The Rockies Are on a Roll : Mountain States Join Economic Big Leagues

An enduring memory that Susan and John Leavitt have of their years in Anaheim was the night in 1989 that they saw a young man die from gunshot wounds on their block.

Today, the Leavitts are living better on less money in this postcard-pretty city at the base of snow-topped Pikes Peak. Leaving the crime and congestion of Southern California far behind, they are among a burgeoning crowd of Golden State refugees pumping new life into Colorado and the rest of the Rocky Mountain states.

The Rockies are, indeed, on a roll.

With fiber optics and computers bringing the inter-mountain West’s vastness and isolation down to manageable size, the region has replaced battered California as a magnet for hopeful companies and individuals eager for fresh starts and new opportunities.

Lured by the region’s newfangled sophistication and old-fashioned work ethic, go-getter companies such as Apple Computer and MCI Communications are gravitating from the coasts to Colorado industrial parks. Around Salt Lake City, a burgeoning software mecca is growing to rival California’s Silicon Valley and Massachusetts’ Route 128.

Denver is literally entering the big leagues with the Colorado Rockies baseball team and a mammoth new airport that could hold both Chicago’s O’Hare and the Dallas-Ft. Worth terminal.

Pay gains in the Rockies have outpaced the national average. And some sleepy western towns--unaccustomed to flourishing--are seeing the kind of home-price appreciation that gave Californians sticker shock in the late 1980s.

Colorado and Utah weighed in last year with enviably low jobless rates of 5.9% and 4.9%, respectively, in contrast to California’s 9.1%, among the highest in the nation. An estimated 40% of the 19,000 newcomers to Utah last year were from California.

“New businesses are developing all over the place,” said Philip M. Burgess, president of the Center for the New West, a Denver think tank. “A manufacturing boom is going on in the West.”

Some in the West lament what others consider progress, of course. In Idaho, an accelerating flood of California baby boomers and Mexican immigrants is changing the state’s homogenous, isolated, rural character--perhaps forever.

“The culture of the West is going to disappear,” said Paul R. Zelus, director of the Center for Business Research and Services at Idaho State University in Pocatello.

Still, for residents of Colorado and Utah--and to some extent leanly populated Idaho, Montana and Wyoming--who took their lumps in the energy collapse of the mid-1980s, the region’s economic revival is a welcome relief.

A decade ago, tens of thousands of laid-off workers headed for greener pastures in California and elsewhere, in some cases leaving the keys of their unsold condos on the kitchen counter. Land speculation left Colorado with a glut of more than 60,000 houses and apartments. At the worst, nearly half the office space in Denver stood vacant.

But much of that is behind them, Westerners say. For now, the Rocky Mountain West is heady with prosperity and has the wide, open spaces to accommodate it. The Big Sky’s the limit.

That the onetime Wild West is changing fast becomes obvious on the wind-swept wheat lands and prairie 23 miles northeast of downtown Denver.

There, on a 53-square-mile plot about the size of San Francisco, 6,500 workers are hoisting beams and installing cables at a futuristic airport topped by 34 white fiberglass peaks that, from a DC-10 cockpit, might resemble a giant bowl of whipped cream.

By summer, the work force will swell to 8,000 as construction heads into the stretch for a Dec. 19 opening.

The $3.1-billion Denver International Airport--a pet project of former Denver Mayor Federico Pena, now President Clinton’s transportation secretary--is intended to be “the airport for the 21st Century,” said Chuck Cannon, a spokesman at Denver’s Stapleton International Airport. Stapleton, 17 miles south, will close once the new airport opens.

Many Denverites complain of overkill, saying Pena unnecessarily saddled them with a costly airport when Stapleton would have been adequate for years to come.

But city officials, conscious of the increasingly global economy, craved the nation’s premier airport to cement Denver’s position as a hub of western trade, tourism and business travel.

The airport will have a 16,000-foot runway to accommodate the super-jumbo jets contemplated by aircraft manufacturers and also be the nation’s first to enable three planes to land simultaneously.

Elsewhere in Colorado, other projects have put thousands to work--erecting a baseball stadium for the Colorado Rockies expansion baseball team, building a new prison, relocating an amusement park and constructing highways and a light-rail line. A new public library for Denver is also planned.

