Colorado's 25 most powerful people; money isn't everything, but it helps.(Cover Story)

Power is measured subjectively and individually. Office holders have power because they make decisions that affect other people's lives. Ministers hold the power of the pulpit to influence behaviors. Wealthy people wield power by simply deciding where to spend or give away their money. And the collective power of people as individual voters is the sword President George W. Bush is wielding with a foreign policy that presses other countries to become democracies.

But you have to wield power to demonstrate you have it.

Voters must vote. If a philanthropist gives money to a cause or organization that accomplishes something with the funds, the benefactor gains power. Preachers who don't ask anything of their congregations are less powerful than preachers who move their congregations to move mountains.

Accomplishment was a difference-making criterion for ColoradoBiz in compiling a list of the state's 25 most powerful people. Wealth, corporate control, influence, the punch one's name and reputation have when the name is dropped; the size of a person's most direct audience (the number of employees in his or her company, for example, or the reach a person has through media); someone's role on the national or international stage; and the currency of one's use of power were all factors in judging the rankings of the state's 25 Most Powerful.

More than 200 people were considered by an editorial board of the magazine.

Those people who were considered for the list included CEOs of large and small companies across a broad spectrum of industrial sectors--health care, technology, manufacturing, marketing--as well as land developers, investors, journalists, politicians, ministers and cultural icons.

At the end of the day, those who made the list were the people in Colorado who you would call to get something done. If these people took your call, you'd probably have a good chance of getting it done.

That's power. Here's the list:

#1

PAT STRYKER, a Fort Collins billionaire heiress, listed No. 179 and worth $1.3 billion in the Forbes 400 (October 2003) list of the nation's richest people. She has been listed for several years. She and two siblings control Stryker Corp., a Michigan medical-device manufacturer, with annual sales of $3 billion and 14,000 employees. Stryker is the most powerful because she is using her wealth now to influence how Coloradans live, and more so than anyone else on the list. She gave $3 million to buy television ads to defeat the English-only voter initiative in 2002--reportedly because she believed, like the initiative's opponents, that it would end bilingual education in Colorado. The proposed constitutional amendment was defeated. During the same election cycle, she gave $675,000 to Democratic candidates. (Although it would take an exhaustive search of Federal Election Commission records to tell who might have won, some of her candidates probably did not since Colorado Republicans were far more successful than Democrats in 2002.) Still, the total amount of her contributions led the list of Coloradans who were picked as the five leading individual political contributors in the state that year, placing her above Charlie Ergen and Larry Mizel, two others who are listed here. Stryker also gave Colorado State University $20.1 million for a new arts center and a complete rebuilding of its football stadium, stipulating that the field itself be called Sonny Lubick Field, pretty much ensuring the coach's career until he chooses to retire. She also was a major contributor to opponents of Referendum A, the water-storage amendment, which was strongly supported by Gov. Bill Owens, who also is listed here. That constitutional amendment, like the English-only amendment, was also soundly defeated. Stryker also has a family foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life, especially for youth, in Fort Collins--the money for the football field was given in its name--and she has invested in a batch of small businesses in the region as well. She is 47, and so she probably has a long time left to wield her power.

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#2

CHARLES W. ERGEN is founder, chairman and CEO of EchoStar Communications Corp., the satellite TV company; and he is now the richest man in Colorado, ranked No. 20 on the Forbes 400, and listed as worth $8.9 billion. In 2002, EchoStar was valued with a market cap of $10 billion, and employed 15,000. Ergen derives much of his power from his reputation as a hard-nosed businessman. He has successfully fought with one of the state's other giants of power, John Malone, when Malone was head of TeleCommunications Inc. (TCI), and also with Rupert Murdock, another media giant, who competes with Ergen globally in the satellite TV industry. Forbes says Murdock is worth about a billion and a half less than Ergen now. EchoStar has eight satellites in space, and Ergen pretty much single-handedly overturned a restriction, written by Congress into the Telecommunications Act of 1996, that kept satellite broadcasters from relaying the signals of local television news programs to TVs hooked up to his satellite dishes. He and his wife, Cantey, were listed second on the list of the state's leading political contributors, having given $417,000 in 2002, evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. When EchoStar's stock price was hitting the $50 mark, lots of Colorado investors who were watching Ergen were pretty pleased with him. The stock price has suffered--in mid November it was a little over $34, but its 52-week range was from $18 to $41 a share--so some of those shareholders may have posted some losses, but if they held on, the stock has recovered significantly. Ergen is said to be difficult to work for, very demanding of subordinates in terms of hours clocked, time off and all-hours phone calls, but there are not many who have regretted riding Ergen's EchoStar. …