Okay, we're recording. Great. Okay. My name is James Pepper. I'm the chair of the Vermont Cannabis Control Board. Today is October 22nd, 2021. It's 11 a.m. And I call this meeting to order. It's a few administrative details. Our advisory subcommittee process is winding down. I think at this point, only social equity is going to continue to meet on its regular schedule throughout the rest of the month. We will continue to call subcommittees and the full advisory committee together as needed. And once again, I'd just like to thank them for all of their service and dedication and commitment to this process. Today, once again, we begin a new phase of our work. Bryn has given each of us assignments on specific decision points that we have researched on our own time. And we are bringing recommendations to the full board at today's meeting and at kind of this next phase of our work at future meetings. And today's decision points are going to be around application requirements. Starting next week, we're going to start holding meetings twice a week on Wednesdays and Fridays. The physical space will be 89 Main Street in Montpelier. We will also live stream these meetings and record them and post them to our website. All the agendas will be available on our website. And there's also a way to sign up for kind of to add your name to our distribution list if you'd like them emailed to you as well. We're going to continue to hold our after hours public comments meetings, you know, on the last Tuesday of each month. The next one is on this coming Tuesday, the 26th and the link will be available on our website. If you'd like to join physical space will be our office 89 Main Street. So before we turn to the agenda, I'd like to ask Bryn to give us a quick executive director's update. Sure thing. So this is just going to be very brief. I wanted to remind everybody kind of repeat our notification that the board made last week that due to a back end operating system upgrade by the agency of digital services, we did lose some website content between October 4th and October 14th. All of the content to our website that was edited or submitted during those 11 days was lost in the operating system upgrade, including public comments, but not limited to public comments. So as a result, the board encourages anybody who submitted a public comment during the period between October 4th and October 14th to submit that comment again. And as chair Pepper just mentioned, the board is going to have an after hours public comment period next Tuesday, October 26th from six to seven. And that's another way to reach the board and submit your comments. My other the other thing I wanted to remind everyone of is that the board put out an RFI for the adult use cannabis license application portal and database project. And we put that out on October 5th. And that is the first step in our process towards soliciting proposals for a web portal for our licensing software, public facing database and other software needs that the board is going to have as we stand up the regulated market. That RFI has been posted to the buildings and general services website and also our social media pages. And it's also on our website and so far we've received several responses responses to the RFI are due today. But as a reminder, no vendor is going to be pre qualified, exempted or selected based on their response or non response to the RFI. That's all I have. Okay. Has everyone had an opportunity to review the minutes from 1015? I take a motion to approve the minutes. Motion to approve the minutes of 1015. Second. All in favor. All right. Let's turn to the agenda then. So again, today we're going to look at our application requirements for all of our license types. And I'm going to start with a discussion around provisional licenses. Again, these are the licenses that a person would get prior to receiving their full license and allow them to kind of make some, have some guarantee from the board that they will ultimately receive a license. So I'm just going to pull this up. So just in making my, in making these bringing these recommendations before you all that here's the kind of the things that I did, you know, kind of on my own time, I reviewed the application requirements in Massachusetts and New Jersey, both of which have this kind of conditional slash provisional licensing process. And so I thought, you know, looking at what they did would be informative with respect to the use of criminal history records. I did kind of, I looked at a somewhat old 2018 summary of all the adult use states that included Alaska, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington and looked, and I'll have a summary of those when we get to it. I also met with Jen Flanagan from Vermont or sorry, VS Strategies. I met with Brynn and David. I have met multiple times with Department of Financial Regulation, Department of Tax, Office of Professional Regulation and VSECU, which currently banks with our existing dispensaries. And then we also, I also held a banking round table in September with any, the invitation went out to kind of DFR's mailing list about any banking institution that might be curious about cannabis. So we got solicited some feedback from various financial institutions. So this is related to provisional, my first couple of slides related to this provisional licensing process. The way that I see this is what we would want to do on a provisional licensing basis is ensure that whoever's applying doesn't have anything in their history or any associations that would be categorically disqualifying. You know, I don't need to know, we don't, as a board, I don't think we need to know things like location of the establishment or that they've secured their local permitting. What we need to know is that this organization, this entity can comply with the Coal Memo, and I know it's been rescinded but the FinCEN guidance has kind of, you know, incorporated a lot of the Coal Memo points. And then we have these two other additional, you know, disqualifying events that are part of Act 164 that the applicant presently poses a threat to public safety or the proper functioning of the regulated market. And we also have the ownership limitations. This is the kind of one license per applicant rule. So all of the