Applicants question pot permit process
We now know which applicants have won the rights to open prized medical marijuana facilities in the Southeast Region of Pennsylvania. This week the state handed out licenses for dispensaries, which will sell the creams, ointments and tinctures created from the marijuana developing in growing facilities. Those licenses were handed out the week before.
And while Delaware County is in line for two dispensary locations, the county was shut out in the lucrative growing-cultivating operations. In fact, the two licenses designated for the Southeast Region both went to Berks County.
An operation in Delaware County, fronted by the McKee real estate family, came in third in the running.
But the question of which of the 45 applicants in southeastern Pennsylvania would be selected to open a medical marijuana growing facility has spawned a whole new set of questions and a likely appeal from a group that hopes to establish one of those facilities in Pottstown.
For the purposes of awarding medical marijuana grow permits, the commonwealth was divided into six regions. The southeast region was comprised of Philadelphia and seven surrounding counties — Berks, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Lancaster, Montgomery and Schuylkill.
Jon Cohn, CEO of Agronomed Pharmaceuticals LLC, which had proposed a grow facility at 740 Queen St. in Pottstown, said he and his partners are puzzled by the scorecards released by the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
For example, Cohn noted that the application by Holitstic Farms, the company seeking to establish a grow facility on the old Flagg Brass property in West Pottsgrove, scored 670.11.
But, like many applicants, Holistic Farms filed in more than one region.
“Their score in the northwest region was 741.69, and I know for a fact it was the exact same application. How is that possible? The state said location would not be a factor.”
“It’s very baffling,” Cohn.
He also struggled to understand how his company’s application scored higher in the growing, nutrient and processing sections, than the experts from Franklin Labs, which has operations in new Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Colorado, “when, quite frankly, we’ve never done that before.”
Also, “we really spent a lot of our time on our community impact score, working with the borough, PAID, said PDIDA, the police department, The Hill School, to see how we could have the biggest impact,” said Cohn.
“We had a multi-level plan for community impact that focused on economic development,” said Cohn.
“Like most of the applicants, we were going to return 5 percent of profits to the community, but we also developed a partnership with Montgomery County Community College to share research with their aeroponics lab; we were going to buy some of the street cameras the police are erecting, we were working with PAID and PDIDA on revitalizing a block of buildings on High Street, but we only scored 50 out of 100” on the community impact portion of the scorecard.
“But the biggest question is about quality control because it was a check box. It was the only section of the application that did not allow a narrative, but somehow we lost 14 points — based on what?” Cohn asked.
As a result of the unanswered questions about how the ratings on the scorecard were calculated, Cohn said his company has little choice but to appeal the decision, given that there are only 10 days to file an appeal and its the
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