change brings opportunity for us to find new solutions to problems cities have long struggled to solve,” Johnston said in a news release. “We know that AI can be exactly that type of disruptive change, and we are committed to partnering to harness that innovation for good.” >> DETAILS

➔ Colorado’s unemployment rate rises to 3.8%. That’s up from 3.3% in December. The nation’s is up, too, to 4%. An economist at the state Department of Labor and Employment pointed out that the rates are still relatively low and the U.S. “has only been 4.0% or less in three years since 2000,” said economist Joe Winter. Job growth also continued — 9,800 nonfarm payroll jobs were added — so that helped ease concerns.  >> READ

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. We’ll be skipping next week’s edition because of the holiday. Happy July 4th! Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• Colorado employers may finally have found enough workers
• How a Denver company is fighting the problem of underemployment
• Why Colorado could start attracting more filmmakers
• New broadband laws to help Colorado streamline distribution of $800+ million
• Nearly 55,000 Coloradans now have a retirement account after law went into effect
• Colorado added a mere 300 jobs in April
• Growing older in Colorado? You’ll be interested in these new laws
• Big economic development wins but sluggish job market? What’s going on in Colorado Springs

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Tamara Chuang

Business/Technology Reporter

Colorado received some notable mentions in the latest national job-openings report. The state had the largest one-month increases in both workers who quit jobs or left involuntarily.

That helped the state rank as the second highest in the nation for workers who quit jobs and third highest for those who lost them in April, according to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary, or JOLTS. The last time the state hit a 3.5% quit rate was in the summer of 2021, when the Great Resignation took hold and employers faced the worst labor shortage in years.

But the frustrations employers felt with getting ghosted by new hires back then doesn’t appear to be happening today, at least from what Tony Gagliardi is hearing. As state director of NFIB, which advocates for 6,000 small business members, there are other concerns, like taxes, inflation or the uncertainty of operating as new state policies go into effect. Finding enough workers is still a concern but for different reasons compared to two years ago when he would hear about members getting zero applications for a job posting.

“Members are concerned about having qualified employees,” Gagliardi said. “There’s also the longevity issue because employers would like to hire long-term employees that want to come and learn the business and hopefully take over the business. I hear from members say, ‘You know, we’ve had a good run, we’ve had a great business and we’ve saved money. But we don’t have employees that are interested in buying the business or taking over the business so we’re just going to close it.’ Now, we’ve lost jobs.”

There are still a lot of available jobs in Colorado, which has hovered around 200,000 a month for the past year, according to JOLTS data. But a year ago, there were 259,000 job openings. As a comparison, JOLTS data had the monthly job openings number between 130,000 and 155,000 in 2019 before the pandemic hit.

Monthly JOLTS data can be questionable since sample sizes are smaller than other Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys, acknowledged the state’s Department of Labor and Employment. CDLE economist Monicque Aragon.

“The JOLTS series is a reflection of the persistent tight labor market in the state,” Aragon said in an email. “Additionally, a high quits rate serves as a potential indicator of employee confidence, and even after accounting for some of the volatility in the series … we are seeing signs of comparatively strong openings and quits in the state.”

1.7 open jobs for every unemployed Coloradan

JOLTS is a key source for the frequently touted jobs-to-unemployed-worker ratio. Colorado’s ratio has been around two jobs for every unemployed worker for two years before dropping in January. In April, the state’s ratio slipped to 1.7 jobs per unemployed worker, as the number of unemployed Coloradans rose. That is still higher than the nation’s ratio of 1.2 open jobs for each unemployed worker.

But it’s not that states should necessarily shoot for a 1-to-1 equilibrium, said Ryan Gedney, a former state labor economist who has ventured out on his own. JOLTS is really just a gauge of labor tightness.

“A relatively higher ratio may mean it’s more difficult for employers to fill jobs, while a relatively lower ratio may mean it’s more difficult for job seekers to find jobs,” Gedney said in an email.

