Hotel Planned for Old United Way Building

A a 150-room Hampton Inn is planned for the former United Way of Tarrant County building at

210 East Ninth Street according to Globe Street. The location is immediately northeast of the Fort Worth Convention Center. Plans call for the hotel to open in 2011.

The old office building will be torn down and new hotel will be built and managed by Pearl Real Estate. This marks Pearl's third hotel investment in the downtown area. The company already owns the Embassy Suites at 600 Commerce St. and the Holiday Inn Express currently being built at 1111 W. Lancaster St.

The United Way relocated their headquarters office to 1500 North Main Street.

Tarrant to Lose 8 Starbucks

The Startlegram reports on the 8 Starbucks locations in Tarrant County that are to close. 3 are in Cowtown, 4 in Arlington. 1 is in White Settlement but that doesn't really matter because no one has ever heard of White Settlement. The store on McCart Avenue couldn't have been open more than six months. Perhaps such poor planning is the reason for the company's poor performance lately?

over in big d, the coffee chain is closing 21 stores.

Here's the Tarrant coffee places that are closing:

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Lone Star State Tops For Business

CNBC today revealed the results of its second annual study of America's Top States for Business. Broadcasting from Cowtown, Correspondent Scott Cohn announced that Texas was at the top of the list:

Texas takes over the number one spot from last year's Top State, Virginia. "Clearly, Texas benefits from the current strength in the energy industry," Cohn said. "But Texas is putting together a truly diverse business climate, with high scores in areas like technology and transportation."

To determine the rankings for America's Top States for Business, each state was scored – using publicly available data – on 40 different measures of competitiveness. States received points based on their rankings in each metric, which were then separated into ten broad categories: Cost of Doing Business, Workforce, Economy, Education, Quality of Life, Technology and Innovation, Transportation, Business Friendliness and Access to Capital.

Here's the top 5:

1. Texas
2. Virginia
3. Utah
4. Idaho
5. Colorado

The worst states for busness? Here they are:
46. Mississippi
47. West Virginia
48. Rhode Island
49. Hawaii
50. Alaska

Cowtown Gas Deals a Model for the Nation

While some local bloggers portray Cowtownites as fools for buying the gas companies' bill of goods Time Magazine sees things differently:

Today's energy company landmen must deal with Texas soccer moms with their own websites and Pennsylvania dairy farmers/bloggers, all armed with Google maps and Excel spreadsheets. The domestic gas-exploration business has undergone a revolutionary face-lift.

Yep, according to Time, local homeowners are driving the hard bargains and taking the gas companies to the cleaners, not the other way around. And people in other parts of the country are taking notice:

[Ron] Stamets says what he and his Pennsylvania dairy-farmer neighbors are doing is based on the experiences of Fort Worth neighborhoods. The Barnett Shale site has long been known to Texas oilmen, but extracting what is estimated to be some 2.5 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas from the 350-million-year-old rocks beneath the Dallas-Fort Worth area only became feasible in the last decade with the advent of horizontal drilling techniques.

So the next time somebody whines about local citizens "selling out" just remember, we're not selling out, we're cashing in.