Recent Articles from Bart Taylor
TopCo leaders optimistic and hiring
Business leaders attending the ColoradoBiz/UMB Financial Top Company awards retreat in Napa, Calif., lamented a lack of qualified workers to fill openings but expressed “cautious optimism” in discussing Colorado’s economic prospects in 2013. Executives from 11 Top Company winners attended the annual event. Against a backdrop of improving national economic news including gains in home [&h[...]
Water-related “carrying capacity:” An idea whose time has come?
Last week, the Colorado Water Conservation Board hosted a conference to discuss the impacts of drought and how water providers can adapt to meet demand in light of diminishing supplies. It's not an easy chore. Drought is stressing an already nervous water ecosystem. The conference was another exam...
Sterling Ranch ruling highlights Front Range water issues
Colorado's business community was reminded again last week that water threatens the region's economic prospects. District Court Judge Paul King ruled that the Sterling Ranch development in Douglas County had not lined up a sufficient long-term supply pursuant to a 2008 statute requiring “a water s...
Search for consensus elusive in Colorado River Basin
The tale of the Colorado River has become tangled in part because of its evolution into two distinct water realities, that of the Upper and Lower River Basins. One operates in a deficit relative to its annual water allocation, the other a surplus. Arizona, Nevada and California are managing the ri...
Remembering Bob Schwab
ColoradoBiz lost a meaningful part of its past this week. Former editor Bob Schwab passed away. Born and raised in Chicago, Bob Schwab was an inveterate newspaper man turned magazine editor. If he had his druthers he'd probably have lived a decade earlier, been a Mike Royko contemporary at the Sun...
Water disrupts the West: Will business begin to look elsewhere?
But as the gap between supply and demand from the Colorado River grows – its forecast by the Bureau to be 4 to 6 million acre-feet by mid-century, roughly one-third its entire annual volume – the long-term implication is inarguable: change is coming to the Southwest U.S. Have water today? You may...
Obama campaign’s Archuleta: Stark choice the tale of this election
Katherine Archuleta, national political director for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, is drawn to the West. Her roots here are deep. “First and foremost, I’m always excited to be able to go back to my home state, where I grew up and led most of my professional life, so from a personal perspect...
Romney for President’s Colorado Connection
(Editor’s note: This is the first of a brief two-part interview series with our featured speakers for the 18th annual Colorado Biz Diversity in Business breakfast, July 24, 7:00-9:30 a.m. at the Denver Center for Performing Arts in Denver.) Speaking with me from Boston, now hip-deep in his fourth national Presidential campaign, Rich Beeson, Mitt […]
The Roberts surprise
Obamacare is constitutional. So says Chief Justice John Roberts, who has surprised even veteran SCOTUS observers twice in the last week. But for the GOP, hope is high that while a battle may have been lost, the war might still be won. Mitt Romney now has his singular campaign issue – the repeal of...
Bureau of Reclamation releases more Colorado River supply & demand data
As I've noted in previous posts, the Bureau of Reclamation will release the results of a multi-year study of the Colorado River this summer. In the run-up to a comprehensive release of findings the Bureau is publishing interim data including last week's “Technical Memorandum C – Quantification of...
A new business agenda on water
With a slim snowpack serving only to reiterate Colorado's long-term water challenge, its clear that reaching out to business to talk about water is increasingly important – but doing so in a meaningful way is difficult. Generally, business hasn't been involved in the water discussion. There's eve...
Icebergs one solution to Colorado River water woes?
What do icebergs and mountains have in common? Water, of course. And in the eyes of one imaginative contributor, both would be a future source of water here, in the Colorado River Basin. Such is the scope of solutions offered in response to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s forthcoming Colorado Riv...