Arvada, CO Experts in Container Rental, Sales & Customization

A 35-year-old Colorado company that develops and manufactures medical products for clients worldwide is expanding its operation and moving into a 34,000-square-foot facility in Arvada.

ERI Group, formerly Evergreen Research, has leased the new manufacturing space and expects it to be up and running later this year. The company, whose main site is in Genesee, has doubled its workforce over the past year to about 100 employees and anticipates the staff growing to roughly 150 by the end of 2025.

“The addition of the Arvada office provides significant expansion to our manufacturing operations,” said Natasha Bond, president of ERI Group. “This is an investment to make the operations more efficient and really set the group up for success.”

The core of the company’s business involves the design and development of medical products. ERI also provides quality assurance and regulatory services.

“We also do diagnostic equipment, some laboratory equipment. And we actually do some environmental-monitoring equipment and high-end sports equipment,” Bond said.

The company’s mission is to enable entrepreneurs “to bring life-changing products to market,” Bond added.

The ERI Group’s clients include the creators of LUCI, smart wheelchair technology. Barry Dean and his brother, Jered Dean, a former Colorado School of Mines professor, started a company after designing and engineering features for a wheelchair used by Barry’s daughter to make it safer and able to connect to the internet.

The work on LUCI is a good example of what makes the ERI team special, said Bond, who joined the company two years ago.

“We helped them the first time around. They went out to the market and had some success. They came back with market feedback and wanted additional features,” Bond said. “We brought it in for about a month of really intensive work and brought the LUCI team to take a look at some of the options we put together, of where we might take the product for them.”

The ERI Group doesn’t create its own products.

“We are a service company. We develop and manufacture our customers’ products,” Bond said. “We are effectively a team of experts that somebody can wrap around a good idea to help it forward.”

The business became ERI Group two years ago when the former owners retired. The company is now backed by private equity that is Denver-based, Bond said. The company has seen business grow while maintaining longtime clients, including customers No. 1, 2 and 4 from 35 years ago, she added.

In 2022, ERI merged with LINK Product Development, a Denver-based industrial design and engineering studio.

About 75% of ERI Group’s clients are in the U.S. Others are in Mexico, Canada, Israel. New Zealand and Europe. Bond said the work ranges from putting in millions of dollars worth of effort into one project while providing a few hours of help for another with meeting regulatory requirements.

“We probably have a hundred projects open at any one time,” Bond said.

She said Colorado is the perfect setting for ERI Group. The company’s staff has expertise in mechanical, electrical, software and systems engineering as well as quality-assurance and regulatory consulting services.

The value of the availability in Colorado of highly skilled, highly motivated team members “who, frankly, are an absolute joy to work with can’t be overstated,” Bond said.

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In a warehouse in Arvada, there’s a place called Crater Beach. It’s really just a giant open box filled with about 30 tons of sand and a handful of artificial boulders. And on one recent day, rolling around Crater Beach, is a rover. To the degree that “breadbox” is a relevant yardstick in a 21st century discussion about space entrepreneurship, this test rover is about the size of a breadbox.

Near the beach, a 20-something is using a modified Xbox controller to operate the rover and help test its autopilot software. Does it do the right thing when it rolls into one of those boulders? How does it adjust to the sand?

The experiments in Crater Beach are some of the innumerable late-stage tests the company Lunar Outpost is running before they try to send a rover, one much larger than a breadbox, to the South Pole of the Moon later this year.

There are about 500 companies focused on the space industry in Colorado and more and more of them are opting for a different path from the military-focused applications that have dominated the state’s contribution for decades. Instead, these relatively small startups are trying to make a mark in what they see as a commercial space sector poised for explosive growth.

And now may be just the time to do it.

Of those 500 or so companies, about half of them are based in Colorado Springs, and it’s no wonder why.

The worldwide Global Positioning System (GPS) is run out of Schriever Space Force Base east of the city. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) operates from the nearby Peterson and Cheyenne Mountain bases. The U.S. Air Force Academy was an early leader in the field of aerospace education.

Additionally, Colorado’s inland location made it a logical host for some of the country’s first intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Today, the part of the space sector specifically serving the Department of Defense is only expected to grow, especially with Colorado Springs hosting the largest share of personnel in the new United States Space Force.

The Catalyst Campus for Technology and Innovation is a startup incubator on the east side of downtown Colorado Springs. Senior Executive Director Dawn Conley said about 80-percent of the companies on the campus are space-focused; the fact that almost all of those cater to military needs is itself representative of a shift in the overall industry.

“Over the last couple of years or several years, the reliance on the space domain … especially how the military conducts some of their business, has evolved and is very important and progressive,” Conley said.