So what to make of rising quit rates and steady job openings? Look at the trends over longer periods of time, said Brian Lewandowski, executive director of the Business Research Division at the University of Colorado’s business school. He also compares the number of quitters to layoffs and over time, that ratio has been more steady than what the state usually sees.

“If you look back over time, it’s a volatile series,” Lewandowski said. “We have a high job openings rate. We know that our job skills outperform. I think it’s still sort of an employee market in Colorado where employers don’t seem to have a lot of leverage — yet.”

Hiring no longer the top challenge for some employers

The challenges of finding enough workers have lessened, at least anecdotally. Lewandowski said that in surveys with area business leaders, there’s still a labor shortage, but it’s different from before.

“I remember talking to a firm that was having a hard time retaining workers so they increased their wages. But the compromise was they could only afford to employ two people instead of three,” he said. “They felt they needed to pay higher wages in order to have somebody who’s competent working for them.”

It’s happening at larger companies, too. Two years ago, United Airlines held three job fairs in one year in the Denver area to fill jobs in customer service, ramp service and pretty much everything. It raised wages and spread the word.

Today? All good, spokesman Russell Carlton said.

“United has been successful in attracting qualified candidates in our city, and as a result we’re fully staffed with less open roles compared to a few years ago,” Carlton said.

The company has grown to 10,000 employees in Denver, from about 7,000 two years ago. But the increase is also credited to the airline’s $1 billion expansion in Denver. It added new gates and new routes. Last year, it hired 2,500 people in Denver alone.

That said, Carlton added, there are still 700 open jobs in Denver for roles like pilots, attendants and operations. Of those, fewer than 200 are for customer service and ramp service. Companywide, United has received nearly 260,000 applications since January, in addition to 40,000 applications for 300 summer internship slots.

McDonald’s, too, has seen hiring patterns shift. After scrambling during the pandemic, local restaurants focused on retention and longer-term workers. There are about 200 McDonald’s restaurants in the Rocky Mountain region, which includes Colorado, Wyoming and western Nebraska.

Altogether, the 200 stores are hoping to hire about 6,000 employees in 2024. While that number is the same as it was two years ago, the circumstances are different.

“We aren’t seeing any difficulty hiring,” said Jessi Bucar, owner and operator of a McDonald’s in Lakewood, “and as a matter of fact, have a lot of applications in the queue.”

And perhaps Colorado employers are finding the workers they need, or can afford. The state’s job board has seen a decline in activity, with the number of job listings just under 68,000 as of Friday. Two years ago in August, there were more than 150,000 openings listed at ConnectingColorado.com, where workers receiving state unemployment coverage must register with and search for jobs.

Take the poll

Is it hard to find a job or hire workers in Colorado? Please share your experience at tamara@coloradosun.com or take the poll HERE

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ Colorado ends budget year $164M in the red with potential tax cuts looming on November ballot. The immediate budget challenges come with an elephant in the room: Two conservative ballot measures that would slash local property taxes across the state and put a cap on their growth >> Read story

➔ Alamo Drafthouse workers hopeful ownership change will favor newly formed union. Sony Pictures bought the movie theater chain less than two weeks after workers at Westminster and Sloan’s Lake locations held union elections. >> Read story

➔ Southeastern Coloradans could pay $20 more a month if state regulators approve utility’s rate increase. Officials in Pueblo and Cañon City are pushing back against Black Hills Energy’s proposal, calling it “one more burden on a poor community” >> Read story

➔ An experiment doled out money to homeless people in Denver, no strings attached. Here’s what happened. The percentage of people who had housing at the 10-month check-in of the Denver Basic Income Project climbed to 45% >> Read story

➔ Facing power plant and coal mine closures, Moffat County wants $118 million in help from the company that owns them. Shutting down Craig Station and Trapper and Colowyo mines will slash as much as 43% of the county’s property tax revenue and 437 jobs >> Read story

➔ Visits to Colorado ski areas reached 14 million in 2023-24, slightly down from prior year’s record. Meanwhile, traffic to the six-state Rocky Mountain Region slipped for the first time since 2019 >> Read story

