Littleton Colorado leads the way in the future of economic development. They practice “Economic Gardening” a model of economic development that seeks to cultivate new business through entrepreneurship.
Every county in the nation for all practical purposes has economic development people at work.
What model is being used where you do business?
Most are trying to lure yesterday’s business from other towns to theirs. Some businesses have gotten wise… why locate anywhere permanently when there are towns willing to lure businesses with tax incentives?
Once the incentive period ends, the businesses are on the prowl for the next “sucker” town willing to give them a free ride.
This model harnesses the ideas of local people who have a commitment to the community.
The seeds of economic gardening were planted in my mind in Leadville, Colorado in the early 1980s. At the time I was working in that community as a consultant after massive layoffs at the nearby Climax molybdenum mine. The community was interested in attracting new industry to town to offset an unemployment rate that was approaching forty percent.
Understand that Leadville lies above 10,000 feet in elevation and experiences winter conditions much of the year. It was, perhaps, the extreme bleakness of the situation that set me on a different course of thinking. During my tenure there, I met two miners who had invented a resin bolt to keep the steel mats up overhead in the mine. A mechanical bolt does not touch the rock in all places on its circumference. A resin bolt consists of two liquids which, when combined, become extra hard—but even more important make one hundred percent contact with the rock.
After the meeting, several things occurred to me. First, even in isolated Leadville, there were unique skills and knowledge that were marketable. Here were two guys who knew the mining industry extremely well and had invented something that would be very useful. Secondly, I thought about how many mines there were in the world that could use a resin bolt—a huge market. Third, I started thinking, wouldn’t it be more productive if the community shifted its focus from trying to attract companies to a pretty harsh (albeit beautiful) environment and instead concentrated on growing local companies which had specialized expertise? The people most likely to live in and love Leadville were the people who grew up there.
I never got very far with that newly developed idea in Leadville, but the concept never left my head. About five years later, the opportunity to try out the idea rose again—this time in Littleton.
Littleton, 1987
In 1987, I was hired as the director of economic development for Littleton. At the time, the entire state was in a recession and Martin Marietta, the community’s major employer, had laid off several thousand employees. There were nearly a million square feet of vacant retail space and downtown vacancies were approaching thirty percent.The Littleton city council expressed displeasure at having our future being dictated by out-of-state corporations and directed staff “to work with local businesses to develop good jobs.”
It was a perfect alignment of the stars—an idea and a need. For nearly two years Jim Woods (now city manager) and I researched the best thinking we could find on the subject, talked to experts, (including the Center for the New West, a think tank here in Denver), and fleshed out the concept.
Photo Courtesy Littleton Colorado Government
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