Filling a prescription for prosperity: Anschutz Medical Campus is pumping billions into the state economy, but can it last?

• Author: Marshall, Lisa
• Position: HEALTH CARE

Outside Lilly Marks' window on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, tractors rumble and towering cranes jockey for position, as the university and neighboring hospitals forge ahead with roughly 1 million square feet of new construction, totaling $820 million in capital investment.

Among the additions to the already-goliath complex: a 171,000-square-foot pharmaceutical sciences building; a 94,000-square-foot health and wellness center; a 40,000-square-foot cancer center addition; and lofty new patient towers at CU Hospital and Children's Hospital.

All this at a time when commercial building elsewhere is still at a crawl and construction jobs are painfully hard to come by. But as AMC executive vice chancellor, Marks is hardly boastful.

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"I don't sleep at night," she says, only hall joking. "We redefine the term 'house poor' when you are leveraged up to your eytballs."

Nearly 13 years after the university broke ground at the shuttered Fitzsimons Army base in Aurora. the glistening, state-of-the-art complex has emerged as a beacon of economic prosperity on an otherwise bleak landscape. In FY 2010, according to a report by Sammons/Dutton LLC, AMC alone contributed S2 billion in economic activity to the state nearly as much as the tourism industry--and employed more than 8,000 people (not including construction workers), making it one of the largest employers in the state. Throw in the contributions of Children's Hospital and CU Hospital - - technically separate entities that share the 578-acre Fitzsimons Life Sciences District and those numbers more than double.

But with the bulk of its revenue coming from government sources like federal research grants, Medicare and Medicaid, and lm makers wielding the budget ax, the future of the campus teeters on uncertainty. Meanwhile, efforts to spark private enterprise on its perimeter have been disappointing.

"It's easy to drive by and revel in what has been built here without realizing that, while it is one of the biggest economies in the state, it is also the most fragile," Marks says.

FROM SHUTTERED ARMY BASE TO 'MAYO CLINIC OF THE WEST'

By 1995, the 578-acre Fitzsimons Army Base had withered to roughly 3,000 jobs and $328 million in economic activity, prompting the Department of Defense to peg it for closure. Across town, the CU Medical School and Hospital on Ninth Avenue and Colorado Boulevard were running out of room.

Two years later, the federal government...