ECONOMIC IMPACT PRESENTATION SUMMARY THE BROADMOOR ENHANCEMENTS - - PDF document

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ECONOMIC IMPACT PRESENTATION SUMMARY THE BROADMOOR ENHANCEMENTS UPDATE MEETING Tuesday, April 30, 2013, 6:00 p.m. Broadmoor Hall Joe Raso, Colorado Springs Regional Business Alliance Doug Price, Colorado Springs Convention & Visitors Bureau JOE RASO: Good evening, everyone. My name is Joe Raso. I'm president and CEO of the Colorado Springs Regional Business Alliance. I get the great pleasure of talking a little bit about economic impact. Russ shared some numbers with you. I want to provide a little broader context to my brief comments for you tonight. I'm going to guess that in this room there are dozens of men and women who, over their lifetime, have owned, operated, or been significant investors in business. I'm going to guess that your success was probably defined by two major things. The first is that your product or service was very relevant to the customer that purchased it. And, secondly, you were able to differentiate yourself against your competitors. I heard Steve commenting on that with the investments that are being made here at The Broadmoor. But I think even more important than that; you were able to do something at the outset of your businesses that ultimately led to your success. I think that was that you thought big. Yes, you were strategic, I'm sure. You were efficient with your resources and you had good people working with you, but your ultimate success laid in the fact you had a vision and a big idea that you brought to reality. Well, that's the same opportunity I think Colorado Springs and The Broadmoor has today. In our business and working with business we focus on relevance and differentiation and invest in excellence. We're fortunate here in our region, as all of us know, to have at least six areas of excellence: The United States Olympic committee, and the sports economy that's generated from that; national and international nonprofits that bring billions of dollars into this region each year; our military installations and great educational opportunities like the United States Air Force Academy. Just

• ur military alone contributes about $9 million to this economy on an annual basis. The Space

Foundation, another center of excellence not just for our region but for our nation and really around the world. Everybody enjoys the climate, except maybe tonight and tomorrow. But by and large we really enjoy that climate and people think this is an excellent place to live for that. I think the sixth one is The Broadmoor. It's something that, for people new to the community like myself and others knew about long before we knew about anything else about Colorado Springs. So to achieve the economic growth and opportunity for our region, I would say we stand a better chance of success if we can tie ourselves to those centers of excellence. I'll give you an example. Just last month the Space Foundation held the 29th Annual National Space Symposium right here at The Broadmoor. My organization and many others, in partnership with the Convention & Visitors Bureau met with hundreds of people, hundreds of businesses, not only in our backyard but also from around the world. Just from that one event which brings millions of dollars into the community, highlights two great institutions, the Space Foundation and The Broadmoor, we alone as an organization are working today on five projects, two existing companies looking to grow here, and three who we're talking really for the first time about economic investment in our community.

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So for me it isn't just the economic impact of putting on major events like national global golf championships, and Russ talked about the impacts of those and that's important. But the

• pportunity is defining our region as a place of excellence. It's about making the big idea reality

and showing business leaders from around the world. I think we talked to 160 media outlets or 180 outlets for major championships. There will be M\millions of people seeing this region maybe for the first time, including business executives. This gives us an opportunity to interact with them in a way that drives economic advancement far beyond the event held here. We have a great relationship with The Broadmoor and with these centers of excellence and we want to continue to do that. So I think what's being talked about tonight, the start of this conversation is really about big ideas and about excellence for our region. So my question is how big do we all want to think? DOUG PRICE: Good evening, everybody. My name is Doug Price. I'm the president of the Colorado Springs Convention & Visitors Bureau. It's kind of interesting, when we were talking about how we were going to address this group, I thought I would share something with you of what it's like to try and sell Colorado Springs to groups and sporting events and religious conferences and everybody else that like to come to our town. My staff, along with John and Dennis, is here, and folks at Cheyenne Mountain and Crown Plaza, we go to about 50 trade shows a year and we stand in the booth and event planners come up to

• us. They have two questions that they ask us every single time. First question is, "Where exactly

is Colorado Springs?" The second question is, "Do you have an airport?" And so we have to check our ego at the door and we will always be one hour south of Denver. And the second part

• f that is we have a fabulous regional airport, and we talk about that, do our best to convince

them that you can get to Colorado Springs and that it is worth the trip. General Palmer had a vision for Colorado Springs when he first founded it. It was about our culture and about the scenic beauty and about the great quality of life that we would have here in Colorado Springs. Gold helped make it happen, but when you think about economic impact and tourism, what put us on the map initially was tuberculosis. It was medical tourism. It was wellness tourism that brought people here and it drove our economy, those little huts and those

• sanatoriums. People came here and it's part of our legacy, part of our heritage.

Today we're in a position where I think -- I think that legacy and that vision of General Palmer's is still alive. We absolutely still have great culture here. We have wonderful scenic beauty and our quality of life is as good as we could ask for anywhere in the country. We just moved here a couple of years ago. One of the differences I find here, comparing it to when we lived in the Washington D.C. area, is everybody in D.C. seemed to be wanting to get

• ut. Where, here, everybody seems to be real happy to be here and we have a tremendous

quality of life. Tourism continues to be a huge part of our economy. We are the third largest employer in the region with over 12,000 jobs connected to tourism. We have about five-and-a-half million people a year that visit the region, and the money that they generate saves every single family of four almost $300 a year in taxes. So tourism is huge. From a big picture standpoint I can tell you the overall impact of tourism is $1.3 billion. For me, I couldn't wrap my arms around that number and I had to boil it down. The way that works out, it's about $5,300 a day, it's about $155an hour, and it's about $42 a second that comes into our economy based on tourism.

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So one of the things that we need to do as a community is to continue to invest in the hotels and the attractions and the amenities that we have to help us not only recover from things like the Waldo Canyon Fire, but also to propel our economy going forward. Now, I want you to know that – does anybody remember the television show Early Edition? It was a show where this guy got his newspaper delivered to his door a day in advance and he would go

• ut the next day and try to avert the problems that he read about in the paper. I sat down with the

Gazette and said, Listen, here is what I need from you. I need you to go forward with me to May 1st, 2023. We're going to go to May Day 2023. Here is what I want to show you. I know those of you in the back can't really see this. But this is the Gazette, the cover, tomorrow morning, ten years from now. It says, "Colorado Springs in the top 50 American cities again." It says we're America's healthiest city and it talks about Colorado Springs rated No. 1 in open trails and spaces, and it talks about this regional airport which is a model for others to follow. How do we do this? We continue to invest in our community. We continue to invest in tourism, in

• ther projects like golf championships that could put us in 180 countries. There is no way we
• urselves can afford to be able to do that. So I hope tonight in some short way I can remind you

that tourism was a big part of our past, it's very important to us today, and going forward it's something that can continue to make that vision stay alive of having a great culture, great scenic beauty, and great quality of life.

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