The military has long sought contracts with the country’s largest aerospace corporations. Think Lockheed Martin. Think Raytheon. Think Northrop Grumman and Boeing. That certainly hasn’t changed. However, the rapidly accelerating competition with potential adversaries like China and Russia has even some of the smallest startups successfully pitching their new ideas and technologies.

“Even the Department of Defense has recognized that that’s where the real innovations and solutions are coming from and that’s where the opportunity is,” said Andy Merritt, chief strategy officer for The O’Neil Group, a real estate and venture capital firm that owns Catalyst Campus and invests in emerging space and cybersecurity companies.

The rover that Lunar Outpost is planning to send to the Moon on a SpaceX rocket in November is not much to look at. This vehicle is closer to the size of a wheelbarrow than it is to a breadbox and — to the untrained eye — the clunky silver box does not look too dissimilar from what high school and college students compete with each year at the Colorado Robotics Challenge at Great Sand Dunes National Park. But, of course, in reality, the Lunar Outpost rover is the product of thousands of hours of planning and tens of millions of dollars.

It is engineered to handle the Sun’s circuit-frying direct radiation and to tolerate temperature changes from -200 to 200 degrees Celsius (changes which happen in seconds in the vacuum of space.) It needs to be able to transmit its exact location from a world without GPS and make sure the technologies other private companies have paid Lunar Outpost to attach to the rover have a chance to do their jobs as well.

It also needs to know when it has run into a boulder and adjust — on its own — accordingly.

When Justin Cyrus, 30, co-founded Lunar Outpost in 2017, he and his team wanted to find a niche with both high potential for growth and diversification, but one still small enough to avoid having to compete against the biggest in the industry.

“At the end of the day, we didn’t want to compete against Elon Musk, we didn’t want to compete against Jeff Bezos,” Cyrus said, referring to the heads of SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Instead, Lunar Outpost takes advantage of the primary innovations of those two companies, which has been to cut the cost of getting payloads into orbit by about 90 percent in some cases. The Lunar team decided to focus on transportation technologies beyond earth’s orbit, eventually landing on industrial robotics for use in extreme environments.

The company has also embodied Musk’s ethos to “move fast and break things.” The rovers made by the company certainly seem expensive, but they cost a fraction of those developed and sent into space by NASA, which have cost billions of dollars each.

“That’s what it’s going to cost if you have to have 99.99999-percent chance of success,” Cyrus said. “However, if you’re willing to accept an 80-percent chance of success, you can send dozens of rovers, dozens and potentially even hundreds of rovers for the same cost of one rover.”

That tradeoff, he said, would allow for much more work and science to be done on the lunar surface, even with a few broken down rovers. Then, as has been the case with SpaceX, data provided from the failures allows for rapid iteration and improvements on the next ones set for launch.

Cyrus has high hopes the rover being sent to the Moon in November will accomplish all its goals. But, he said if his rover is able to just successfully drive off its lunar lander, his team will consider that a success. They have three more launches scheduled in the next three years to try again.

Cyrus said Colorado’s space community is different from the space and technology sectors in other places, like Silicon Valley or Boston.

“Those startup environments are very competitive,” he said. “Here in Colorado, it’s quite a bit different. It’s a very collaborative environment and that’s what I love about Colorado. It’s been a great ecosystem for our company to grow and thrive in.”

Bob Cone, chair of the Colorado Space Business Roundtable, said states including California, Texas, Alabama and Florida all have thriving Space industries, but that nowhere else has been able to foster innovation quite like Colorado.

“We have the highest concentration of aerospace employment in the U.S., maybe in the world, here between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs,” Cone said.

He said the state’s industry is well-diversified, with the largest companies having a firm presence all the way down to the small startups like Lunar Outpost, which currently has about 70 employees.

A 2023 report from the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation notes that more than 60-percent of Colorado space companies employ fewer than 10 people.

With costs coming down and advancements in everything from materials and electronics to artificial intelligence, Cone said that of any time in his more than 30-year career, the period now feels like a new space renaissance.

“I have never witnessed the confluence of really positive effects for an industry — in this case aerospace — like I have in the last five to 10 years, across the board,” he said.

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Arvada Fire said the fire was on Yarrow Street, which is in the area of Wadsworth Boulevard and Pomona Drive.

ARVADA, Colo. — No one was injured when two neighboring homes caught fire Thursday afternoon in Arvada, according to Arvada Fire Rescue.

About 1:50 p.m. Thursday, Arvada Fire's Support Team Assisted Response, or STAR51, reported a smoke plume while driving on Pomona Drive, and crews quickly responded to the fire on Yarrow Street, in the area of Wadsworth Boulevard and Pomona Drive.

When crews arrived on scene, one home was fully involved and the fire was spreading to a second home.

