From sewing to growing
As one of the city’s last textile plants shuts down, its operator wants to sow seeds for a new business – marijuana cultivation
It is a commonly held notion in this city that the textile industry belongs to a bygone era, but for Gerry Beyer, not so much.
The manager of the cavernous Nyanza mill at 159 Singleton St., Beyer was still running the Hanora Spinning yarn-making operation at the site, with about two dozen employees, until about 16 months ago. But Hanora Spinning is no more; the workers have been laid off and, for the last few weeks, a crew from a textile company in the United Kingdom has been dismantling the multi-ton yarn-making machines on the shop floor, shipping them overseas.
Beyer, who had worked for Hanora Spinning for 33 years, now helps with the work of dismantling the machines – the same ones he helped assemble a quarter century ago.
“Every time I turn one of those bolts, it feels like I’m cutting off one of my limbs,” says Beyer. “It’s heartbreaking, but I’m beginning to accept it now.”
What Beyer cannot accept is to see the 108-yearold mill where he’s worked most of his adult life morph into another abandoned factory building and left to deteriorate. A handful of other tenants still occupy about two thirds of the space in the 240,000-square-foot, four-story site, but the New York company that owns the building must find a replacement for Hanora Spinning to keep their investment viable.
Beyer and the First Republic Corporation of America, the owner of the mill, see a bridge to the future – in medical marijuana.
They propose an indoor cultivation operation as a new kind of manufacturing to take the place of Hanora Spinning.
The question is, will city officials cross that bridge with them.
“It’s critical that this building has to make money,” says Beyer. As he looks across the Blackstone River from a window on the top story of the mill, Beyer adds, “The last thing I want to see is for it to become like some of these other mills just down the street. People just walk away.”
Ordinance prohibits pot growing
For Beyer and First Republic, however, the bridge to the future is looking more like a roadblock at the moment. Although indoor cultivation of marijuana for medical use is legal in Rhode Island – nearly two dozen sites, licensed and regulated by the state Department of Business Regulation, are already in operation – the practice is explicitly prohibited under the city’s Zoning Ordinance.
Beyer, who says he’s been approached by investors whose applications to grow indoor pot are already in the DBR pipeline, first approached city officials about lifting the ban last September.
Last month, Beyer asked the City Council if there had been any progress on the issue. Members of the council said they were waiting for members of Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt’s administration to provide them with a policy directive indicating how the issue should be handled. The mayor responded by suggesting that the council had the full authority to amend the zoning ordinance on its own and should present the administration with a recommendation for feedback.
The council shifted the political onus back on the administration two weeks later, passing a resolution instructing the mayor to provide the administration with a recommendation on the whether to modify the ban on indoor cannabis cultivation no later than March 19. Among other things, the council wants Police Chief Thomas F. Oates III and Tax Assessor Elyse Pare to weigh in on the pros and cons.
They’re also asking for a model ordinance from the planning department “in the event the city decides to allow indoor marijuana cultivation,” the resolution says.
While Beyer is anxiously awaiting some movement on the issue, he thinks one of the factors that’s slowing it down is misinformation about what it is he actually proposes.
He’s heard debate on talk radio in which callers seem to think cannabis grown in a facility such as he envisions would somehow find its way into the hands of children for illicit, recreational use – a claim that’s outlandish as far as he’s concerned. For one thing, recreational use of marijuana is illegal in Rhode Island. Lawmakers have introduced bills to legalize recreational cannabis during each of the last several sessions, but all have died and so far there’s no sign lawmakers are planning to take the leap anytime soon – even though neighboring Massachusetts has already done so.
If an indoor marijuana grow sets up shop in the mill, Beyer says it would be located on the fourth floor and policed ‘round the clock by armed guards. There would also be surveillance cameras around the perimeter of the building and other safeguards to minimize odors – all in keeping with regulations promulgated for indoor cultivation by the DBR.
