Avoiding the house chores is serious business. Making busy work for myself I took the time to scratch one item off my fun to-do-list - check GOP candidate for Senate's Cory Gardners' Open Secrets campaign donation listing.
#14 - The Broe Companies
Who? That can't be real. It sounds like a bowling team of junior Coors executives.
Oh, but as Google tells us, they are very, very real.
Believing you only start to know a person or company when you get to the 4th or 5th page of Google results, I found this on the top of the 4th page, from 2006, he's #23 on ColoradoBiz's list of the state's most powerful people (thanks to Free Library for link). The write-up? Like catnip for the kitty, I am drawn to the flame.
Pat Broe is one of the state's invisible power people, really the first to make this list. He's not rich enough to be listed on the Forbes 400, and his company, The Broe Cos. Inc., is no Fortune 500 employer. Yet when you look into Broe, and catch him lunching with the governor, or launching a manufacturing plant in Northern Colorado while a statewide recession rages around him, you have to conclude there's more to the man than he ever allows to go public. The Broe Cos., a private company, owns real estate, housing complexes for the elderly, railroads, energy producers and technology companies, which it invests in as a venture partner. Broe mostly makes his money on land deals, however, deals that sometimes also involve his short-line railroads--he is the largest owner of short-line rail in the U.S. and Canada--deals that often include, too, governments starving for industrial and commercial development in order to build their tax base. Broe is known as a tough negotiator in such deals. But don't expect to see his picture taken at the ribbon cutting. He doesn't often let that happen.
More links after the jump & special alert for railroad activists.
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