Last week, we published a first-of-its-kind investigation into the right-wing dark money network exerting immense influence over Colorado politics. Called “The Redprint: How Advance Colorado and Anonymous Donors Shape the Political Landscape,” the piece looked at Advance Colorado’s opaque funding and tightly knit cluster of organizations which, together, allow it to drive dominant political narratives in ways which benefit their donors’ agendas.
To my surprise, the piece gained some traction, and I have received a good amount of outreach in response to it – some from people asking follow-up questions, and some from people hoping to share additional pieces of the story with me, both of which I appreciate.
To the latter: If you have pieces of this puzzle which I have not yet uncovered, I would love to hear from you, too. Public records and tax documents go a long way, but they don’t go all the way. By design, the information available in the public record stops short of the secrets which dark money groups like Advance Colorado hope to keep secret. Inside information can often go further, or at least provide leads which allow us to see connections we otherwise would have missed if confined just to the public record. I am always happy to talk off-record or on-background as well.
To the former, I want to dedicate the rest of these column inches. Whether by limitation of time or sheer ignorance, I cannot answer every question I have received about The Redprint in the last week, but I can answer some of the big ones: about the local school board races influenced by the Advance Colorado network; the network’s ties to one of Colorado’s most prominent business lobbies; and just what on earth the Arkansas-based Walton family is doing in Colorado politics.
Not-so-local School Board Races
In last week’s investigation, I diagrammed and explained the flow of money through the interwoven organizations of the Advance Colorado network for the year 2022 – and then I mentioned, offhand, that the network looked similar in 2023, but that much of the 2023 money ended up being spent in local school board races around Colorado. For some reason (the fact that the piece was already 4,700 words long), I provided no further details.
In retrospect, I probably should have known that I was going to receive emails about that one. And I did. Thankfully, I have more details, and another handy chart, to explain exactly which school board races were impacted by money from the Advance Colorado network.
In 2023, like in 2022, millions of mostly anonymous dollars entered the Advance Colorado network via a series of donor-advised funds, family foundations, and one anonymous primary benefactor. After taking a series of comically circuitous routes through the network’s constellation of 501(c)(3)s and (4)s, nearly a million of those anonymous dollars entered two independent expenditure committees, ready to be spent on Colorado elections.
As a reminder, independent expenditure committees, or IECs, are the state version of super PACs: they can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money supporting or opposing candidates, but they cannot give that money to the candidates, and they are not allowed to coordinate with the candidates.
In 2023, the two major IECs used by the Advance Colorado network to rain money down on school board races were the Springs Opportunity Fund, which focused on Academy School District 20 and Colorado Springs District 11, and the Ready Colorado Action Fund, which spent on races in Adams 12 Five Star, Montrose, and Aurora Public Schools.
In El Paso County, where conservatives have been fighting for control of the county’s few large school districts for more than a decade, the Springs Opportunity Fund brought nearly $600,000 to the table in 2023. Administered by Katie Kennedy, the conservative financial compliance expert who oversees the circulation of money through the Advance network’s many organizations and political committees, Springs Opportunity Fund brought those funds to bear on races in Academy School District 20 and Colorado Springs District 11, the tenth and twelfth largest districts in the state, respectively.
In ASD20, the group unloaded roughly $150,000 in support of conservative candidates Derrick Wilburn and Amy Shandy. In D11, Springs Opportunity Fund dropped another $435,000 supporting the conservative slate of Parth Melpakam, Jason Jorgenson, Thomas Carey, and Jill Haffley. In both districts, the funds were spent on direct mail, robo-calls, video production, the works. All of the El Paso County candidates backed by Springs Opportunity Fund won their seats.
In contrast to the $435,000 Springs Opportunity Fund spent in D11, the candidates themselves raised pennies. Jason Jorgenson, for instance, raised just over $2,300, while Parth Melpakam topped the field by raising $26,000; in both cases, a fraction of what anonymous donors spent on their behalf.
The Ready Colorado Action Fund, meanwhile, spent about $147,000 of the network’s anonymous cash supporting conservatives in three other districts, with mixed results. Ready’s candidates in Adams 12 were wiped out, as was Max Garcia, the Ready-backed candidate in Aurora Public Schools. Ready saw some success in Montrose, though, with two of their four candidates – Neisha Balleck and Ted Valerio – winning seats.
Coloradans Concerned About Colorado Concern
After publishing my investigation last week, someone asked me the kind of niche, inside-baseball question which makes my ears perk up. Did you find any connection to Colorado Concern? – one of the state’s major business lobbies. The question interested me because of the specificity: to even know what Colorado Concern is, much less have questions about them, you have to be paying attention to how business interests flex their muscle in Colorado politics.