Other working bits

➔ CU’s “quantum machine shop” gets $20M grant. That’s what researchers at the University of Colorado are calling the future National Quantum Nanofab, a new facility on campus with a clean room and nanofabrication tools that’ll take five years to build. The project just received $20 million from the National Science Foundation. Quantum tech has been part of the Boulder economy for decades, but turning quantum research into a revenue source is a new direction for the growing commercial industry. The future facility could help companies build the components supporting “quantum computer chips that may outperform the fastest computers on the market today,” school officials said. >> Read more

➔ Federal internet subsidy ended, but Longmont has its own. After federal funding ended in May for the Affordable Connectivity Program, 250,000 Colorado households lost access to the $30 monthly subsidy to offset internet costs. But in Longmont, most ACP customers stuck with the city’s NextLight discounted fiber service — and then some. The community-owned internet service began offering discounted plans at the start of the pandemic and still does, at $14.95 per month for 100-megabit service and $44.95 per month for gigabit speeds. That’s a $25 discount. As of mid-June, there were 926 customers on NextLight’s Internet Assistance Program, compared with 906 who had been on ACP. >> NextLight’s low-income program

➔ Denver is short 70,000 homes, says Zillow. If every Colorado family or household had a home of their own, the city of Denver would come up 70,197 houses short. That’s how many individuals and families are living with nonrelatives, according to housing market researchers at Zillow. Of those Denver dwellers, only 5.1% could afford a typical mortgage payment. >> Zillow’s report

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• How a Denver company is fighting the problem of underemployment
• Why Colorado could start attracting more filmmakers
• New broadband laws to help Colorado streamline distribution of $800+ million
• Nearly 55,000 Coloradans now have a retirement account after law went into effect
• Colorado added a mere 300 jobs in April
• Growing older in Colorado? You’ll be interested in these new laws
• Big economic development wins but sluggish job market? What’s going on in Colorado Springs
• Food is money for Colorado farmers and ranchers. Here’s how the ag census report says they’re doing 

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Tamara Chuang

Business/Technology Reporter

Brian Ysasaga took one step inside the building during Colorado Aerospace Day at the Capital in March 2022 and turned around.

“I’m not going to lie to you, I ran out. I walked in and everybody was in suits,” said the jeans-clad Ysasaga, who was studying to become a pilot at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “I’ve never owned a suit in my life. I didn’t feel comfortable.”

He’d already gone further educationally than anyone in his family in Texas. The first to graduate from high school. The first to go to college. He wanted to be a pilot and picked MSU because the school “helps with your first two lessons.” But as the airline industry ground to a halt and pilots were furloughed during COVID, his professor encouraged him to consider other careers since he could always get his pilot license. So, he started looking into aerospace.

Call it happenstance but on his way back to his car, he bumped into an unfamiliar face, Carol Carter, who said to him the event hadn’t started yet and asked where was he going? She listened and encouraged him to wander with her through the Capitol. It was life-changing for Ysasaga — and not just because he wound up meeting the person at Lockheed Martin who later would hire him. It’s because of Carter, who became a mentor and called herself his “Colorado mom,” he said.

“I probably wouldn’t have finished my degree,” said Ysasaga, whose older brother passed away unexpectedly a few months later causing Ysasaga to nearly drop out of school. “If it wasn’t for running into her, I probably wouldn’t have made it to where I am now.”

Carter calls it “the hidden curriculum” — the little things one learns or finds outside of the classroom that provide career support. Not all students, especially the first-generation in college, have access to a network of professionals and mentors, which is why Carter started GlobalMindED a decade ago in Denver. This type of access can make all the difference between landing that first career-building job versus being underemployed for years. Carter credits her older brothers for helping her find her path into a career of publishing, ending up as a vice president at academic publishers Prentice Hall and then Pearson before starting her own ventures.

“GlobalMindED is to the students we serve what my brothers were to me, and that is the hidden curriculum — the kinds of things that a lot of people from ZIP codes of privilege have built right into their neighborhoods with neighbors who work at IBM or can provide internship guidance or coaching, that kind of thing,” Carter said. “A lot of our students don’t have anyone who can provide that to them.”

