Power points: Colorado's 25 most influential businesses and organizations.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Cover Story

What is Colorado's most powerful institution? The strongest power center in the state? Its most august seat or locus of power?

Those are questions ColoradoBiz staff and its editorial board asked approaching this month's power issue. Last year, the magazine named the Top 25 Most Powerful people in Colorado.

Considering that power held by individuals might wax or wane more significantly over a two-year period than in a mere 12 months, this year, editors of the magazine decided to update last year's list of people, but focus more exclusively on organizations, institutions and businesses to determine where real power resides en masse across Colorado.

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Criteria for making our choices were similar to those used last year to pick the Most Powerful people. Newly re-elected President George W. Bush said it best when it was clear that he would serve a second term: "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it."

So, exerting the power of a group's or organization's position was a difference-making criterion in choosing and ranking these centers of power.

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Wealth of an organization, clout conjured up by just invoking the name of the institution, and the size of the group (or the number of employees of a business) and the size of its area of influence (number of customers or the people it represents) figured in the mix as well. Here are the results of our survey:

1 Colorado voters

Through initiatives and referenda, the Colorado electorate--more than 2.1 million voted in the presidential election in November--have made our state's major political decisions for more than a decade. They passed TABOR, the Tax Payer Bill of Rights, which limits taxes and government spending, as well as Amendment 23, which dictates minimum spending on Colorado public education; and they have turned down plans to provide funding for water-storage and statewide limits to growth. Locally, Denver metro voters recently approved the $4.7 billion FasTracks mass-transit project, and renewed $30 million-plus a year in taxes for Denver metro arts and cultural organizations through the Science and Cultural Facilities District. Colorado voters, as a group, are the most powerful institution in the state.

2 Wal-Mart Stores

Wal-Mart, based in Arkansas, is the nation's largest retailer and the world's largest merchant, expecting $300 billion in sales this year. In Colorado, it has a store in every major town, more than 50 Wal-Mart stores and Sam's Clubs, and it employs more than 23,000 workers. That's by far the largest private-sector employer in Colorado. Debates over store locations have been well documented across Colorado: in metro Denver, in Steamboat Springs, in Evergreen. In most cases, it gets what it wants, and the value of the company lies not only in its reputation for offering low prices, but also in the real-estate value of those stores. Colorado Wal-Mart workers became nationally significant last year when autoshop workers in Loveland requested to be organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7.

3 The U.S. defense community

In Colorado, defense spending has long been taken for granted, and, therefore, often went unheralded. By the early 1990s, however, when base closings and consolidations were at hand nationally, state officials began to catalog the economic impact of such Department of Defense and Department of Energy installations as Rocky Flats, Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Fort Carson, Peterson, Schriever and the new Buckley Air Force bases, the Air Force Academy, the U.S. Space Command, and the former Fitzsimons Army medical complex. A 2003 public-television survey of federal defense spending in Colorado put annual contract spending at nearly $4.9 billion and DOD spending at $3.3 billion. Direct and indirect military and civilian jobs in the defense sector have been estimated as high as 142,500.

4 Qwest Communications International Inc.

No. 136 on the 2004 list of Fortune 500 companies, Qwest, which operates in 14 states across the West and Midwest, was No. 1 among the eight Colorado-based companies listed by Fortune. It posted $14.936 billion in revenues in 2003, and is the third largest private-sector employer in the state with 11,100 of 42,700 employees system-wide. Philip Anchutz, No.3 on the ColoradoBiz list of the 25 Most Powerful people in the state last year, remains a director of the company, and CEO Richard Notebaert, who was one of last year's "Four on the Fence" for Most Powerful, has improved his claim to join the Top 25 by helping the company survive--even if its survival is only for a sale to another company some day in the future.

5 First Data Inc.

First Data also is a Fortune 500 company, ranked 242 nationally, and second largest by revenues in Colorado, with $8.5435 billion in 2003. Charles Fote is CEO and was No. 10 on our 25 Most Powerful in 2004. The company has 31,000 employees around the world, with 2,700 of them working in Colorado. Its primary business is Western Union, the 153 year-old money-transfer company it bought in 1995, but it also is a large processor of credit-card and check transactions. Fote has allied the company with the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and gained clout among the state's Hispanic business community as a result, but Western Union also has taken some flak for exploiting illegal Hispanics with large fees for money transfers back home.

6 Focus on the Family

The Colorado Springs-based, national, non-profit promotes family values with an active mailing list of 2.5 million, more than 1,300 employees, most of them working in Colorado, and an estimated $140...