Dayspring did not give the supervisor money out of the goodness of his heart,” the judge said.ĭayspring also admitted he tried to bribe the mayor of Grover Beach, a small city south of San Luis Obispo. Shevin argued Friday that Hill did not take any action that benefited Dayspring alone, but rather a group of growers who had all been seeking the exemption. He urged the politician to maintain the exemption, but only for growers like Dayspring who had already received it, writing in a text message: "It’s really important u guys extend the timeframe for submission and don’t allow other people in yet.”Īfter the Board of Supervisors voted 5 to 0 to extend the exemptions, Dayspring said he handed Hill $5,000 in cash outside a restaurant in Avila Beach. The following year, Dayspring gave Hill $5,000 in cash and cannabis products. The board voted unanimously to grant the exemption to growers who had registered with the county before the ban went into effect - a decision that benefited Dayspring, according to his plea agreement. In November 2017, San Luis Obispo supervisors were weighing whether to exempt certain growers from a moratorium on cultivating marijuana on unincorporated county land. He paid Hill an additional $9,000 in cash the following year, the agreement said. In his plea agreement, Dayspring admitted that he first bribed Hill with three $3,000 money orders. He had not been charged with a crime at the time of his death. “He lives with, quite frankly, the death of Adam Hill,” Shevin said.īefore his death, the supervisor acknowledged he’d tried to kill himself after agents searched his government office in March 2020. Hill died of an overdose of cocaine and antidepressants in August 2020, the San Luis Obispo Tribune reported.
“Maybe someone turned him onto the, quote-unquote, game, but he took advantage of it.”Įric Shevin, one of Dayspring’s lawyers, said the supervisor first appealed to the entrepreneur by saying his wife had left him, leaving him without furniture in his home and unable to make his rent. The lawyer, whom they didn’t name, introduced Dayspring in 2016 to Adam Hill, a San Luis Obispo county supervisor, they said.Īttorney Brown Bodner suggested the lawyer told Dayspring to bribe Hill, saying he gave her client “not just incorrect, but frankly illegal advice."īirotte seemed skeptical. He eventually acquired six grow sites and opened dispensaries in several Central Coast cities, ventures that made him millions of dollars.ĭayspring’s attorneys said he had hired a different lawyer to help him navigate a shifting morass of licensing and regulatory hurdles as he looked to expand his businesses. He pleaded guilty in July to bribery and filing a false tax return.īy 2013, Dayspring was supplying an estimated 30 legal dispensaries in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, his attorney wrote. That no matter what was taken from me, I would always have the ability to find security for my family, my partners, my employees and, at the end of the line, myself.” He bought 40 acres of land in the mountains east of Santa Maria, living on his property in a trailer with his two dogs and earning a reputation for growing “first-rate product,” his attorney wrote.ĭayspring told the court Friday that his life became “singularly focused on building a business that was too big to fail. In Dayspring’s case, the bribes paid and favors performed have left a jaded public with the impression, Birotte said, "that, ‘Hey, this is the way it’s supposed to be, but this is the way it’s done.'"ĭayspring began growing small amounts of cannabis around 2007, when he got a prescription for medical marijuana, one of his lawyers, Sandra Brown Bodner, wrote in a sentencing memo. “What’s troubling about this case is it goes to the heart of government process,” Birotte said, noting that just a few blocks from the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, several council members at City Hall have been accused of taking bribes.
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