Power lines: Colorado's 25 Most Powerful businesses and organizations.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Company rankings

Two years ago, ColoradoBiz ranked the 25 Most Powerful organizations, businesses and other institutions in the state, naming Colorado voters as the most powerful group with influence on state affairs.

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This year, we rank the Regional Transportation District, RTD, as the No. 1 Most Powerful organization in the state.

Even if it did not make the list two years ago, RTD, with $4.7 billion worth of power to spend over the next decade on the mass-transportation FasTracks system, has stormed the list of organizations just as effectively as newly elected Sen. Ken Salazar stormed the list of 25 Most Powerful people in the state in 2005.

And RTD has a people partner in making it the most powerful.

Governor-elect Bill Ritter--he may be sworn in by the time you read this if it's after Jan. 9, the day of the inauguration--plans to appoint a blue-ribbon transportation commission within 90 days of taking office. RTD's spidery light-rail system will figure in any plans the state makes to solve traffic congestion along the entire Front Range, on the way into town from Denver International Airport, and up the hill to the state's tourist playgrounds via the Interstate 70 corridor.

The lack of action taken by some of the 2005 Most Powerful groups led to their being left off this year's 2007 list. Among the groups that dropped off the list were those very same Colorado voters, since they really had empowered RTD in 2004 with their vote, and since then were taking mere maintenance steps by approving catch-up state funding in Referendum C in 2005 elections, and voting on a new governor in 2006.

Others that fell off this year's list compared with 2005's were First Data Inc., which spun off its most powerful business arm, Western Union, the money transfer company that maintained its headquarters presence in Colorado, however. Also the Colorado General Assembly, which in essence, ceded much of its power to voters in the Ref. C election. The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, as well as its largest employer of members, King Soopers, fell off the list, largely because no strikes or labor disputes have developed over the past two years that demonstrated them exerting their power. Regal Entertainment Group, a Philip Anschutz company, moved from Colorado during the two years. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and National Jewish Medical and Research Center in effect were largely silent during the two years and, therefore, fell off the list to make way for newcomers.

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One of those newcomers includes an old listed company, Vail Resorts, but it is joined by other ski-industry companies and interests because as a combined entity, the ski industry in Colorado has enormous influence. And other groups of shared interests, Front Range water authorities and companies, for example, made the list because of their aggregate power, while others--the oil and gas industry--were considered but did not make the list because there was no dominating company or entity to lead their charge onto it.

So our ColoradoBiz 2007 list of the 25 Most Powerful organizations in the state is based on the same criteria as two years ago: the wealth of an organization, the clout conjured up by merely invoking the name of the institution, the size of the group (number of employees of a business, for example) and the entity's influence or audience (number of customers served, or national or global reach).

So for the second time, ColoradoBiz presents these 25 Most Powerful organizations. Here's our list:

1 RTD

Look at all the hype that attended RTD's opening of the Southeast Light Rail, a nearly $900 million transit line that runs from Downtown Denver to Park Meadows shopping mall along Interstate 25 and out to Parker Road along 1-225 in Aurora. The Southeast line was part of the T-Rex transportation expansion project engineered during Gov. Bill Owens' administration, and its cost doesn't even figure into the $4.7 billion FasTracks money approved for RTD to spend over the next 10 years. In order to gauge the impact of that future spending, you have to realize FasTracks is the state's largest current public-spending construction project, and it will provide jobs to Colorado's construction industry throughout the next decade. The money includes a good chunk devoted to the City of Denver's redevelopment of its Union Station transportation hub, which also will host a train from DIA and the termini of the five other new light-rail arms that extend RTD's mass-transit mission into all directions of the metropolitan area. And none of RTD's current plans include a solution to the state's Interstate 70 corridor congestion. That statewide solution will inevitably include a mass-transit asset that RTD will probably be involved in providing. The agency's experience with rail-based people movers will give state officials no choice but to include RTD as a partner in that huge, multi-billion-dollar solution.

2 Vail Resorts and the Colorado ski industry

With $838.8 million in annual revenues, and more than $196 million in profit during its last fiscal year, Vail Resorts Inc. remains the big kahuna of the state's ski industry, but would have slipped from its 10th rank in 2005 had it stood on its own for ranking this year. The resort, which moved its headquarters down the mountain to Broomfield last year, boasts 14,000 employees nationwide, 11,000 of them working in Colorado at peak ski season. Back in 2005, Vail had undertaken a $500 million redevelopment of both Vail Village and LionsHead, and Aspen Skiing Co., a much smaller organization, had somewhat disappeared from a longtime role as an industry leader in the state. SkiCo, however, is back, if not bigger in size, then with a bigger voice and industry leadership role (see story, page 40). Considering that, and the role the whole Colorado ski industry will play in figuring out how the state unlocks the bumper-to-bumper, summer-and-winter congestion along Interstate 70, we lumped the entire industry together with its leader, to rank it the No. 2 Most Powerful entity in Colorado. Although Aspen Skiing Co., for one, has made global warming a concern of the entire industry, Colorado skiing continues to grow. Last season, the industry broke its record for ski visits at 12.5 million for 2005-06, about 500,000 more visits than the previous record year in 1997-98. The state's tourism industry now generates $8.2 billion in overnight domestic visits per year, and an additional $620 million annually in international overnight visits.

3 Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Wal-Mart, based in Arkansas, is the nation's largest retailer and the world's largest merchant, posting $312 billion in sales in its fiscal 2006, and growing in Colorado from 50 to 74 stores over the past two years, and from 23,000 employees in the state in 2005 to 24,658 in 2007. The company also operates two distribution centers in Colorado. That's why it often doesn't lose its disputes with neighbors of proposed locations of Wal-Marts in Colorado, and often obtains the blessings of local officials who appreciate the boost to local sales taxes that a new Wal-Mart contributes to local taxing jurisdictions. Recently it announced a national rollout of $4 prescription drugs, which will boost its customer base, no doubt. The growth of its workforce in Colorado over the past two years more than secures its position as the largest private-sector employer in the state. The retailer also built one of its new, experimental model stores in Aurora. According to a company spokesman, the new model incorporates many "green" construction features that help the company keep a commitment to environmental sustainability.

4 The Colorado defense community

Ranked No. 3, two years ago, the only reason the Colorado defense community could be pushed down in our power rankings this year would be to make room for the ski industry in the No. 2 slot. This community in Colorado has grown almost as spectacularly as Wal-Mart during the past two years--perhaps even more. And projections for the industry go only up, up and up. The Colorado Data Book, for instance, projects that the space industry alone in Colorado will grow from $4 billion to $5 billion in revenues annually right now and a peak employment of 130,000, to $7 billion in revenues by 2010 with employment in the sector at 232,000. And "space" is really only one part of what could be called the larger defense community, which might include "homeland-security industry" growth, as well as military operations, which are already set to grow at Fort Carson and some of the other Army and Air Force facilities between Colorado Springs and Pueblo. In 2005, the count of active military personnel in Colorado was 32,483, so numbers this year should be going up from there. Outgoing U.S. Rep. Joel Hefley last spring boasted that military construction projects slated for Colorado in spending bills in Congress then totaled $138 million. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still wearing on, the likelihood of a shrinking influence for Colorado's defense community can only be considered...