A busy couple of weeks for business news also included a welcome announcement about improvements planned for Powderhorn Mountain Resort. The $5 million project will include the installation of a high-speed quad chairlift at the resort on the Grand Mesa. The project is doubly beneficial in that the chairlift will be manufactured at Leitner-Poma right […]
Universities aren’t usually considered in the same fashion as such major industry sectors as energy production or tourism in quantifying economic effects. And that’s too bad, because universities exert a variety of direct and indirect effects on the economy in the money educational institutes spend as well as the money students and faculty spend. Fortunately, […]
The Business Times recently received a response to the editorial published in the Jan. 15-28 edition. In the editorial, we asked what our readers and advertisers would like from us in the coming year to make us a better publication. We noted that our local chamber of commerce does this every year, as do many […]
Rather masochistically, I sit through the State of the Union Address each year. This year, sadly, was no exception. As expected, the majority of President Barack Obama’s seventh such address was focused on domestic policy and his horrendous ideas for it. They were predictably awful. Casting aside any regard for the fact federal spending has […]
As the one of the few, fearless, resident New England Patriots fans in Grand Junction, I have to just shake my head and laugh at the insanity of the news coming from the northeastern United States. And as a reference to my last column, you can now count me among the folks who say, “I’ve […]
Important indicators continue to reflect improving economic conditions in the Grand Valley, bolstering prospects 2015 really will be a better year for business. But, will indicators tracking the local labor market follow suit? Sales tax collections, a key indicator of retail activity, increased 2.5 percent for Mesa County in 2014 over 2013. At 3.4 percent, […]
The latest read on economic growth in the United States was a clear positive during an economic recovery that’s grossly underperformed since it officially started in mid-2009. We won’t get a read on economic growth for the fourth quarter and all of 2014 until late January. But the most recent take on the third quarter […]
Much of the world was horrified by the savagery exhibited in Paris. That horror, at least in the West, was not so much that people had been killed — that happens regularly enough — but a response to the reason for which they were slaughtered: namely for the “crime” of publishing cartoons that displayed a […]
A new year almost always brings an opportunity for a fresh start and renewed ambition to do things better. In business, that usually boils down to providing customers better products and services faster and at lower cost than competitors. Part of the process must include listening to customers to determine what they actually need and […]
It’s that time of year when resolutions and prognostications abound. My favorite saying applied to New Year’s resolutions is in saying they’re basically a bunch of promises to break the first week of January. And while I won’t predict a whole lot, I can pretty much accurately nail a few things that without question will […]