2025 Market Facts VRP - Flipbook - Page 54
46 | ECO NO MI C PRO FI L E & MA R K ET FACT S 2025
COURTESY FORT COLLINS UTILITIES
The Riverside Community Solar Project in Fort Collins.
FORT COLLINS
State’s 4th-largest city touts technology, tunes
FORT COLLINS — Colorado’s fourth-largest city is far more than just bikes, bands and
brews. There’s also business, beauty and brains.
Fort Collins’ heartbeat can be heard in its
live music venues for local and visiting performers, a symphony orchestra and a Music District
developed by the locally based Bohemian
Foundation. Ironically, Fort Collins was also
rated as the most peaceful place to live in the
United States, according to a report in January
in Travel & Leisure magazine. The article said
Fort Collins’ noise level is about the equivalent
of rustling leaves.
The beer comes from more than a score
of microbreweries and brewpubs; the largest
remains New Belgium Brewing Co. The city
also is home to the largest brewer in the world,
Anheuser-Busch.
Business thrives locally with some of the nation’s largest technology companies, including
Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., Advanced
Micro Devices Inc., Broadcom and Intel Corp.
Advanced Energy Industries Inc., a Fort Collinsbirthed company, is now headquartered in
Denver. Woodward Co., with aerospace and
other technologies, is headquartered in Fort
Collins, and technology incubator Innosphere
showcases area startups.
A renovated plaza anchors the city’s
popular Old Town district, which boasts hotels,
restaurants, bars and entertainment venues.
Meanwhile, the Midtown Business Improvement District is working to make that area as
distinctive as Old Town, and a major overhaul
of the aging Foothills Mall is converting it into
a mixed-use shopping, residential, office and
entertainment area.
The beauty is found in acres of parks, miles
of trails and greenbelts, and the Cache la Poudre
River that flows out of the mountains and
through the heart of the city.
The brains are developed at Colorado State
University, with programs in engineering,
energy research, business, bioscience and other
disciplines. CSU is upgrading and expanding its
College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, a program that’s ranked second
in the nation by U.S. News & World Report for
2023-24.
CSU works closely with federal laboratories,
several of which are located in Fort Collins. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s
Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases offers
research into dengue fever, Lyme disease, West
Nile virus and other ailments. Meanwhile, CSU researchers have developed a tool that can be used to
switch a plant’s key genetic traits on or off at will,
the first time a synthetic genetic “toggle switch”
has been used in a full-grown plant.
The nursing program on Front Range Community College’s Larimer Campus was ranked
tops in the state by RegisteredNursing.com.
Beer, other businesses and residents need
water, and a massive proposed project in Northern Colorado will soon be able to deliver more
of it. After two decades of wrangling, a settlement between the Berthoud-based Northern
Colorado Water Conservancy District and the
environmental group Save the Poudre cleared
the way for construction of the $2.25 billion
project and established a fund to protect the
Cache la Poudre River.
