The Northern Colorado Business Report editorial board - including the publisher, members of the editorial staff and visitors from the business community - met in late December to talk about the coming year and those things we would like to see happen.

The following - in no particular order - is our New Year's "wish list" for the benefit of our growing region.

• The Colorado governor's so-called "New Energy Economy" will take wing in 2009 in ways that we don't even anticipate, with startup companies in the clean and renewable energy sector emerging.

• The best minds in Northern Colorado will shed political considerations and move toward regional solutions for transportation problems that, if not addressed, will begin to paralyze our economy.

• Someone with resources and a penchant for risk-taking will step up with a major project plan for downtown Greeley, one that can serve as a catalyst for resurgence and bring the Downtown Development Authority's voter-approved funding potential to bear.

• Likewise, Loveland's elected officials will continue moving down the road to resurrecting that city's downtown district, building on the successes that will be recorded next year with innovative redevelopment projects.

• The millions that will fund Fort ZED - a forward-thinking "net-zero" energy district covering part of Fort Collins - will bear fruit with a model for efficiency and sustainability that will make the city a national standard-bearer.

• Timnath and Fort Collins will lay down the swords and figure out how a contested development plan called Riverwalk, a dense, mixed-use proposal for the southwest quadrant of Harmony Road and Interstate 25, can proceed to the benefit of both communities.

• Windsor developer Martin Lind will find success in courting aviation-related businesses to set up shop at his Fort Collins-Loveland Airport commercial park, feeding the region's economy with hundreds of new, high-paying jobs.

• From the ruins of General Growth Properties Inc., the real estate investment trust that owns Foothills Mall in Fort Collins, will emerge a development plan that will make the 72-acre site a new and vibrant commercial and residential center in the city.

• Colorado's legislature will find ways to address the most crushing threat to small businesses - the costs of providing health-care coverage to employees. Let's get this solved in 2009.

• The business incubator that operates under the auspices of the Rocky Mountain Innovation Initiative will have a new, and much more spacious, home where the most inventive companies in the region can thrive and grow, making Fort Collins and the region a research and development capital for the "Innovation Economy."

• A Northern Colorado Water Congress will form, putting the most knowledgeable and talented people in Larimer and Weld counties to work on seeking solutions to water-supply problems that pit cities and farms against one another in competition for this scarcest of resources.

• Some very, very smart crop science experts, chemists and other scientists will find a way to make cellulosic ethanol financially feasible, opening the potential for energy independence and creating an entirely new economic sector for Northern Colorado.

• Colorado's legislature will undertake a renewed effort to resolve the toxic interaction of the Gallagher Amendment, TABOR and Amendment 23, measures that together place an undue and unsustainable tax burden on commercial property owners.

• The board members of the Northern Colorado Economic Development Corp. and Upstate Colorado Economic Development will find valid reasons to start serious talks about merging the two entities into a single, unified regional economic development platform.

• The nascent collaboration among the region's four main colleges and universities will take some tangible form - as it already has in an office building at Loveland's Centerra development - and lead to workforce development plans that will make Northern Colorado's population ready for a strong economic recovery.

• Most of all, we wish for the continued strength and health of our region's business community as it moves through the challenges of the coming year and toward the better days that we are certain await.



Tom Hacker is the editor of the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-221-5400, ext. 223 or at thacker@ncbr.com.