But most of those jobs will wind down in mid-decade--just as Colorado is facing the closure of the technical training center at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver and the phase-out of the nearby Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, with a potential loss of more than 11,000 high-paying jobs.

Some of the ill effects from defense and construction layoffs may disappear if Ziff-Davis Publishing decides to transfer its 1,200-employee computer magazine empire to southeast Denver from New York and suburban Boston. Based on its past growth, Ziff-Davis, which publishes PC Week and other magazines, could employ as many as 6,000 people by the end of the decade. A decision is due soon.

Despite the dramatic turnaround, the Rockies still face serious challenges.

Though Colorado led the nation last year in growth of construction jobs, it is losing tourism and convention business even though the implementation of Amendment 2, an anti-gay rights initiative, has been held up by the courts.

Congestion is building on busy highway corridors. Houses are devouring thousands of those wide, open acres. Workers flocking to jobs in Salt Lake City are straining the supply of rental housing, and home prices could quickly soar out of reach for the average buyer in some small towns.

One Rockies town that now has much to boast about is Colorado Springs, 70 miles south of Denver.

This bustling city of 300,000 is courting companies in manufacturing, information processing, intellectual products and nonprofit work, luring them with inexpensive buildings in free-enterprise zones, tax breaks, training funds and lower housing costs. The abundant outdoor sports don’t hurt, either.

“The increase in the number of businesses coming here from someplace else is very significant,” said Robert K. (Rocky) Scott, president of the Greater Colorado Springs Economic Development Corp.

In 1992, 32 companies--with 1,875 jobs--arrived from elsewhere, including 17 from California. The year before, 28 companies came, one-fourth of them from the Golden State.

The most prestigious catch has been MCI Communications, which is in the process of moving a 1,250-person division from Washington, D.C., that designs software to run the company’s telecommunications products. The payroll is expected to grow to 3,100.

Another high-profile victory was Apple Computer, which in late 1991 began manufacturing its fast-selling PowerBook laptop computers in nearby Fountain, Colo. The payroll is 500 permanent employees and rising.

Need permits? Apple bought its building and was up and running in nine months. Want a street name changed? No problem. Apple’s is now Bandley Drive, after the Silicon Valley street where the computer company was founded.

In moving from Fremont, Calif., near San Francisco--where Apple’s plant straddled an earthquake fault line--the company wanted to cut costs for itself and its workers.

“Housing affordability was key,” noted Jim Bilodeau, the facility’s manager. Bilodeau moved to Monument, an upscale mountain community built around a golf course where newcomers are building homes at a rapid clip. Half his neighbors are from California.

Many Californians have migrated because of disillusionment with the tattered quality of life and urban woes. They are people like the Leavitts, who despaired of ever buying a house in Orange County.

John Leavitt, 30, left his public relations job there and joined a Colorado Springs firm at $28,000 a year, a 33% pay cut. Six months later, the Leavitts bought a $74,500, 2,400-square-foot home, with payments lower than their rent in Anaheim.

Susan, 27, who recently gave birth to their third child, misses Disneyland now and then, but that’s about it. Happy with their choice, they nonetheless fear that Colorado Springs’ small-town feel could be lost.

“It’s already becoming California-esque,” John said, noting the rash of big new developments with small yards and narrow gaps between houses.

Despite the job influx, more than half the economy of Colorado Springs, home of the Air Force Academy, still hinges on the military and the defense industry.

“We’re vulnerable,” Scott said. “That’s one reason we’re so aggressive about bringing in non-defense business.”

Recently, the spotlight has shone on evangelical Christian organizations that have moved to the conservative community--groups that provided much of the impetus behind Amendment 2, the measure passed last November that bans laws specifically protecting the civil rights of homosexuals.

Since January, 1990, a dozen “religious right” groups have announced moves to Colorado Springs. The largest is Focus on the Family, which relocated from Pomona in 1991 after getting a $4-million grant from a local foundation. It employs about 1,000 full-time workers.

Most of the groups, though, are tiny; all told, they account for just 1.5% of the county’s employment. But Scott, at least, welcomes the companies’ $36-million-a-year lift to the local economy.

