[Source: Denver Business Journal] A California bioscience company is moving its headquarters to Arapahoe County and creating some 130 new jobs, the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade said Thursday.
Viveve Medical Inc. (Nasdaq: VIVE) manufactures non-surgical devices for treatment of vaginal conditions. It is finalizing a lease and expects to relocate from Sunnyvale, California, in early 2017, said Rebecca Gillis, OEDIT global business development manager.
The decision by Viveve — formerly PLC Systems Inc. — to relocate was aided by a $2.2 million economic-development incentive package it received in late September from the Colorado Economic Development Commission.
The decision was disclosed during the same EDC meeting in which commissioners learned of two other big job wins and offered a combined $9.4 million to two other companies to consider significant growth in the metro Denver area.
“We have these projects working. We see examples of this working,” said EDC Chairman J. J. Ament of the job-growth incentive tax credit, which awards per-employee tax breaks to companies only after they have filled each position for at least one year. “And as of yet, it hasn’t cost the state a dollar because these are all performance-based incentives.”
EDC members also learned that Velocity Global, a locally headquartered international payroll service firm, has decided to take incentives to expand here rather than grow overseas and will create as many as 193 new jobs in the area over the next eight years.
Company officials told the EDC that they could have moved to a more international market, but they decided to expand in Colorado because of the talent pool and $1.9 million incentives.
Gillis also confirmed for the EDC that Charter Communications has chosen to build a $31 million facility and chosen to add some 920 jobs there. The company officially made that announcement on Oct. 4.
Flush with that success, EDC members also offered two more companies incentives.
The commission pledged as much as $9 million to “Project Zygote,” an unnamed energy company that is considering opening a regional office to oversee its growing operations involving extraction of natural gas and oil from rock in Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming.
The move would create 320 new jobs for the company — a subsidiary of a publicly traded international company with headquarters in Houston — and has a “likelihood” of leading to Denver becoming its new domestic headquarters, Gillis said.
Also, EDC members offered as much as $371,771 to “Project Abel,” an unnamed Denver-based company that manufactures food service equipment, including the shields that go up over buffets and salad bars.
The 27-year-old company is being forced from its headquarters because of eminent domain and is considering whether to move 138 jobs to Adams County or to a location on the East Coast that would be closer to more of its customers.
EDC members next month will begin consideration of whether to alter the tax incentives they give in order to offer bigger packages to bigger companies and to those companies locating in areas most in need of economic help, OEDIT executive director Fiona Arnold said.
Source: Denver Business Journal
October 20, 2016