kind of recommendations that I made are to try and get at whether one of these disqualifying events is in an applicant's history. So what I see for the provisional license is you have to designate the type of license you're seeking, including the tier. And if you're doing a cultivation license, you have to distinguish between indoor and outdoor. Documentation that the cannabis establishment is registered to do business in Vermont. The federal tax identification number, you know, some of the folks that I talked to also said that we should include social security numbers on this. Just by way of reference, all of these came from Massachusetts. So this is all part of the Massachusetts kind of provisional licensing process. Information about the cannabis establishment, including its legal name, articles of the organization, bylaws, all people having director and direct control. Any kind of contractual relationship that conveys director and direct control. Any individual who's named as part of these other recommendations also has to disclose any interest in another application in Vermont. So this would be trying to get at that one license per applicant rule. And also documentation about for everyone named whether they have an interest in a organization or a cannabis establishment outside of Vermont. And I think this really speaks to kind of some cold memo and FinCEN priorities. We would want to know if there's any negative actions or, you know, license denials or anything that's happening in another jurisdiction for any of the entities that have director and direct control. And then also a list of anyone who's contributed capital resources. I think probably we should limit this to above 10% to the cannabis establishment, whether they have direct control or indirect control or not. So that's slide one. Slide two, this is more provisions. So criminal and administrative history records for everyone who's listed kind of in the application. And I have a separate slide on what information we're going to request in order to get that criminal and administrative history records. Assign authorization to share the info with appropriate agencies. Proof that anyone who's significantly involved or has a financial interest is over 21 years old. And of course there's a catch all any other requirements that we deem necessary. So the one that I really wanted to talk to you all about is also confirmation of tax compliance, which is prerequisite of most licensure in Vermont. This is a sticky subject because we have this legacy cash issue and we have this issue of cannabis profits that people likely have not been paying taxes on. And yet we're actively trying to incorporate them into the regulated market. So I'm curious what we want to do on this. This is the one piece where I feel like, you know, all this other stuff is pretty objective and I'm happy to take recommendations on anything else. This is one where I think we're going to need to discuss whether this is necessary, whether it's necessary for all license types and what we should do specifically about cannabis profits. So I'm wondering if it's necessary for the provisional part of the process and, you know, because what people can do is then make an agreement with the Department of Taxes, right? So in the provisional process, they don't have to disclose that, but for licensure they do, is that significantly different or is that? So I think that could be a way to do it. The problem that I think we might run into is that if someone is entering into an agreement with the State Department of Taxes, then they have to also do something on the federal side. They're kind of like admitting that they haven't been paying taxes. And I just wonder if that implicates them in a federal tax evasion scheme. How have in your conversations, how have other states approached this? So when I spoke to Jen, they specifically disqualified people with cannabis dispensing offenses because of this very reason. Of course, I think that's not where we want to go. I think we actively, you know, our social equity applicant criteria, for instance, includes cannabis dispensing offenses. So we would on the one hand be saying you're a social equity applicant and on the other hand we're saying you're categorically disqualified unless you pay taxes. So maybe what I don't know is what would cause the Department of Taxes to know that someone didn't pay taxes. So if they've been operating in cash, then, you know, that unless it was in a bank account somewhere that may not be disclosed, I can see where there might be other income or somebody didn't file their taxes that we might ask them to then write that. But I'm wondering if there's any documentation or record that they've, or are you saying that because now they're saying, okay, I've been doing this and I'm bringing experience to this, obviously I've made income somewhere. I think where it would get tricky is if someone had a conviction for dispensing or trafficking of cannabis and there's no tax record for them. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of different, I think, unique situations based off folks that have been participating in the legacy market. Are they doing so as their primary source of income, their only source of income? Or are they doing so as a supplemental source to their full tax abiding nine to five job, you know what I mean? And from that perspective, I think if somebody's tax compliant, or their business is tax compliant, separate from their interest in being a legacy grower, what can we really do other than look at what they've presented to the tax department with respect to them being personally compliant and if they have a business separate from, you know, cannabis production, they're also compliant there as well. But what did you say would trigger on the federal side? I'm just, it was Ray, when I was talking to one of those folks, they just said, you know, because I thought, well, couldn't you just have some sort of state plan worked out or some sort of true up amount that people pay just so you don't have to detail every transaction, all the income, you could just say $500 and wipe the slate clean. The person I was talking to, I forget who it was exactly, just said no, because then you're essentially admitting that you haven't been