Ysasaga, who graduated earlier this month, began working full-time at Lockheed Martin Monday. He’s also attending his third GlobalMindED Conference, which starts its 10th annual conference next week in Denver. He’ll be attending as a mentor.

“I do have people asking me to show them the ropes or ask me questions on LinkedIn,” said Ysasaga, who’s been mentoring a sophomore on a similar career path this year. “And I take it, like how Carol would.”

Underemployment impacts 47% of Colorado workers

Programs like GlobalMindED that try to narrow the equity gap that impacts Black and Hispanic students and those from low-income backgrounds are more likely than others to face the curse of underemployment, which is when college grads end up in jobs that require no college or high school degree.

It’s a situation that appears to be getting worse, according to a recent report by The Burning Glass Institute, a research firm that tracks work trends. By analyzing real-time labor market information like job postings and professional profiles, Burning Glass and the Strada Education Foundation found that 52% of graduates from a four-year degree program were underemployed a year after graduating. A decade later though, 45% were still considered underemployed. In Colorado, that figure was 47%.

Getting that first-college-level job after graduation is critical, said Carlo Salerno, Burning Glass’ managing director of education insights and a lead author of “Talent Disrupted: Underemployment, College Graduates, and the Way Forward, 2024.”

“It’s a big concerning number. People do not go to college to not get a college-level job afterwards,” Salerno said. “What it suggests is that we have a large-scale issue to be addressed because we spent all of these years focusing on access and getting people into college. And then the narrative shifted to completion — how do we get people through college? And now we’re realizing that even getting them through college is not enough. Now there’s this bigger challenge of when they do get to the workforce, they don’t always get to leverage the degrees they earned.”

Many factors for underemployment sound plausible. New grads with no professional experience, not even an internship. The student’s choice of institution, degree or location all impact job opportunities (“You can’t study marine biology and live in Des Moines,” Salerno said). Science, math and other STEM-related fields had a much higher rate of college-level employment than other majors. Baristas with English degrees may be a myth but underemployment was the majority outcome for those with degrees in the performing arts, humanities and cultural studies.

“If I end up as a barista and then a year later, I’m still out in the job market looking for that first career position, not only am I now competing with the people I went to school with who not only have the same degree as me but I’m also competing with the new crop of graduates with the same degree as me. And I’m also competing with other people who’ve been in the job market a couple years before me and who may have some work experience as well,” he said. “What happens with folks who are underemployed is they increasingly get squeezed.”

His advice? Get an internship and work experience while still in college. Major in subjects where jobs are plentiful, like math. And make good decisions.

“It’s about giving prospective students a better sense of the opportunity landscape in front of them,” he said. “The more they make good decisions and good fits, the better the chances are they will find majors that help lead them to better employment outcomes later.”

Building a local network

Carter, at GlobalMindED, essentially is sharing her network with those underemployed college graduates. And she’s got a vast network full of professionals from Microsoft, IBM, NASA and more.

Mentors, who can tap into GlobalMindED’s platform to schedule time to meet with students, are gracious with their time and include people like Tom Fuchs, a cloud architect at Microsoft.

He’s mentored a few students through GlobalMindED. Some haven’t been on a technology track and in those cases, he’s there to listen, answer questions and share a professional’s perspective. It’s a way he feels he can give back for the support he’s received in life, which includes moving to the U.S. from Poland when he was 15 and not knowing a word of English.

“I realized the importance of these small touch points that have been made in my life,” said Fuchs, who is currently mentoring Roger Businge, a recent cybersecurity grad. “Oftentimes there are people who are kind of shy and don’t want to speak up and you really want to get them to believe in themselves. I relate to that because my culture was very much kind of like ‘don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.’”

Businge graduated June 1 with a bachelor’s degree in IT and cybersecurity from Colorado State University Global, the virtual program of the CSU system. He’s still looking for a job. Ideally, he’d like to get one as a systems security specialist. He’d learned about GlobalMindED during school and felt he really needed all the opportunities he could get.

