Mayor isn’t showing hand on pot growing

Baldelli-Hunt says City Council must decide on zoning ordinance to allow marijuana cultivation

WOONSOCKET – Despite a local businessman’s repeated requests for relief from the prohibition on indoor pot farms, neither the City Council nor Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt appear poised to make the first move.

The mayor made it plain to councilors on Monday that she isn’t budging from her position on the issue – which is that the council has the full authority to allow indoor cultivation of medical marijuana without a recommendation from the administration.

“Ultimately it is a council decision as to whether they want to move forward or not,” Baldelli-Hunt said. “It’s just a matter of whether the council wants to change the zoning ordinance or not change the zoning ordinance, or as (Councilman Richard) Fagnant said, move forward with a referendum.”

Baldelli-Hunt’s comments came in response to the latest inquiry from Gerry Beyer, manager of the Nyanza Mill, on the status of his request for changes to regulations that prevent the site from being used for indoor cultivation of cannabis.

Beyer first appeared before the council last September with his proposal to bring in a licensed grower to establish a roughly 10,000-square-foot plot on the fourth floor of the mill – a fraction of the space idled by the recent demise of Hanora Spinning, one of the city’s last textile manufacturers.

Last month, the council overwhelmingly approved a resolution instructing Baldelli-Hunt to provide the council with a recommendation on how the panel should proceed. The measure called for

input from the chiefs of the e police and fire departments, d as well as the tax assessor. e The resolution also gave

the administration a deadp line to respond, which was s March 19 – Monday – the a same night Baldelli-Hunt e reaffirmed her position to o the council during a regular e meeting in Harris Hall.

After taking in the maye or’s response to Beyer, Council President Dan Gendron’s indicated that the n council’s position hasn’t

changed, either. n He told Beyer: “As soon as we have the recommendal tion from the administration, t we’ll get back to you.” l Later, Gendron said he was disappointed that the administration had balked at the council’s request, but he defended the panel’s need for guidance on the issue of lifting the ban on indoor marijuana farming.

“The administration is going to have to deal with the ramifications of whatever action we take,” said Gen-

dron.” There could be public safety impacts, taxation impacts, quality of life impacts. We need a recommendation from the mayor and the administration because they have the resources to do this work.”

Gendron said the council is made up of part-time elected officials and it doesn’t have the necessary resources to research the issue properly.

“The mayor has the resources to do these impact studies at her disposal,” the council president said. “We do not.”

Located at 159 Singleton St., the mill Beyer manages was home for many years to Hanora Spinning, which closed for good in November 2016 after its markets were slowly overtaken by cheaper, foreign competition. The company laid off the last of its workers at that time, but it’s still selling off looms and other spinning hardware to overseas concerns.

The loss of Hanora Spinning has left about a third of the mill’s 240,000 square feet of floor space vacant. New York-based First Re- public Corporation of America, which has owned the mill for over 50 years, is exploring all its options for keeping the building profitable, including indoor cultivation of medical marijuana, according to Beyer.

The state Department of Business Regulation, which runs the state’s indoor cultivation program for medical marijuana, says there are only 23 licensed growers, but roughly three times as many applications are pending. The DBR won’t grant a license to any applicant that doesn’t control a site that meets all local zoning and occupancy guidelines.

Indoor cultivation of medical marijuana has been explicitly prohibited under an amendment to the zoning ordinance that was approved by the council in March 2016. At the time, the council’s chief aim was to make it easier to repurpose old mills for indoor agriculture and aquaculture, but the council saw fit to carve out an exclusion for cannabis.