Above all, the marijuana would be grown exclusively for the state’s so-called compassion centers – sites where patients who have a doctor’s prescription to be treated for various medical conditions with medical marijuana can buy the product. There are currently three, one each in Portsmouth, Warwick and Providence, but state regulators are planning for more.
“This is not open to the public,” says Beyer. “Cultivators will only grow for the compassion centers.”
Location would fit into state’s model
The DBR’s Norman Birenbaum, principal economic and policy analyst for the state’s medical marijuana program, says he doesn’t know who wants to set up shop in the Nyanza mill, but he’s toured the site and thinks its a very attractive location for an indoor cultivation operation.
He says it’s entirely possible that Beyer has been approached by someone with an approved application – but not necessarily a license. A handful of applications have been approved with specific sites in mind, but for one reason or another, the applicants have lost access to those locations. Now it’s likely they’re looking for new sites before their approvals lapse.
What’s certain, Birenbaum says, is that without zoning approval and an occupancy permit from the city for a specific location, no DBR-approved application will be granted a state license for indoor marijuana farming. DBR requires proposed grow sites meet the agency’s strict standards.
Not only are DBR’s security requirements exceedingly demanding, the agency enforces strict standards designed to minimize nuisance, fire hazard and promote the general welfare of abutters.
“You can literally stand outside one of our buildings close enough to touch it an not smell anything outside because of the way we address odor,” says Birenbaum.
Beyer’s plan for the Nyanza mill also jibes with the general direction DBR wants to move to promote supply for the compassion centers. The current model is built on homebased growers, and the state would like to see it more centralized.
With nearly 20,000 approved medical marijuana users, each authorized to grow up to 12 plants, the home-based model is unwieldy and hard to regulate for odors, security, packaging and other manufacturing standards designed to protect the public, according to Birenbaum. Regulators also believe too much homegrown weed is finding its way into the black market.
Currently there are only 23 licensed growers in the state, many in the Warwick area, which has been rather welcoming of the budding industry. More than 70 other applications have been approved, but not yet licensed, according to Birenbaum.
DBR has also announced that it has put a freeze on new applications while it evaluates how the calculus of supply and demand shakes out among the existing pool of applicants, licensed and otherwise.
Birenbaum notes that Gov. Gina Raimondo’s proposed budget supports DBR’s vision for a more centralized approach to growing medical marijuana. If approved, it could quintuple the number of authorized compassion centers in the state from three to 15. That might sound like a lot, said Birenbaum, but there were only about 2,000 approved medical marijuana patients when the first three compassion centers opened, and there are now 10 times that number.
The current patient-to-dispensary ratio is about a quarter of that of other states where medical marijuana is distributed, he said.
Birenbaum said the existing cultivation sites are located in all kinds of real estate, some newly designed and built expressly for indoor cultivation, and some old, including retrofitted mills. The DBR describes the Singleton Street mill as something of an ideal location, especially if the state ever decides to issue permits for growing operations larger than 10,000 square feet. That hasn’t happened yet, but state law makes provision for five classes of licenses, including “C” and “D” permits, for facilities as large as 20,000 square feet, neither of which has ever been issued.
“Anything with open space and high ceilings,” said Birenbaum. “It’s a pretty good tenant to have. It’s a pretty valuable cash crop. Our security requirements are pretty robust. If we ever open it up to C and D permits, that building would lend itself to those as well.”
Medical marijuana may be a economic lifeline for underutilized mill and retail space, but Scott Gibbs, director of the Economic Development Foundation of Rhode Islands, says communities have to decide whether it’s the kind of economic development they want.
“Obviously there are a lot of communities that are getting into this, and that’s fine,” said Gibbs, who manages Highland Corporate Park. “But it’s definitely a public policy issue, no doubt about it.”
“This is not open to the public,” says Beyer. “Cultivators will only grow for the compassion centers.”
“It’s a pretty good tenant to have. It’s a pretty valuable cash crop.”