Economic vitality and community resilience is a team effort. Local businesses, governments, special districts, and residents must all play an active and ongoing role in positively influencing economic change. Our challenges today are the same ones we’ve been facing for 40 years: workforce housing, transportation & transit, and creating a year-round economy.
Locally, the Eagle County Economic Development Plan serves as Eagle County’s road-map toward long-term economic vitality. The economic development plan is founded upon a guiding principle of “Community Sustainability” in the pursuit of our economic development objectives. This principle states that the decisions, policies and programs that we pursue in the implementation of the plan should aim to create outcomes that are economically viable, environmentally sound, and socially acceptable. We are working to support businesses to address our fundamental community challenges in a responsible way.
Our challenges in Eagle County are not unique to the rest of Colorado, specifically non-front range locations. For a variety of reasons, rural Colorado isn’t necessarily seeing the same economic growth, resiliency, and opportunities as the Denver metro area. The Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, the Business Research Division (BRD) of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, State Demography Office, partnered on an economic resiliency study of Colorado rural communities to understand what makes some communities in Colorado thrive while others fail to retain population and sustain economic growth.
The primary purpose of the project was to study identifiable factors that differentiate a path of success for communities across Colorado. This report details secondary data studied for the analysis and primary research garnered through focus groups in select counties located on the Eastern Plains, Mountain Region, and Western Slope in Colorado.
Given our rural resort nature, it is no surprise that our community issues mirror the key hurdles for economic sustainability identified in the report. The report identifies housing availability and supply; labor market; youth & family retention; and smart growth.
Our first, foremost, and most daunting issue in communities around Colorado is housing availability and supply. In order to build more economic diversity within a rural county, multiple focus group participants stated the need to grow existing small businesses and attract other businesses to the community. However, certain factors limit these counties from being attractive to outside business. The first major issue that prevents business growth is a lack of affordable housing for employees. Like Eagle County, Buena Vista (in Chaffee County), for example, currently has very little inventory for home rentals, experiencing a slim 1% vacancy rate. Home prices within many rural communities are reasonable for incoming retirees and second-home buyers but not for low- to mid-wage earners who are needed for many jobs. As we know, a shortage of housing is a top problem preventing business and population growth.
Sound familiar? We’re not alone. Eagle County faces similar challenges as other communities in rural Colorado and it is incumbent on us to work together to address this issue to help ensure our future economic growth and stability. We are actively working on workforce housing issues at Vail Valley Partnership and welcome you to join us in the effort to meet the needs of our community and our businesses – and to help ensure our future economic growth.
Learn more from State Demographer Elizabeth Garner on June 14 at our Vail Valley Business Forum program. Complete details & RSVP at VailValleyPartnership.com
Chris Romer is president & CEO of Vail Valley Partnership, the regional chamber of commerce. Learn more at VailValleyPartnership.com