IDAHO SPRINGS — The investors behind a gondola-anchored resort and village at the historic Argo Mill have rebounded with European investors after losing $4.5 million to an alleged scam by an escrow company.
“Can you believe it? We have the most amazing team in the world,” said Mary Jane Loevlie, an Idaho Springs entrepreneur who is guiding the Argo Mill project.
A few hundred supporters of the project gathered Thursday afternoon to mark the groundbreaking on a gondola-based project that aims to ignite Idaho Springs’ tourist economy with a mountain-top pedestrian plaza and event space on Miner’s Point, adjacent to the 450-acre, city-owned Virginia Canyon Mountain Park.
“What a great opportunity for Clear Creek County, Idaho Springs and the state of Colorado,” Gov. Jared Polis told the crowd gathered in a circus tent at the base of the 1893 Argo Mill.
Lovelie hearkened to the hardy miners who dug a 4.2-mile tunnel in the late 1800s to connect Idaho Springs and the Argo Mill with 200 gold mines stretching to Central City. Today the Argo Mill hosts 40,000 visitors a year who tour a portion of the historic tunnel and mill that once processed millions of dollars worth of gold ore. (And is now part of a 400-square-mile Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site.) The investment group that bought the historic mill property and mining claims for the mountaintop plaza in 2016 expects to host as many as 500,000 to 700,000 gondola riders a year, many of them hikers and mountain bikers accessing dozens of miles of trails built, in part, by the Colorado Mountain Bike Association.
☀️ READ MORE
“The Mighty Argo Cable Car will be the intersection of heritage tourism and outdoor recreation,” Loevlie said to roaring applause as she sipped a Miners Point Pilsner made special for the groundbreaking by the Tommyknocker Brewery in Idaho Springs.
It’s been a long and tortuous road for the 50-plus investors in the Mighty Argo Cable Car Group, who in 2019 proposed a sweeping resort project intended to spark an economic revival in Idaho Springs. Their initial investment of nearly $5 million disappeared in an alleged scam by a title company. The group had to scrape together new funds and new investors, while federal officials accused the title company of stealing close to $15 million in escrow deposits from 10 businesses.
Nearly five years after initially planning to break ground, the Might Argo project is underway. The investors are joined by a European investment group — the Funis Fund — that supports urban cable car projects. It’s the group’s first investment in North America.
“We will be part of an elite group of global gondolas that this group is invested in,” said Loevlie, who, in the 1950s, worked at her parent’s miniature golf course and burger stand in Idaho Springs and went on to co-found Shotcrete Technologies. “We are sort of on the cusp of this kind of development in North America.”
Sebi Lueoend, the chief financial officer for Doppelmayr, the Swiss aerial transit company that is building the Mighty Argo gondola, said the future of artial tramways is in urban environments. Right now, he said, his company generates about 60% of its revenue from ski resort lifts, 20% from cities like La Paz, Bolivia, and Mexico City, where gondolas can move as many as 8,000 people an hour, and 20% from points of interest like the Argo Mill. The 1.2-mile gondola and investment by the Doppelmayr-partnered Funis Fund in Idaho Springs will help expose more people to the value of aerial transit.
Within 20 years, Lueoend said, his company will be focused on cities and 80% of Doppelmayr’s revenue will come from people-moving aerial systems in urban landscapes.
“Cities have few other transit options to move people off the roads and into a totally green system,” he said. “The closer we build to cities — like this project — the more people will see this is a perfect transit system.”
Loevlie on Thursday never mentioned the theft of her group’s initial investment. But her many supporters in the crowd talked about her resilience, determination and dedication.
“There is a lesson for all of us in there,” Idaho Springs Mayor Chuck Harmon said.
In 2019, the investors planned to spend more than $32 million to start construction of a 1.2-mile gondola and commercial village around the dormant Argo Mill on the banks of Clear Creek. In 2020, the group deposited $4.5 million into an escrow account with Virginia-based First Title Inc. as an equity deposit to secure a $32.7 million construction loan.
The loan would have paid for a new $8.3 million Leitner Poma gondola, a $12.1 million gondola station, a $2.3 million plaza in Virginia Canyon Mountain Park and nearly $5 million for a three-story parking garage.
But the money disappeared. The group in 2021 sued the owners of the title company, arguing Sandra Bacon and Chrisheena McGee stole the deposit and distributed it to personal accounts. The lawsuit alleged the women forged documents to hide their theft, emailing bank documents where they added a “7,1” to statements, so a bank account with $20,803.89 read as $7,120,803.89.
A U.S. District Court judge awarded the Mighty Argo investment group $8.7 million in damages in 2022 after Bacon and McGee responded to the civil lawsuit by arguing they were protected against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment.
McGee and Bacon were each indicted by a federal grand jury on 12 counts of wire fraud in November, with federal prosecutors accusing them of stealing $14.8 million in escrow deposits in 2019 and 2020 from 10 businesses and individuals.
The women pleaded not guilty. U.S. District Court judge Daniel Domenico earlier this month granted their request for a continuance to prepare their defense and set a trial date for April 2025.
Every one of the original investors in the Mighty Argo group is still involved, from longtime Idaho Springs business owners to Clear Creek High School graduates who went to school with Loevlie’s daughters. They plan to open their new gondola and mountain top plaza in 2025.
The recovery of the Argo Mill project “has got to be one of the biggest surprises of my life,” Mayor Harmon said in an interview. “It was such a crime. Since these thieves took off with their money, the interest rates have doubled and construction costs have gone through the roof. They stole so many opportunities. But don’t ever count Mary Jane out.”