Arvada Fire said one person evacuated safely from one of the homes, and the other home was unoccupied. No injuries were reported. The first fire crew on scene also helped evacuate three dogs.

> Video above courtesy Scott Neal

The fire was put out at both homes about 2:30 p.m., Arvada Fire said.

Investigators were working to determine the cause and origin of the fire.

Secondary search completed. Corrected address is the 8400 block of Yarrow St. off Pomona. Fire investigators are on scene to begin their investigation when it is safe to do so, while the Red Cross has been dispatched to assist homeowners. Firefighters now working on overhaul. pic.twitter.com/VDFCztNEIK

— Arvada Fire (@ArvadaFire) July 13, 2023

Sky9 went over the scene after the fire was under control:

This is a developing situation. This article will be updated as information is confirmed.

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For 18 years, Denver’s And Toto too Theatre Company has been dedicated to showcasing the work of women playwrights. Now their marquee event has a new location: Olde Town Arvada.

And Toto too Theatre hosts a unique annual program as the main fundraising event called The Play Crawl. Colorado women playwrights write two- to three-minute, site specific plays that are performed environmentally — in shops and restaurants. The evening begins with a mix and mingle and a silent auction. Then the audience is divided into groups of 10 to 15 and guided by a crawl leader. The company’s producing artistic director, Susan Lyles, says many of the crawl leaders are supportive local male playwrights.

“So once everyone's broken up, they are taken by their crawl leaders in their groups from venue to venue to venue,” Lyles said. “The actors stay where they are and it's the audience that moves around between the plays.”

Each play is done up to 10 times in one night.

After so much change and development in the Tennyson Street neighborhood of Denver, the previous home for the event, The Play Crawl is moving to Olde Town Arvada.

Lyles said Olde Town is actually pretty perfect to host the event, with independent shop owners and the area being so pedestrian friendly.

Maru Garcia directs one of the plays for this year’s Crawl. She said the performances create community.

“Not only with the theater people, but also to expand it into regular people, and it's a nice collaboration between artists and businesses and, and I love it,” Garcia said. “The quality of the plays is amazing every year.”

She says the key to success for this event is to trust the process.

“I have to empower the actors to trust what they are doing, to take it easy to just, create and be flexible and adaptable,” Garcia said.

Both Lyles and Garcia offer the same advice for attendees: “Wear really comfortable shoes.”

And Toto too Theatre’s Play Crawl is July 12.

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Growth is good. But hold the sod. And have the checkbook handy.

Colorado’s population growth and the swelling stress on state water resources amid climate change and drought are sending Front Range suburbs in a scramble to shore up sustainable supplies.

Castle Rock is banning traditional grass turf in front yards of new homes and offering developers steep fee discounts for water-saving “Coloradoscaping” yards. The Douglas County town that is a center for housing sprawl in Colorado foresees dwindling aquifer resources and ever-higher prices to secure new surface water from the state’s overtaxed mountain river basins.

Arvada, on the opposite corner of the Denver metro area to the northwest, is more than doubling homebuilders’ water and sewer connection fees and sharply raising existing homeowners’ utility rates. The city has so far avoided turf bans or other strong conservation measures on development, while a debate builds on whether the its new $54,000 connection fees are making homes even less affordable.

The two cities’ big moves, combined with Aurora’s recent decision to restrict new lawns and ban new golf courses, reflect the strains on high-growth Colorado cities confronted by higher water prices and dwindling supply, older collection and treatment systems hitting capacity, and everyday inflation. Arvada says it is paying 30% more for water treatment chemicals, and triple for piping, amid worldwide price increases.

“Water is a critical resource here,” Castle Rock Water Director Mark Marlowe said. “These are the things we can do to make that resource go further.”

“We are at capacity, and parts of our system are full in places that we expect that growth is going to pay for itself,” said Sharon Israel, Arvada’s director of utilities.

Aurora sent water messages loud and clear over the summer by moving to ban new golf courses and sharply limit the amount of traditional thirsty lawn grass installed in the yards of new homes.

Now comes fast-growing Castle Rock, which Tuesday night was expected to give final passage to a ban on front yard grass in new homes and a limit on backyard grass to 500 square feet. The new rules also demand that developers oversee all water-wise landscaping if they want to qualify for discounts off steep tap fees.

City water agencies are ramping up those tap fees charged to developers to link to local water systems to pay for higher water acquisition and distribution costs amid the historic Western drought. The tap fees have risen so high that homebuilders are arguing — out of self-interest, but also reflecting concerns of town officials — that water fees are a major contributor to the lack of affordable housing on the Front Range.

Castle Rock’s utility system fees for a newly built single-family home in 2023 will be $42,097, up from $37,067 this year. Developers who agree to oversee landscape installation themselves using certified conservation contractors can trim more than $16,000 from that total under the new rules, officials said.

