THERE'S NO OTHER company in Washington quite like the Cowles Co. of Spokane. Its exact wealth is a secret. As a privately held company, it doesn't have to report its finances and it doesn't. The company's director of marketing, Shaun O'L. Higgins, will only say that if Cowles did report its financial condition, it would make the state's top 50 businesses lists "easily." But more important than the total wealth is the fact that for more than a century, nearly all of the company's hundreds of millions of dollars in assets are concentrated in Spokane County and neighboring Kootenai County, Idaho, giving the family extraordinary influence in the eastern portion of the state.

The company flagship, the Spokesman-Review, is the largest daily newspaper between Seattle and Minneapolis. Historically, it has played an important role in making eastern Washington the state's conservative redoubt, a balance and a nettle to the more liberal Westside. Although the paper has mellowed in recent decades, no statewide public official can make a decision without considering what the Spokesman-Review might say about it. In addition, the Cowles' ownership of one of Spokane's major broadcast stations, KHQ-TV, and the Spokane Journal of Business gives the family substantial media control in the region.

This combination of being the area's largest financial power and owner of its main sources of information gives rise to the dark Spokane secret: namely, that "the Cowleses run Spokane." This idea, which has survived for a century as an undercurrent in the city's politics, contributed to the recent civic controversy over a mall called River Park Square that brought Spokane unflattering publicity and saw the Cowleses accused of getting a sweetheart deal at the expense of the public.

Yet the same mall also made the Cowleses heroes in Spokane. Walt Worthy, the owner and restorer of Spokane's historic Davenport Hotel, believes the controversy cheated Betsy Cowles of credit for sparking a commercial renaissance in the city's downtown. "That started everything," he says. Another veteran downtown developer, Ron Wells, figures the Cowleses' River Park Square kicked off a $3 billion surge in investment in downtown Spokane. "It's phenomenal. It's totally transformed downtown."

The fourth Cowles generation is led by Stacey Cowles, 48, and his sister Betsy, 44. Both work in all areas of the family business, but Stacey is the publisher of the Spokesman-Review, and Betsy's specialty is the family's wide-ranging property holdings.

Betsy Cowles could fairly be described as firm. It is a trait friends and foes seem to agree on. Detractors say she was determined to get the city involved in River Park Square, and admirers say she was determined to get the city involved in River Park Square.

She begins an interview with a firm request that it not dwell on the River Park Square controversy. She is understandably weary of a topic that has dominated almost a decade of her life. Her attitude about the controversy is that, for reasons she has never understood - reasons that involved "agendas" of various parties in Spokane, she says - some people chose to see the public-private partnership of the type that has been used in dozens of cities all over the country as a conspiracy when used in Spokane.

She particularly regrets the impression that River Park Square was the only important project of the company's development business. "Even at the height of the controversy, we were working on other things," she says, and the view through a window over her shoulder illustrates her point. While River Park Square was transforming the north edge of downtown, the west end of Spokane, visible through the Spokesman-Review building window, was being shaped by private Cowles expenditures. The new block-long newspaper printing facility is across the street, and behind it sits the new KHQ-TV building, which was moved from an edge of the city to help revive downtown. Across another street is the renovated Fox Theater, a civic effort Betsy Cowles helped lead.