Flagler – Randy Fagerlund wears many hats in this farming town 125 miles southeast of Denver.
He’s the mayor. He’s the assistant fire chief and an emergency medical technician. The married father of two serves on a church board and helps coach the high-school football team.
He’s also the plant manager at Wagner’s LLC, a birdseed maker and the town’s top private employer.
But that’s only until November, when he will resign after 24 years at the plant, the last five as plant manager. He says he’s quitting his $75,000-a-year job because cost-cutting measures and corporate oversight became too strict after Wagner’s changed owners last year.
“It’s very difficult to leave the company I grew up with and my dad started, but times have changed,” said Fagerlund, a gregarious 50-year-old with a sun-chapped face. “I thought I had a nice position until I retired, but life is unfair.”
Robert Deziel, Wagner’s chief executive, tells a different story.
He said Fagerlund and town officials helped secure a $500,000 federal grant and donated 320 acres of town-owned land to entice a competitor, Seattle-based Global Harvest Foods, to build a birdseed plant in Flagler. In addition, Fagerlund’s brother Gary, a former Wagner’s employee, now works for Global in sales.
“The process hasn’t been right and the result isn’t right,” said Deziel. “It’s been underhanded and behind closed doors. There’s a serious conflict of interest.”
Randy Fagerlund said he recused himself from town meetings and City Council votes involving Global. He said, however, that he does regret not being “more active telling Wagner’s” of Global’s pending arrival.
At stake in the battle may be the financial future of this farm town of 612 people near the Kansas border. Town leaders are positioning Flagler as the “Birdseed Capital of the World.”
Recruiting a competitor
Like in many rural Western towns, Flagler’s agricultural- based economy has grown stale, causing its population to dwindle, many of its youth to leave and businesses to close. The median household income is a modest $28,523, while the median home value is $65,800, according to 2000 census figures.
For-sale signs dot the front yards of 34 of the town’s 267 homes, an official said. Just two restaurants are still cooking; one of them is inside a Conoco convenience store. Five vacant storefronts line Main Avenue.
To halt the decline, city leaders have hatched a plan for economic revival: become the world’s birdseed capital.
Wagner’s has produced birdseed here under various names and owners for 40 years. The plant’s 32 employees help produce 1 million pounds of birdseed each week.
Truckloads of millet, milo and sunflowers – the three main grains used in birdseed – are shipped in from farms in Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska. Railroad cars carry grain not used here to other Wagner’s plants in North Dakota, Ohio and Illinois.
The grains are cleaned by a machine. Then apron-clad workers funnel the grains into five-pound bags, which are placed on pallets and loaded into trucks. The bags of birdseed are delivered to grocery, hardware and home-improvement stores nationwide.
Randy Fagerlund’s father, Wayne, co-founded the Colorado Birdseed Company in 1964. A New York-based company, Wagner Bros. Feed Corp., purchased a controlling stake in Colorado Birdseed in 1974. For the next 30 years, the Fagerlund family ran the plant. Randy began working there in 1981.
In 2004, Deziel and an investor bought the Wagner’s brand and its four plants around the country, including Flagler’s.
“Flagler has been great to my family,” said Wayne Fagerlund, 87. He credits his move to Colorado from Wyoming in 1948 to winning a car in a poker game.
But the game in Flagler is now for much higher stakes.
In the $2.6 billion birdseed industry, Wagner’s ranks second and Global ranks fourth.
Global sees Flagler as a logical place to expand, said Jeff Pochop, a Global executive.
Its proximity to Interstate 70 and a railroad line provides Global better access to customers in the West and Southwest. It is also in the so-called “heart of millet country,” enabling Global to ship grain to its other U.S. plants in Pennsylvania and South Dakota.
Global plans to break ground within the next 30 days on its $3.1 million birdseed facility 2 miles west of Flagler. It plans to hire 20 people initially and will add 10 more within two years.
Alice Kotrlik with the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, the state agency that signed off on the federal grant, said public support in Flagler was overwhelming.
“The area is distressed economically relative to others in Colorado … (but) they will end with two (birdseed) companies and more economic opportunities,” she said.
To Wagner’s, the fact that Flagler used local and federal funding to recruit a competitor was unfair, Deziel said.
“It’s like stealing from Peter to give to Paul,” Deziel said at an August town meeting, according to a transcript.
“This is a very competitive business, and there’s not enough grain out here to begin with,” Deziel said in an interview. The arrival of a second birdseed plant could increase local grain prices and pinch a tight labor supply, Deziel said.
The future of Flagler
For the most part, Flagler residents have greeted Global’s arrival with approval.
“This small town needs it,” said Marie Daniel, 39, a Flagler native who works in traffic control in metro Denver. “I’d consider working (at Global); that way I wouldn’t have drive to Denver for work.”
A straw poll at an August town meeting found 115 people in favor of the new plant, with just one dissenter, said Thomas Bredehoft, publisher of The Flagler News.
“When you get a chance, an opportunity to bring in 20, 30, 50 families, you jump at it,” Brede hoft said.
About 10 years ago a trash-incinerator company tried to build a plant in Flagler. Residents and town officials rejected the idea as unattractive.
“For rural America, it’s tough to get industry to move in,” said Jim Pieters, who helped recruit Global through the town’s economic-development group. “The chance of IBM building a plant here is unlikely.”
As for the birdseed industry, “We know it is (an environmentally) clean, and it’s something we are comfortable with,” Pieters said.
The fear, however, is that Wagner’s will decide to move its operation elsewhere, residents and town officials said.
Deziel replies that Wagner’s is “here to stay.”
Yet, he has concerns.
“Is it viable for two plants to exist in the same town when they have to compete for raw materials and workers? It’s a difficult situation to exist in.”
As for Randy Fagerlund, he plans to stay at Wagner’s until Nov. 22, then work as a substitute teacher in town. His noncompete agreement with Wagner’s expires in June.
Asked if he would work at Global someday, he said, “I’m going to look at all options available to me.”
Staff writer Will Shanley can be reached at 303-820-1260 or wshanley@denverpost.com.
