Area to receive $15 million grant for jobs

Hickenlooper: Labor Dept. funds to help solve 'Colorado paradox'

David Milstead, Rocky Mountain News

Thursday, February 2, 2006

The Denver area will get $15 million in federal economic-development money to help create high-paying jobs now and in the future.

The grant is part of the Department of Labor's WIRED - Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development - initiative. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao announced 13 grants totaling $195 million Wednesday. Chao said they're part of President Bush's Competitiveness Agenda, described in Tuesday's State of the Union address.

The money will be used to help solve what Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper calls the "Colorado paradox - we have the best-educated work force in the country but one of the lowest percentages of high school graaduates going on to college - we're sort of failing long-term."

The city's economic-development staff and the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. prepared the application, which was submitted by Gov. Bill Owens in December. The federal government chose it and the other 12 from roughly 100 applicants.

Much of the money will go to the Metro Denver EDC, which recently identified special industry "clusters" that are key to the region's growth.

Tom Clark, the director of the Metro Denver EDC, said his group will hire staffers for each cluster who will work with Colorado's schools and colleges to develop job-specific curricula.

"If a kid has a predilection for math, we'll make sure the math being taught in the classroom focuses on employment opportunities that will be out there when that kid graduates," Clark said.

Ledy Garcia-Eckstein of the Denver Office of Workforce Development said the money will also be used to survey "the best (job-training) programs in the metro region that can be replicated" in other locales.

"We're going to train the work force - meaning both the future and present work force," Garcia-Eckstein said.

Hickenlooper spoke about the grant Wednesday afternoon at an a economic-outlook panel sponsored by GHP Financial Group. His talk started not with talk of work force need but of successes: above-average job growth in the metro area, high-performing Colorado stocks, increased venture-capital investment and continuing appreciation in house prices.

Those are mostly recent developments.

The Denver area lost 50,000 jobs from 2000 to 2003 as part of a recession that hit Colorado late and hard. Colorado's comeback was slower than the nation's.

The grant application is premised on the comeback, not the downturn.

"It became evident that the skills demand, fueled by the remarkable turnaround of technology companies in the past few years, is increasing substantially," Denver wrote.

The application cited Colorado's position as 49th in K-12 spending as a percent of personal income and 49th in state and local support for higher education as reasons it needs the federal aid.

Getting wired

Regions that have been selected for the Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development Initiative:

Coastal Maine

Northeast Pennsylvania

Upstate New York

Piedmont Triad North Carolina

Central Michigan

Western Michigan

Florida Panhandle

Western Alabama and Eastern Mississippi

North Central Indiana

Greater Kansas City

Metro Denver

Central and Eastern Montana

California Coast

David Milstead is finance editor of the Rocky Mountain News. He can be reached at 303-892-2648 or milstead@RockyMountainNews.com.