In fact, only one man who could be considered old-line powerful — First Security Bank's former chairman Spencer Eccles — even made the newspaper's Top 20 list of influential and powerful people.

Other businessmen are there (Larry Miller, for example, was listed as No. 5), but they are a new breed of entrepreneurs, not corporate survivors.

Gov. Mike Leavitt — a self-made millionaire in his family's insurance business — has considerable experience dealing with the state's power structure.

He's seen it change dramatically in two ways: "One is clear: changes in ownership" of the major blocs — media, mining, retail chains, banks, utilities. "Those are macro-economic trends."

The other change is more subtle.

Leavitt recalls when you could get together the leading members of the University Club (now closed) or the Alta Club, "and they formed a critical mass. They controlled a lot of resources, and it was a kind of traditional atmosphere you'd expect. That doesn't exist anywhere near that extent today," Leavitt said.

"And a lot of it is because wealth has been dispersed through technology to people who have serious wealth and control a lot of the resources, but they are in companies that are far less profiled. I bump into (Utah) companies today that have $100 million, $200 million net worth that are listed on the NASDAQ exchange, that people in this state have never heard of before.

"These are people who are not involved in the same way in the community that those 'captains of industry' used to be," Leavitt said.

The LDS Church also doesn't have the impact on the local community it used to have. While the church clearly has influence, it is now more behind the scenes, several people said.

Several years ago church President Gordon B. Hinckley (listed as the most influential man in the state by the newspaper's panel of experts) decided that church general authorities would no longer sit on private business boards.

Across the state, leading corporate citizens who used to reserve one or two board seats for church general authorities filled the vacancies with other citizens. With the church's removal of those men from boards — from the Deseret News to Zions Bank to the utilities to major retail chains — a direct link of communication between church leaders and the community ended.

Fred Ball, longtime Chamber of Commerce president and now senior vice president for corporate affairs at Zions Bancorp, said the change has led him to observe that the church isn't as active in the business community as it used to be.

"I used to say when I first became chamber president (in 1971) that if I had five men around a table agreeing, I could do anything," recalls Ball. "They were N. Eldon Tanner (a former member of the LDS Church's First Presidency); Jack Gallivan (former Tribune publisher); Wendell Ashton (former Deseret News publisher and Utah Symphony president); B.Z. Kasler (former president of Mountain Fuel Supply); and Arch Madsen (former president of KSL)," Ball said.

"Now the chamber isn't out front on much, and I couldn't even tell you who the head guy of Kennecott is in Utah. Things have really changed."

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E-MAIL: bbjr@desnews.com ; lucy@desnews.com