PAST ISSUES: May 2007

Editor's Note:  Here come the tourists
Tourists. They clog our roadways, crowd our beaches, make it harder to get a dinner reservation, but thank goodness they're here.

Cover Story:  Tourism's pot of gold
Beach-goers, boaters and other visitors please take a bow: You play a starring role in the region's economy. When other more cyclical industries plateau or face serious trouble, the steady tourism sector in Maine and New Hampshire serves as the great equalizer.

Cover Story:  Seasonal adjustments
Running a seasonal business is not for those easily rattled by factors out of their control such as weather, changing consumer spending habits, the weather, evolving demographic shifts, and, yes, the weather.

Cover Story:  Primary concern
Sen. Eugene McCarthy once said more people die in New Hampshire than win its first in the nation presidential primary. Of the campaign trail, he quipped, "New Hampshire is like a suit of long underwear frozen stiff on a clothesline."

Entrepreneur Watch:  Completing the staircase
Steve Pettit and his entrepreneurial co-conspirators are happy to be "located far away from corporate America," in a high-tech development center just off of Route 33 in Greenland. Which doesn't mean that Pettit, the president and co-founder of Great Bay Software, doesn't want to serve corporate America with breakthrough networking solutions.

Featured Article:  Tourism is the latest chapter in Portsmouth's story
Portsmouth is an attractive tourist destination because people can get away for the day to the beach, the mountains, or Boston, and still stay in town.

Featured Article:  Heads on beds
Besides bacon and eggs, John Lippincott offers his guests at Farmstead Bed and Breakfast eight kinds of pancakes. Blueberry pancakes are his speciality. He even picks his own berries. He shakes his head and laughs at his transformation from the former Pease Air Force Base pilot to hospitality entrepreneur in southern Maine.

Politics:  It's time to invest more in N.H. tourism
New Hampshire is extremely reliant on tourism as a source of both jobs for its citizens and revenue.
According to information from the state Bureau of Travel and Tourism, 68,000 jobs are directly tied to tourism and another 84,000 depend on tourists coming to the state. That makes tourism the state's second largest employer, behind retail, and ahead of health and business services.

Last Word:  Can you say carbon offset?
What a difference a year can make. Bob Sheppard, the deputy director of the Portsmouth-based environmental consulting firm Clean Air-Cool Planet, is making far fewer cold calls to businesses and corporations to offer CA-CP's services. The trend has changed dramatically and now the business executives at all levels are calling Sheppard and his CA-CP colleagues.