Koelbels Receive Award for Promoting Free Market Economics

Denver – The Colorado Council on Economic Education has named longtime CCEE supporters  Walter A. “Buz” and Sherri Koelbel recipients of the 2015 Adam Smith Award.
The Koelbels were honored at a business community dinner featuring national business leader Steve Forbes as keynote speaker. Forbes is chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media, including legendary Forbes Magazine.
CCEE President Robert Clinton said the Adam Smith Award honors Colorado community leaders who have demonstrated exemplary support of the principles of free market economics and high ethical standards and are actively engaged in the Colorado community.
The Koelbels have been CCEE board members for 18 years. Together, they are the third recipient of the Adam Smith Award since it was launched in 2011.
Buz Koelbel is president and CEO of Koelbel and Company in Denver, the region’s longest-operating family-owned real estate development firm. He is also the current vice chairman of the CCEE board of directors, chairman of the Adam Smith Society and continuously serves on other community boards.
Besides extensive work in CCEE, Sherri Koelbel is active in community affairs including a history of leadership roles with the Junior League of Denver, the Denver Zoo and the Denver Santa Claus Shop.
Koelbel and Company also has a longstanding tradition of supporting the University of Colorado and the Leeds School of Business, which claims three generations of Koelbels as alumni. In 2007, the extensively renovated business school building on the CU campus was named the Koelbel building in honor of the company’s contributions.
CCEE is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering Colorado’s youth to achieve a lifetime of economic understanding and financial freedom by providing training programs and classroom resources to teachers, schools and school districts.
The 2013 recipient of the biennial Adam Smith Award was former U.S. Ambassador Jim Nicholson, who also served as Secretary of Veterans Affairs in the George W. Bush administration.
In 2011, CCEE named the late Bill Daniels and his legacy, the Daniels Fund, as inaugural recipient of the Award. Daniels single-handedly pioneered the long-distance television industry in 1952 by setting up a microwave feed to deliver Denver programming to Casper, Wyoming. He became known as the “father of cable television” before shifting focus to professional sports ownership, plus brokering and investment banking, including founding the Young Americans Bank. When Bill Daniels died on March 7, 2000, the Daniels Fund received more than one billion dollars from his estate, making it one of the largest private foundations in the United States.
To learn more about CCEE and supporting free market principles, please visit the organization’s web site at ccee.net.