Arvada’s vote Monday night boosted charges for water, sewer and stormwater connections that it calls “system development fees” to $54,000, more than double the previous $25,000 fee, according to city officials and the Home Builders Association of Metro Denver.

Builders know water conservation is crucial now more than ever, and agree with the gist of the Aurora and Castle Rock initiatives, HBA’s Morgan Cullen said. They did seek concessions, not wanting to be responsible for overseeing all the landscaping.

But the rapid increase in new home tap fees, in Arvada and to a lesser extent in places like Castle Rock, is exacerbating crushing affordability problems for new buyers, Cullen said. “Water is getting prohibitively expensive,” he said. At current median home prices, the rising tap, storm and wastewater fees represent about 10% of the overall price, he noted.

The stress on water resources and homebuyer resources will only worsen. Castle Rock expects to grow from 81,000 people to 140,000 in the next couple of decades. The city wants to cut per capita water use by 18% in the next 10 to 20 years, Marlowe said.

Castle Rock gets its drinking water from a combination of withdrawals from aquifers under Douglas County, which are depleting and can’t continue to be used at current rates, and buying from Denver and Aurora. Water law allows much of Castle Rock’s water to be reused — withdrawals from aquifers and transmountain diversions can be recycled “to depletion.” The town is working on recycling more aquifer water back into the system after it is spread on landscapes and flows back to local creeks.

Restricting water use in new development also helps keep costs lower for existing Castle Rock homeowners, Marlowe said, a key consideration as electric, water and other utility rates soar. On a winter day, Castle Rock uses 4 million to 5 million gallons of water, while summer days peak at 19 million gallons. The city must build out enough infrastructure to handle the peaks, and charge ratepayers for the capacity and upkeep.

Avoiding new infrastructure through keeping the summer peaks lower “will help on rates” over the long term, Marlowe said.

Castle Rock calls its alternative home landscaping models “Coloradoscaping,” and Marlowe said such water-saving designs will be part of many new developments up and down the Front Range. “We certainly think it’s a good thing for the state as a whole,” he said.

Arvada’s steep increases to both development fees and rates for existing water and sewer users will shore up existing systems and allow growth that supports future city budgets, council members said in approving the increases unanimously Monday night.

“Development has to pay its own way,” Arvada Mayor and Councilmember Marc Williams said. “We’re not going to do it on the backs of existing ratepayers. Yes, we recognize this is going to have an impact on housing costs.” Like other council members, Williams said Arvada now needs to redouble efforts on both utility support programs for lower-income customers, and creating more affordable housing units.

“We invite all of you to work with us on that,” Councilmember Lauren Simpson told developers and community members in the audience.

“As much as I hate to do it, it’s a necessary evil. I hope this doesn’t deter development in our community,” Councilmember David Jones said.

Developers speaking at Monday night’s public hearing said the connection fees were high, but praised the council for agreeing to delay higher payments until July 2023 to allow them to line up permits and financing before the new fees take effect.

“I hope that with the modification, developers will still see Arvada as a great place to be,” Jones said.

Arvada purchases most of its water from Denver Water. The Jefferson County community is paying for one-sixth of the controversial expansion of Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir Dam in Boulder County, and will receive one-sixth of the new water supply from that, Israel said.

The city and consultants spent the past three years studying water supply and capacity for water treatment, stormwater and sewage, Israel said. Council members mentioned their tours of the aging sewage treatment facilities reaching their limits, and having helped neighbors shovel sewage out of basements after the 2013 floods on the northern Front Range.

Denver Water, meanwhile, is raising its raw water charges to Arvada by 15%, Israel said. Every stage of utility handling is undergoing massive inflation, from water cleaning chemicals to pipelines to fuel and equipment. Arvada needs to issue $100 million in bonds for its water and sewage utility systems, and interest rates on that new borrowing will be far higher than the rates contemplated three years ago.

At the same time the new development fees were passed, the council approved a 12.3% increase in existing water rates and a 9.8% boost to sewage rates. Both systems will also charge higher fixed monthly service fees.

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“So all of that together we estimate it would be about $9 more a month for a typical single-family residence,” Israel said. “We are still in the bottom third of the metro area in terms of fees for water and sewer services. So it sounds like a big jump, but it’s a big jump on a relatively smaller number.”

Israel acknowledged Arvada has not made the same push that Castle Rock and Aurora have made to reduce thirsty grass lawns. Landscape watering typically makes up about 50% of municipal water use in arid states that are thick with traditional turf grass. Arvada customers have access to consultation on creating a more water-wise landscape, she said, and the city is gradually installing smart water meters in homes that alert customers to leaks and their overall use.

“We haven’t gone the same route as some other communities,” she said.