In a past life in Uganda, he worked as an IT consultant providing training at the local internet cafe and doing repairs and installations. But his passion was cybersecurity and after moving to Denver, he enrolled at CSU. But it was a challenge to take on an unpaid internship to gain experience. With three young kids at home, he started renting his car out on Turo, which helps pay the bills. He got the idea to car share after attending a GlobalMindED seminar on how to get started in real estate. While he’s working on additional security certification, he’s ready to work a college level job in cybersecurity and appreciates the support Fuchs has provided.

“When you’ve just come here as an immigrant, sometimes people, the first people I talked to, for example, they would always limit you to those casual jobs like working in a warehouse. They would feel like as an immigrant, you can’t easily go into corporate places,” he said. “But at GlobalMindED, I’ve met a number of people who have moved up the ladder in the corporate world who started just like me. I think GlobalMindED has helped me a lot to believe in myself and believe I can reach the heights.”

Some resources:

• GlobalMindED works with local colleges to provide support to first-generation college students and others. Its 10-year anniversary conference starts Monday. >> Website
• ActivateWork, a nonprofit that helps provides train motivated job seekers from diverse backgrounds for tech careers. >> More 
• Colorado apprenticeships: Colorado’s own Registered Apprenticeship Programs Directory

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ Has your water bill gone up? Depends on where you live in Colorado. Some Colorado water bills have increased 600% in a state where residents are already mired in rising prices. >> Read story

➔ Xcel’s $440M plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions gets Colorado’s OK — but it could boost utility bills again. The Clean Heat Plan seeks to move more Colorado homes and businesses to electricity from natural gas. Some worry the utility could make windfall profits from fighting the climate crisis. >> Read story

➔ Developers in the U.S. are forced to build parking no one uses. In Colorado, that’s starting to change. >> Read story

➔ How a nationwide slowdown in housing sales put a kink in Colorado’s mattress recycling. Used mattress foam piling up at Spring Back Colorado’s recycling plant in Commerce City is due to a lack of a market, a problem that recyclers of other materials are wrestling with, too. >> Read story

➔ Coloradans from every political party, age group and region want politicians to do something about the cost of living. Voter Voices is a statewide survey asking Coloradans what they want politicians to focus on in the upcoming election. Hundreds of answers reflect a concern with the high cost of living. >> Read story

➔ Colorado state parks now offer free app to help blind visitors navigate. The state provides the Aira guided-walking app for free in all state parks, and the reviews are sublime. >> Read story

Other working bits

➔ Denver inflation slowed to 2.6% in May. That’s lower than the U.S. rate of 3.3% in May. Both rates are compared to 12 months prior. The Denver region has been experiencing lower consumer price increases than the rest of the nation since March. Prices were still up slightly though and the biggest culprit was energy, which was up 1.9% due to the increase in the price of electricity, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor. >> Report

➔ Big wins for Colorado businesses, says chamber. The Colorado Chamber of Commerce is patting itself on the back for taking down eight “job killing bills” debated during the recent legislative session. In its annual report, the chamber said 76% of bills it supported passed while 82% it opposed were killed. What did it take? Reaching out to legislators more than 4,300 times, according to the chamber. >> View Colorado Chamber’s 2024 Annual Report

➔ Dinner, theater and a babysitter? Just Call Emmy. Denver babysitter matching service Call Emmy has teamed up with Nightout, an entertainment ticketing company, to help busy parents plan an evening by booking tickets and a babysitter in one place. Nightout connects directly to Call Emmy’s digital platform so parents can add vetted sitters right after their ticket purchase. Denver is the first market, said Call Emmy founder Arezou Zarafshan, who took over the tech developed by Nanno to vet babysitters. Call Emmy has sitters and other folks offering household help in 50 states. >> Details

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• Why Colorado could start attracting more filmmakers
• New broadband laws to help Colorado streamline distribution of $800+ million
• Nearly 55,000 Coloradans now have a retirement account after law went into effect
• Colorado added a mere 300 jobs in April
• Growing older in Colorado? You’ll be interested in these new laws
• Big economic development wins but sluggish job market? What’s going on in Colorado Springs
• Food is money for Colorado farmers and ranchers. Here’s how the ag census report says they’re doing 
• More than 50% of Colorado’s businesses employ workers outside the state

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Today’s What’s Working starts with a dive into incentives and the filmmaking industry in Colorado by Sun arts and culture reporter Parker Yamasaki.

