The Colorado Economic Development Commission is hoping a Fortune 500 bioscience company doesn’t pull the football away at the last minute when it comes to setting up shop in the state and creating 1,000 jobs.
The commissioners on Thursday voted unanimously to offer a $24.8 million tax credit package to the unknown company, according to a spokeswoman with the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade. The business is identified in city documents by the codename Project Charlie Brown.
The global firm with a comic-strip-inspired alias has big expansion plans. A summary from the COEDIT staff says the company is seeking to create a campus that will bring together technical, manufacturing, distribution, managerial and administrative arms of its business, a project with an estimated $150-million price tag.
That campus has the potential to create 1,000 new jobs over an eight-year period. The positions would pay $136,721 per year on average, more than double the what the average Coloradan takes home, according to the state summary.
The company is also weighing locations in Minnesota, Tennessee and Texas, according to the state.
Should Project Charlie Brown land in Colorado, state officials anticipate additional benefits that include skills-based training for workers and the potential for “significant economic spinoff.”
Finally, “the project highlights Colorado’s continuing strength in the bioscience and healthtech innovation sectors,” the state’s summary reads.
Metro-area hubs for the blended health and tech industries include the Fitzsimons Innovation Community facility on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora and the Catalyst HTI building in Denver’s River North Art District.
The 180,000-square-foot Catalyst building opened last year and is now 90 percent leased, according to Mike Biselli the entrepreneur behind the project. Tenants there include Kaiser Permanente, Hitachi Consulting and UCHealth.
Biselli said Thursday he’s not at all surprised a Fortune 500 biotech company would be eyeing Colorado for a major campus.
“That’s just one of many in the hopper,” he said.
Biselli said people in both the private and public sectors have been hard at work for years building a robust health-tech ecosystem in the state and people in that industry — in the U.S. and internationally — are taking notice. He called the strong cooperation between public and private groups to attract big-name organizations to the state “the unique sauce” that makes Colorado a special place to do business.
“We’re just getting going,” Biselli said.
