Business

While the madness of Black Friday will play out at big-box retailers this week, small businesses in South Jeffco want residents to remember that bigger isn’t necessarily better when it comes to holiday shopping. 

Saturday is national Small Business Saturday, an event started in 2010 by American Express to give local businesses their own Black Friday sales day. The event calls on shoppers across the country to forgo the big retail chains and spend their money at locally owned and operated stores. 

A new business has blown into town and reinvigorated a once-abandoned building.

Hurricane Grill & Wings now occupies the building of the long-shuttered Ruby Tuesday near AMC Bowles Crossing, near West Bowles Avenue and South Wadsworth Boulevard. The restaurant is the culmination of nearly three years of work, said general manager Michael Garcia. The business, which opened Monday, has hired nearly 100 employees, said Garcia.

After seven years of planning and testing at Lockheed Martin’s facility in Waterton Canyon, the MAVEN spacecraft is just a short plane ride and 140 million miles away from its final destination: Mars.

The craft is scheduled to be launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Nov. 18. NASA has a 20-day window for the launch; otherwise, the mission will have to be put on hold another two years before Mars and Earth are again in the proper alignment.  

The Littleton City Council has approved up to a $300,000 tax rebate as an incentive for the Breckenridge Brewery to relocate to Littleton.

The council approved the tax rebate on June 4 when it gave final approval to Breckenridge Brewery’s site development plan. The council passed the measure on a 6-1 vote, with Councilwoman Peggy Cole voting no. 

Breckenridge will receive a 50 percent rebate on any sales taxes collected after the first $40,000 is collected by Littleton. The brewery is estimated to bring in about $120,000 a year in tax revenue.