Sheila Traister got her start acting in commercials in the late 1980s when, she said, Colorado was in the middle of a filmmaking boom. But by the late 1990s the local work started to dry up, and Traister started traveling more.

“For somebody like me, the majority of my work takes place out of state now,” Traister said. “So I will spend anywhere from 20% to 40% of what I make on a job to do the job.”

Last week Gov. Jared Polis signed House Bill 1358, which expands a tax incentive credit for film, TV and commercial productions that want to shoot in Colorado. The bill allocates $5 million per year over the next four years to spend on refundable tax credits for productions filming in Colorado.

A 2022 legislative task force study reported that since Colorado began offering film incentives in 2012 (which, before last year, were distributed as cash rebates), the state spent $30 million over the decade, or roughly $3 million annually. The Colorado Office of Film, TV and Media reported $182.8 million in actual and predicted production spending and 6,023 cast and crew hires during that time.

The assumption of the incentive is that film productions can be a huge financial boon for local businesses.

In 2022, New Mexico reported a 660% increase in direct spending from the film and television industry in their rural regions — up to nearly $50 million from $6.5 million in 2021. The state has since increased its tax incentive bump to 10% from 5% for productions that film outside of the Santa Fe-Albuquerque corridor.

Colorado is hoping to see similar gains, with additional incentives for productions that use local infrastructure, and film in rural regions or marginalized urban areas.

But bringing in more film productions can also benefit Colorado in a qualitative way, by creating clearer professional pathways for creatives who live, and hope to work, in the state.

“It’s harder to gain experience when you don’t have opportunities to mingle with people at a higher level than you are professionally, or be on their crew or shadow them,” said Micah Baird, an independent filmmaker based in Fort Collins.

“It’s the same thing even for people a level or two above me,” he said. “Like, there’s not a lot of people who start excelling here —they move to California or are constantly traveling to where there is another level of opportunity, and where the whole infrastructure is there already.”

So what does House Bill 1358 do?

In short, the bill lengthens the amount of time that refundable tax credits will be available — to four years from one — and removes a condition that states the credit was only available when state revenues exceed state spending by at least $50 million.

The extension of the credit helps in three major ways. First, it allows film production companies to plan out projects years in advance, which is common practice for bigger productions.

“We can’t just say here’s a ‘maybe’ for projects that want to come here. Productions shy away from Colorado because of that reason,” said Bryant Preston, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Local 7.

The multi-year guarantee will also help lure in episodic productions like TV shows, which distribute economic impact over multiple years, and won’t gobble up the $5 million credit in one fell swoop.

Finally, it creates a runway to build up Colorado’s film industry infrastructure. Some of that infrastructure is physical, like sound stages. But some of it is professional, like internships and shadowing opportunities.

“All the money and resources invested into state education, just to have those students graduate and leave the state. Or they leave right after high school because they know there are no internships of real consequence to be had in Colorado,” said Traister, who created an acting department at the Colorado Film School 25 years ago.

Baird, the filmmaker in Fort Collins, feels rooted in Colorado. “I think we just need infrastructure in general, like a path for people, and students, that gives them the opportunity to stay and work.”

38 states have incentives

The way that film locations are chosen has changed drastically over the past two decades.

“It used to be that if they needed the mountains like we have, films came here. If they needed the beach, they went to Florida or California. If they needed skyscrapers, they’d go to New York City. If they wanted plains and plateaus, they’d go to the Midwest,” Traister said.

But since roughly 2002, when Louisiana became the first state to aggressively ramp up its film tax incentive program, locations have been almost entirely incentive-driven. For example, as the New York Times quipped, when Michigan unwound its once-robust film incentives, it lost out on the filming of “Detroit,” which ended up being filmed in Boston.

