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 Collins-birthed 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.
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 Collins-birthed 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.