The Takeover continued from page 8 At eighteen, Biggio was looking at seri- ous prison time on another assault case. He turned to the pot business, he says, as a way to cover his legal bills. He was soon facing ad- ditional charges after police raided his grow house. They also uncovered a smuggling network Biggio had developed to bring weed to Colorado from British Columbia — an operation that, at its height, was reportedly moving a hundred pounds a week. In 2000, he pleaded guilty to marijuana cultivation and was sentenced to eight years in the Colorado Department of Corrections. He served his time and emerged into a strange new world. What had once been a grave offense, punishable by years behind populated room, it occurred to him that there were opportunities in Moffat that should be explored. “The town was barely a town,” he recalls. “They didn’t have any money. They could barely fi ll the board. But they had a lot of commercial irrigation water.” A bombastic pro-420 documentary on YouTube asserts that Moffat had $27 in its treasury before the cannabis business “saved” the town. Locals say that’s simply not true, that the town was solvent and managing to get by before Biggio’s arrival. (Moffat businesses include two marijuana dispensaries, a coffee shop, a restaurant, a Dollar General store and a $17.5 million K-12 school building that opened in 2015, paid for by a local bond issue and state funds.) It is true, though, that Moffat lacks funds for The plan fell into place after Biggio met Justice, a retired residential developer who was looking to invest in cannabis in the San Luis Valley. (Area 420’s Shakedown Street is a nod to Justice, an avid Deadhead.) The purchase of what would become Area 420 had barely been concluded when county offi cials imposed a moratorium on new mari- juana grows. Undeterred, Biggio and Justice decided to seek annexation of the property by the town of Moffat, an arrangement that would allow them to skirt county restrictions. “They did us the greatest favor ever by putting in that moratorium,” Biggio says now. The deal hammered out with town of- fi cials gave Area 420 the kind of partnership with local government that many corpora- tions lust for. The company agreed to pay the costs of extending water and power juana grows would be limited to the north side of the tract and that other, non-cannabis- related businesses would be located closer to the existing town and school. A 2018 agree- ment signed by Justice and Mayor Reigel states that the town’s approval of the initial annexation is conditional on, among other things, the creation of a “community utility center for the use of the general public,” which would contain bathrooms, a shower and a laundry. Discussion of the promised facility continued well into 2019, but ref- erence to it was deleted from subsequent annexation agreements. Justice denies that her company failed to meet any of its obligations. She says she at- tempted to deliver a check for the utility cen- ter on several occasions, only to be thwarted by Reigel’s efforts to change the terms of the Railcars house a recording studio and Area 420 offi ces next to grain bins being converted into housing; Moffat Mayor Cassandra Foxx favors changing the town’s name to Kush. bars, was now legal — and drawing a scrum of investors and ganjapreneurs. Biggio struggled to adapt to the changing landscape. He started a company to help ex-cons fi nd employment and served on a re-entry task force, but the 2008 recession wiped out many grants and programs. He slid into a job at a medical mari- juana dispensary, but then the state changed the rules so that someone with his record couldn’t work there. He purchased property in Elbert County and started a grow there but ran afoul of regulators. That time he took a deal that put him on probation for two years. In 2012, Colorado voters approved Amendment 64, authorizing retail sales of recreational marijuana, and the fl oodgates opened. Biggio started hearing stories about how the San Luis Valley was the next big thing. A buddy told him he had to check out Crestone. “They’re trimming weed on Main Street,” his friend reported. “The cops don’t give a shit here.” Biggio checked out Crestone, an artist 10 colony and spiritual center, but found it too esoteric for his tastes. “It’s a free-range mental institution,” he scoffs. “Not a place to do business.” He started a medical grow on county land, then bought a property in Moffat and built a greenhouse in the yard. Quizzed by the then-mayor about his intentions, he took his caregiver paperwork to the next town board meeting to prove he was fol- lowing the law. Looking around the sparsely a municipal sewer system or a water treat- ment plant, and that the town has struggled to fi nd enough citizens willing to serve on its board of trustees. The last three board elec- tions, including one last spring, have been canceled because there were no contested seats; typically, boardmembers are simply appointed to fi ll vacancies. Moffat has also had trouble retaining a town clerk — the only full-time, salaried town employee — and has run through town attorneys like so many Wet-Naps. Last year the board issued an ordinance abolishing a proposed planning commission — “which, for all intents and purposes, does not exist in the Town due to a lack of citizen participation in municipal governance.” Biggio had no trouble obtaining a seat on the town board himself; he fi lled a position that became vacant when his predecessor, upset that the town was becoming recep- tive to the cannabis industry, tendered his resignation. He served for a little more than a year, until his multiple activities in the area, including acting as a liaison for other growers seeking land and water rights, presented too many confl icts of interest. But learning how the board worked helped Biggio fi gure out how to pursue his main ambition: fi nding a suitable property with suffi cient water that he could sell in one-acre parcels to other growers. “The play was to get the town to approve me to access one of the municipal wells,” he says. lines and roads to the new development and for improvements to a municipal well; in return, the operation obtained access to cheap municipal water and a certain degree of protection from county interference. At- torneys for one group of residents impacted by the annexation blasted it as a “Faustian economic deal” and “a blatant attempt to work around and undermine county land- use restrictions.” County offi cials challenged the annexation process in court, but a judge ruled in the town’s favor. Patricia Reigel, the town’s mayor at the time of the annexation, says that her board decided to approve the deal because of the benefi ts Area 420 promised to bring to the town — not only more jobs and excise taxes, but new facilities, too. “They were supposed to put in a laundromat, a shower facility and a restroom for the town,” she says. “I didn’t imagine they would violate their own agreements.” Biggio denies that Area 420 made any such commitments. “The former mayor was attempting to extort us into doing that,” he says. But public records indicate that the hoped-for comfort station was more than just idle chat. In early meetings with the board, Justice explained that she was ex- ploring several possibilities for mixed-use development of the property, including a gas station, a car wash, a recreation center and a laundromat. She suggested that the mari- deal. The bathrooms and laundry are now being built on Area 420 land, she reports. “We have lived up to every promise we made,” she says. “Many things happened with the government that sent us into a tailspin. The mayor charged us tens of thou- sands of dollars of fees that were fi ctitious. She was just making up fees. This goes into a whole level of corruption that I never encountered before.” At one point, Justice and Biggio felt so well-disposed toward Reigel that they named a road in the grow area in her honor: Mayor Patricia Reigel Boulevard. But the relationship soured quickly, especially after a convoluted incident in which the mayor and town compliance offi cers were accused of removing equipment from Area 420 on behalf of an ex-employee of a grow, who claimed the items belonged to him. Charges of offi cial misconduct against Reigel were later dismissed. Citing health reasons, Reigel resigned as mayor in 2020. Her departure came amid considerable upheaval in Moffat over the annexation and heated disputes between the mayor and town board members, some of whom also resigned. One source of the squabbles was the increasing array of poten- tial and actual confl icts of interest the board was facing. Every small-town governing body has some inherent confl icts to grapple with, but the Moffat situation couldn’t be solved by an occasional recusal. continued on page 12 AUGUST 11-17, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com ALAN PRENDERGAST COLORADOAREA420.COM