Thirty-eight states now have allocated tax incentives for film productions; five states introduced those incentives in the past two years, and two states —Michigan and Wisconsin — are working to reinstate their abandoned programs.

The sign read “Welcome to Roswell, New Mexico.” But the real location was Las Vegas, N.M., where a film crew in the Spring of 2021 had turned the plaza neighborhood into the alien-spotting city featured in the Roswell TV series. Production crews paid attention to every detail, including fictional newspapers with a story of destroyed beehives. (Tamara Chuang, The Colorado Sun)

Georgia’s $5 billion in incentives

And then there’s Georgia.

Since Georgia started its film tax incentive program in 2005, the state has doled out nearly $5 billion in incentives. Those investments have proven fruitful, but they’ve also put a target on Atlanta’s back.

“I kept seeing films that said they were based in Colorado that weren’t. They had our mountain ranges wrong, and at the end of it, was that damn Georgia peach,” said Rep. Leslie Herod, one of the bill’s sponsors, at the bill’s signing event. “And if you guys have heard me speak about film, you know how much I can’t stand that peach. Because quite frankly it should be our beautiful Rockies.”

For what it’s worth, the Georgia film commission offers an additional 10% credit on the 20% base tax credit if films embed that ubiquitous peach logo in their end credits.

But Georgia’s program, successful as it has been, might be a little too pie-in-the-sky for Colorado’s current film industry. Even our neighbor New Mexico’s incentives, which will increase from $110 million in payouts to $160 million over the next four years, are hard to compete with at this time.

Preston said Colorado should be competing with our other neighbors —Utah, Wyoming and Oklahoma. (Two sources brought up the fact that the hit show “Yellowstone,” supposedly based on a ranch in Montana, was shot in Utah.)

Incentives success and skepticism

To be clear, film tax incentives have not proven to be cure-alls for ailing economies. Some states, like California, Pennsylvania and Virginia, have reported that their programs either didn’t make a huge difference for productions’ decisions to shoot there (California) or had a negligible impact compared to other industry-specific incentives.

But those states have kept their film tax incentives propped up one way or another, acknowledging that even if the return on investment wasn’t quite as stunning as they’d hoped — Pennsylvania reported a 13.1 cent return for each tax credit dollar spent —they all still created a net positive.

A 2023 audit of Georgia’s film tax credit addressed skepticism about whether the state was really seeing a substantial return on investment when comparing tax dollars in versus tax dollars out, but did conclude that the tax credit “induces substantial economic activity.”

“When you incentivize the film industry, that impact reaches just about every business you could possibly think of,” Traister said. “If you’ve got a three-week film shoot or a six-month TV series, those people are living here. They’re going to our theaters now, our museums, our restaurants, our zoos, our city parks. They’re gonna go to Garden of the Gods and Aspen and Snowmass, and it just goes on and on and on.”

Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter

Got an arts or culture-related story tip for Parker? Email her at parker@coloradosun.com

Gov. Polis, the entrepreneur

Long before Jared Polis became Colorado’s governor, he was an entrepreneur, having founded an online greeting card site, an ecommerce florist and other ventures in the 1990s. He also was a cofounder of Techstars, the business accelerator for tech startups that launched in Boulder more than 17 years ago and ended its era in the city Thursday.

Polis, who’s had a very busy few weeks signing and vetoing bills from the recent legislative session, still made time to speak at the last Techstars Boulder Demo Day. And while he was at it, he gave several nods to entrepreneurship in Colorado, like this:

“There’s so much more support for starting a company and getting the help and support you need here today in Colorado,” he said. “And we also are relatively unique in the country. I will be governor for two more years and when I’m done being governor, Colorado will have had 16 years of an entrepreneur as our chief executive officer.”

He was talking about himself has his two-term predecessor, Sen. John Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper, before he became Denver’s mayor and then governor, opened Denver’s first craft brewery, the Wynkoop, which helped revitalize the city’s Lower Downtown neighborhood.

