Business leaders and economic experts believe Colorado’s economy is on the right track heading into 2023. 

The South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce held its annual Economic Forecast breakfast Friday at Marriott South at Park Meadows.

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Panelists Henry Sobanet, the chief financial officer for Colorado State University, Chad Marturano, vice president and chief financial officer for the University of Colorado Boulder, and Laura L. Jackson, vice president of air service development and aviation research for Denver International Airport discussed their predictions and goals for the future of the state’s economy. Dennis Huspeni, the city editor for media sponsors The Denver Gazette, served as moderator.

Sobanet said he believes 2023 will be a positive year with some weakness to start with.

In his presentation to the capacity crowd banquet room Friday, Sobanet said there are five major threats to Colorado’s economy right now: inflation, workforce availability and morale, housing affordability, overall sentiment with “recession chatter” and the Ukraine war. Risks and trends for businesses to watch include any 2023 state legislation on housing and business policy, the debt ceiling fight, climate adaption, artificial intelligence, the automation of work and social commentary mixing with economic commentary.

“The fed tightening is having an impact, the layoffs are affecting optimism, but people are still moving to Colorado — although not as many — and on average the trend is to probably have slightly positive economic conditions for calendar 2023,” Sobanet said.

An aging population will likely lead to changes in spending and the demand for healthcare, according to Sobanet. While commodity inflation is beginning to moderate itself, labor costs are still trending upward.

“Business costs are an issue, housing affordability for workforce, our transportation infrastructure still needs an infusion of resources,” Sobanet said. “I think overall we’re working through some tough times in certain areas.”

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While presenting the University of Colorado’s 10-year revenue forecast, Marturano emphaized the risk of less students graduating from high school leading to less in-state skilled labor available for the workforce. According to CU’s data, Medicaid will overtake K-12 education as the largest general fund expenditure in the fiscal year 2024.

“We’re expecting a little bit of a decline in the next couple of years in Colorado’s high school graduating population which means fewer resident students,” Marturano said. “It means fewer folks to fill all of the jobs that you have in your respective industries.”

As concerns around the pandemic lessen, travel is picking back up and thus the need for employees in the travel sector has increased, Jackson said. For example, TSA has hosted several job fairs recently in an effort to get more employees at DIA.

Not only is DIA the primary airport for Denver residents, and statewide, Jackson said statistics show it’s Wyoming’s main airport as well. While DIA retains 90% of all Colorado-originating passengers, it also retains 45% of Wyoming and 10% of Nebraska-originating passengers as well. In 2022 through November, the airport had 63.6 million passengers, up 0.6% from 2019. That statistic doesn’t include December passenger numbers, which will be marred by the Southwest crisis that stranded passengers and canceled hundreds of flights in the last week.

Jackson also announced in her presentation that on March 4, nonstop flights to Tokyo/Narita will resume for the first time in more than 1,000 days.

“Anytime we have more passengers, we need more employees at the airport,” Jackson said. “It also means there’s more demand for travel to and from Denver, which benefits businesses in Denver [and] it benefits people who live here that are expanding their businesses to other places and using the airport to fly.”

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