City planning next move on marijuana cultivation

WOONSOCKET — The next phase of the City Council’s effort to open the door to indoor cultivation of medical marijuana will begin on Monday, when the City Council is expected to impanel a committee to draft legislation regulating the practice, councilors say.

Councilman James Cournoyer said the panel reached a consensus during a work session last week to seat a subcommittee whose charge would be to craft an ordinance covering issues that would include the siting of indoor marijuana farms, licensing and fees.

“We’ll draft the legislation and we’ll put it before the council for a vote,” he said. “We may have another work session, or it could go straight to the council, perhaps within the next couple of weeks.”

Indoor cultivation of medical marijuana is legal under state law, and heavily regulated by the state Department of Business Regulation. But the council adopted an amendment to the Zoning Ordinance in March 2016 covering indoor agriculture that specifically carves out a prohibition for cannabis.

Since then, Gerry Beyer, the manager of the 240,000-square-foot Nyanza Mill on Singleton Street, has been urging the council to lift the ban. The mill has been owned for over 50 years by New York-based First Republic Corporation of America and, until recently, had been the home to one of the city’s last textile manufacturing operations, Hanora Spinning.

Beyer, who first approached the council last September, says the mill is now three-quarters empty and losing money. The owners see medical marijuana as a new kind of manufacturing that could save the mill from the fate of so many others – abandonment, neglect and blight.

Beyer says he’s been approached by more than one suitor who already hold a state-issued commercial license to grow medical marijuana, and he’s appeared before the council on multiple occasions to urge members to reconsider the ban.

For months, Beyer’s request seemed mired in politics, as members of the council insisted on obtaining a recommendation from Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt before considering legislation to amend the zoning ordinance to allow cannabis cultivation. The council even passed an ordinance instructing the mayor to provide such a recommendation. The only formal response the council received came from Police Chief Thomas F. Oates III and Fire Chief Paul Shatraw, both of whom said they would approach their duties with regard to an indoor pot farm the same as they would any other business operating in the city.

Officially, neither took a position on indoor cultivation of marijuana. The mayor, meanwhile, insists that lifting the ban is a legislative prerogative that rests entirely in the council’s jurisdiction.

Within the last several weeks, however, the council appears to have abandoned its demand for an administrative recommendation before taking action. Councilman Richard Fagnant may have brought the matter to a head when he introduced a measure to change the phrase “excluding cannabis” to “including cannabis” in the existing indoor agriculture ordinance.

Fagnant submitted the ordinance not once, but twice, doing so most recently at the last meeting of the City Council earlier this month. He was voted down for the second time, with Cournoyer and other members of the council criticizing his approach as overly simplistic.

Cournoyer said it’s still unclear who will serve on the committee to draft an ordinance to lift the ban, but it’s clear that the issue of growing medical marijuana for one of the state-licensed dispensaries requires more finesse than changing a word in the zoning ordinance.

“If we’re going to do this it’s got to be done right, or it’s going to be a disaster,” said Cournoyer. “If the city is doing this, it’s not going to be just for Gerry Beyer. When and if we make this change, it’s going to affect the entire city.”

Generally, said Cournoyer, the council intends to restrict indoor cultivation to industrial zones, but “Singleton Street isn’t the only industrial zone in the city.” A local ordinance should also duplicate some of the regulations covered by the DBR, since the city would have an interest in maintaining a regulatory framework for security and other safeguards in the event the state laws covering indoor cultivation change unexpectedly in the future.

State-issued commercial licenses cost tens of thousands of dollars, said Cournoyer, but the fiscal upside for the city is limited. The only added revenue the city expects would come from taxes on business equipment – in the case of indoor cultivation of cannabis, perhaps some lighting, ventilation and other gear.

That’s why, Cournoyer said, an indoor cultivation ordinance should also address some sort of licensing or host fee for the city.

“The whole notion that we’re going to collect mil-b lions of dollars from this, that’s not going to happen,” said Cournoyer. “We don’t get any incremental revenue from this. We’ll be able to tax some tangible property. That’s it.”