During his 5-minute speech to the Techstars audience, Polis pointed to one particular law he helped pass. Senate Bill 134 prohibits home owner associations from banning home-based businesses. While this hasn’t been a big issue, companies skirting HOA rules could be out of compliance with one’s bank and insurance. The new law protects those home-based startups running “reasonable” businesses. In other words, no running a retail store with cars pulling up.

“That’s one less legal threat hanging over the heads of entrepreneurs,” Polis said.

Section by Tamara Chuang | Business/Technology Reporter

➔ Techstars Denver hosting workforce accelerator. Techstars still has a presence in Colorado. On Monday, the company said its new hybrid Workforce Development Accelerator will be based out of the Denver office. The startups have been chosen and the program begins June 10. The goal? Develop tech that helps companies attract and retain talent and create a pipeline of future employees. >> Check out the 12 startups

➔ Tax credits for employee-owned businesses. Polis also signed House Bill 1157 into law this week to provide a refundable income tax credit for tax years 2025 to 2029. The credit is up to 50% of costs incurred by new employee-owned businesses and not to exceed $50,000. Such companies must have been owned by employees for seven or fewer years. This also creates a new Employee Ownership Office within the state’s economic development department. >> Read law

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ Outside Festival deemed a success with 18,000 attendees helping forge a model for a new national outdoor recreation gathering. With business, concerts, films, panels and outdoor gear brands, organizers hope the inaugural Outside Festival becomes a must-attend event for the outdoor recreation industry >> Read story

➔ Estes Park has growing pains this summer. From construction to elk, here’s how to manage it. Understanding the downtown road re-construction mess, a still-shuttered national park campground and elk attacks are a few of the keys to the area >> Read story

➔ Colorado’s growing approach to solving chronic homelessness: Permanent housing with few rules. Jefferson Center and WellPower of Denver are building permanent supportive housing complexes modeled after a 2017 Denver building that still has a waitlist >> Read story

➔ Hope Springs in Greeley, the largest Habitat neighborhood in the West, gets a 3D twist and $100M to build 491 homes. As median home prices edge beyond $500,000 in Weld County, there’s new hope with this community of affordable housing options >> Read story

➔ Eldora Mountain Resort withdraws objections to ski patroller union vote. Eldora managers say the move is to promote “good faith” negotiations while patrollers suspect the decision was based on the legal cost “to argue challenges that were shaky at best” >> Read story

➔ A Colorado Supreme Court ruling poked a hole in ski resorts’ liability protections. What’s next? Ski resorts, summer camps and rafting companies warned prior to the ruling that it may force companies to get rid of many recreation options for kids >> Read story

Other working bits

➔ Colorado’s CLIMBER small business loans extended. Most of the $250 million Colorado set aside for small business loans is still untapped so the CLIMBER program was extended with House Bill 1453, which Polis signed this week. Short for Colorado Loans to Increase Mainstreet Business Economic Resiliency, CLIMBER loans were offered “as federal pandemic funds have dried up for small businesses,” said Sam Taylor, program director. But as of the end of March, just $24.5 million has been loaned out to 198 small businesses in Colorado. These working capital loans of $10,000 to $500,000 for up to 10 years are available to companies with up to 99 employees. >> More at climber-colorado.com

➔ The 4th annual hunt for tech to help Colorado communities begins. The Colorado Smart Cities Alliance just announced its fourth-annual C² Challenge, a competition to find technology that addresses this year’s priorities of affordable housing for the missing middle, crime prevention, infrastructure management and utilization of park space. Winners get to work with a local city to test out their tech on a larger scale. An information session is June 18 (register here). Submissions are due July 26. >> Submit

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• New broadband laws to help Colorado streamline distribution of $800+ million
• Nearly 55,000 Coloradans now have a retirement account after law went into effect
• Colorado added a mere 300 jobs in April
• Growing older in Colorado? You’ll be interested in these new laws
• Big economic development wins but sluggish job market? What’s going on in Colorado Springs
• Food is money for Colorado farmers and ranchers. Here’s how the ag census report says they’re doing 
• More than 50% of Colorado’s businesses employ workers outside the state

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.