Pueblo--a onetime company town south of Colorado Springs on Interstate 25, which parallels the Front Range of the Rockies--has also found California to be a happy hunting ground. Since the mid-1980s, its low costs and eager work force have attracted 20 companies, including eight from California.

The arid plains community of 101,000 grew up around CF&I; Steel, a foundry that opened in 1881. By the early 1980s, the mill, plagued by a lack of modern equipment, was losing business to lower-priced imports. When more than 4,000 workers were laid off, Pueblo’s unemployment soared to 20%.

The Pueblo Economic Development Corp. was born of that crisis. It aggressively markets Pueblo as “The Nation’s 1 Most Pro-Business Community.” Pueblo set up five enterprise zones and imposed a half-cent sales tax earmarked for economic growth.

Now, even bankrupt CF&I; is getting a boost from a new owner, Oregon Steel of Portland, which plans to spend $250 million to update the plant and preserve 1,600 jobs. In return, Pueblo offered $8 million in concessions, mostly tax credits.

In next-door Utah, home-grown Information Age companies are stoking the economic fires and injecting a high-tech flavor into the business climate. A “Software Valley” has sprung up north and south of Salt Lake City along Interstate 15 between Logan and Provo-Orem.

All told, the state has as many as 1,500 information technology businesses, about one-third of them software companies. Heavyweights include WordPerfect, producer of the top-selling word-processing program, and Novell, a maker of computer-networking software.

The youthful industry generates close to $5 billion in sales a year and employs about 63,000 people--8% of the state’s non-farm work force. That figure is expected to soar 23% by 1996.

Financial magazines have long touted Utah as an employer’s dream, with its low taxes, pro-business attitudes and young, motivated labor pool. The state has recruited computer-based operations of American Express, Sears’ Discover Card unit, Holiday Inn and Marriott. Delta Air Lines made Salt Lake City its western hub.

The boom is giving Salt Lake City some flash--and is ever so gradually diluting the pervasive influence of the city’s Mormon founders. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who once accounted for 70% of Salt Lake city’s population, now make up less than half.

Yet the strict Mormon moral code, emphasis on schooling and work ethic are evident in the clean-cut staff at WordPerfect.

Founded in 1979, WordPerfect grew out of the collaboration of the student director of Brigham Young University’s marching band and a computer science professor, who set out to choreograph band routines. Last year’s sales topped $530 million.

The firm’s research park in Orem, amid a residential neighborhood at the foot of Mt. Timpanogos, has grown to 16 buildings in four years. Employment has risen to 4,300 from 2,700 a year ago; salaries of $35,000 a year and up are typical.

Starter homes that once cost $60,000 now push $110,000, and million-dollar mansions are going up next to WordPerfect’s headquarters on what used to be Mormon-owned apple orchards. Jeff Acerson, the company’s director of corporate communications--who also dabbles in real estate development--figures that the 55 acres he bought four years ago have tripled in value.

Here too California transplants are giving life to the economy. Black Diamond Equipment Ltd. left the Ventura seaside for the Utah mountains in 1991 and has been on the ascent ever since.

“We couldn’t have done in Ventura what we’re doing here,” said Peter Metcalf, chief executive of the maker of climbing and other outdoor gear.

Formerly a part of the Patagonia outdoor clothing empire, Black Diamond is now ensconced in several “chalets” in a onetime retail complex in southern Salt Lake City.

A highly automated shop cranks out thousands of carabiners--the hooks that keep climbers’ ropes secure. The warehouse is in a former grocery store. Black Diamond has grown to 100 employees from 65 at the time of the move, with 50 more openings to come.

The bespectacled Metcalf, an avid mountaineer, is busily transforming the center--a quick hop from the Wasatch Mountains--into a mecca for climbers and back-country skiers.

One former shop features a gym where hardy souls climb an ersatz mountainside. Metcalf has brought in a boot-repair specialist, a sewing contractor and a ski tune-up shop. Coming soon: a bistro where climbers will be able to boast about their exploits over cups of espresso.

When word got out that the company planned to leave Ventura, Metcalf “never even got a phone call” from local officials. But he got a warm reception from the people in Utah.

“They made us feel like VIPs,” he said. “It’s absolutely thrilling.”

Times researchers Ann Rovin in Denver and Norma Kaufman in San Francisco contributed to this story.