Founded in 1986 by Trump mega-donor Larry Mizel, Colorado Concern is “a statewide CEO-based organization devoted to investing in and promoting a pro-business environment through the political process,” according to the group’s PR. In other words, it’s a gaggle of the state’s most influential business executives working to ensure that the government remains more responsive to them than to you.
Given that the Advance Colorado network appears to have much the same goal, the question makes sense. The answer is less clear.
No, I did not discover direct financial ties between Colorado Concern and the groups in the Advance Colorado network. In fact, I found no other nonprofit organizations contributing financial support to Colorado Concern. According to reporting by Colorado Newsline, Colorado Concern is supported by membership dues, which range between $5,000 and $10,000 per year. The group currently has 140 members, and reported revenue of $1.29 million in 2023, which is in keeping with the dues numbers reported by Newsline without any external support from groups like Advance Colorado.
Yes, however, Advance Colorado and Colorado Concern are very much connected. In 2023, the groups found themselves on opposite sides of the state’s ongoing property tax debate, with Concern helping craft Proposition HH and Advance leading the successful opposition to it. In 2024, though, the two groups publicly allied with each other to promote and support a separate slate of ballot initiatives to permanently cut and cap the state’s property tax rates.
The groups are also connected by way of the Common Sense Institute (CSI), which receives a portion of its funding from Advance Colorado and other groups in its network. Until last summer Advance prominently featured CSI on its website as one of two “partner organizations,” with the other being Ready Colorado. Dave Davia, president and CEO of Colorado Concern, chairs the board of the Common Sense Institute.
There’s also a connection by way of Katie Kennedy, Advance’s financial whiz. Kennedy administers Colorado Concern’s political committee, the cleverly named Colorado Concern Political Committee. It is worth noting, though, that the group is not a major spender when it comes to elections, and that having Kennedy administer your committee is a hack to winning the Colorado politics version of Six Degrees of Separation.
Wal-orado?
Close readers and eagle-eyed chart perusers noticed the presence of a distinctly non-Coloradan dynasty in the Advance Colorado network’s web. Indeed, the Waltons of Arkansas are one of the very few donors to the network who we can identify. As the wealthiest family in the world, perhaps they do not feel a need to hide their doings from mere mortals.
Whatever their reason for taking a more transparent approach than many of the country’s other unwieldy oligarchs, the Waltons are annual contributors to the Advance Colorado network by way of six-figure contributions to High Hopes Colorado, the vehicle by which Ready Colorado receives much of its funding. In its earliest years, Advance Colorado also received a significant portion of its funding by way of High Hopes. For the last several years, the Waltons’ annual contribution has been $300,000.
But why on earth does the world’s wealthiest family – a family famously not from Colorado – spend 7.5 times the average salary every year to influence elections in a state which they are famously not from? Well, other than the fact that the annual contribution is less than pocket change to them.
The Waltons are more involved in Colorado than many people realize. Folks tend to remember that the famous Arkansans bought a major ownership stake in the Denver Broncos a few years back, but I have found that many don’t know that they own most of the rest of our sports teams too – they just let their unlikeable in-law take all the heat.
‘Stan Kroenke’ is a name many Colorado sports fans have said alongside colorful expletives over the years. If he had not married Ann Walton 51 years ago, we may never have had the opportunity. In addition to being the owner of England’s Arsenal football club and the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, Kroenke has a near-monopoly on Colorado sports franchises. He owns the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, and the Colorado Rapids. He even owns the state’s professional lacrosse team (the Colorado Mammoth, apparently).
How did Stan Kroenke originally make enough money to buy all of Colorado’s sports teams, you may ask. And I will tell you. The man who has repeatedly blocked his team’s home markets from watching their games originally made his money by marrying Ann Walton, then opening a real estate development firm whose entire business model was building strip malls next to new Walmart developments. Self-made man or decidedly not, he is, perhaps, the most successful in-law of all time.
Now, with the Broncos added to the family portfolio, the Waltons have just about completed the collection (assuming nobody would want to own the Rockies at this point). Does this have anything to do with why they spend nearly half a million dollars a year on elections in Colorado? Probably not – but it irks me.
Despite having published a broader and more detailed look at the Advance Colorado network than anyone else, there are still questions I cannot answer. The fact that nonprofit organizations, like those making up the backbone of the network, file their disclosures on a significant delay means that I cannot successfully “catch up” to the network’s constant evolutions by way of the public record alone. Many of the groups mentioned in our investigation have already been shuttered. Defend Colorado is defunct. Colorado Stronger Alliance has been replaced by CO Business Alliance. Others will silently fade, replaced by new front groups for the same bank accounts, some of which we might not spot until after they have spent a small fortune to influence local elections.
The system meant to insure transparency and accountability in political spending is broken, but we have already been able to report more about the Advance Colorado network than its architects hoped we would ever know. With your help, we can report more, connect more dots, and shine the light just a little bit further into corners designed to keep it out.
At the Colorado Times Recorder, the tip line is always open.