paying taxes and you can clear yourself on the state side, but then are you opening yourself up to federal liability for not paying taxes? Well, I definitely don't want to put people at risk federally, so maybe we don't need. I would say this might be an issue for our banks and others, our financial institutions. Maybe they can have their own, you know, their own requirements. I'm wondering if we should say something along the lines of your in compliance with taxing, kind of like what you were saying, Kyle, on everything else except for maybe illicit profits related to cannabis. And maybe we do it that way. Maybe we require it for integrated license holders or for retailers that they need to be 100% tax compliant, you know. Yeah, we'll never get the legacy market we hope to capture if we require too much of it on the cultivation end. Yeah, but I like that there's sort of a balance that you struck there between everything that is not cannabis related I have reported. Right. Of course I didn't report the cannabis related stuff. Right, okay. So I'm going to change this to confirmation of tax compliance except for cannabis profits. And we can, I can't change it in real time, but I think it's probably taking notes. Okay. Can we go back to the FinCEN and call memo for a second? I'm wondering how this, how this works with our social equity plans. Are there, is there conflict here between some of like the preventing revenue from the sale of marijuana going to criminal enterprises? And some of this may be my, my ignorance about certain language, but you know, if we're asking if we're saying that under our social equity plan that we are inviting people in who have otherwise had cannabis offenses. Is this, when you're presenting this, are you talking about going forward? I think you were talking about their history. Right. I was, yeah, I mean, I have a slide on how we should deal with criminal history offenses, criminal historic convictions. But we do need to have something, you know, I think that's where you get to all the ownership interest and financial interest to make sure that everyone who's participating, moving forward, isn't diverting to some sort of criminal organization. Just for members of the public, we are going to have a public comment period. So it's, but not, not for a little while. Just, just putting it out there. Can I ask you a question, Pepper? And I think it might have been on your, your next slide. I'm thinking about direct control and indirect control. Yeah. And just, I'm wondering your thoughts on what indirect control means. I'm just trying to get your thoughts or our thoughts on the record because some folks in this provisional license, I would imagine will seek business technical legal assistance and doing so. But, and we can put together guidance documents on what a lot of these terms mean, but for the folks listening and everybody that might tune in at some point. What does indirect control mean from a ownership perspective here? This is one of those terms where I think if we understand the concepts, then we can define it specifically in role. But yeah, I think it would be, this is, this comes from Massachusetts that has a definition of an entity having indirect control. So we could also pull that up. But it would really be, I think, if you had some sort of veto authority, but you're not involved in day to day operations, but you, you know, it's written into your kind of ownership agreement that you can control certain decision points. And that makes sense. I just, I'm assuming we'll have a number of small businesses that understand that nucleus. Right. And who might have indirect control and be a non-voting or voting member of an organization. But folks aren't going to have, depending on the size of the business and perspective employees down the road, you know, things could change. Just want to make sure people understood. And for the provisional process, we expect applicants to have some of this information, but potentially not all, right? Like they're, I think, kind of the goal is so that people could go and get. Yeah. Yeah. So what I would say on that piece is I don't assume that everyone seeking provisional license will know all of their business arrangements. They, because they might need the provisional license to go out and get some more investors, for instance. However, I would say that that would, those new investors might make you categorically disqualified eventually. So the provisional license kind of says, you know, at this point in time, based on this information, you can move forward. If this, if the circumstances change as in if you're bringing on new people with direct or indirect control, they'll have to go through this process. So it's kind of like a point in time, you're good with, you know, with this folk, with these people. If you change the circumstances too much, then you might not be able to convert your provisional license into a full license with those new people that you've added. Okay, that makes sense. And on the denials, you talked about business interests and other jurisdictions, and I think you mentioned denials and other jurisdictions. I assume we would consider what their denying license is based on. Right, we would have, exactly. That's how I see this is really like, you know, we just need to know if there is some sort of adverse administrative employment action or something else going on. This would be our opportunity to know about that and to, and give us discretion to determine whether or not it would be categorically disqualifying for remand license. I mean, is that how you all are thinking about the provisional licensing process? Just kind of like, do the kind of record checks and the financial checks and just make sure that, you know, there's nothing that we see that would automatically disqualify someone from licensure. Yes, knowing that they might have to come back with additional information. Right. If they have new investors, new record checks and so forth when they do the actual licensing process. Yeah, and I even like it from the perspective of keeping it broad, just if we're talking about cultivation from an indoor-outdoor perspective and not having them pick certain tier spam calling me, sorry. Because going through this provisional license process, they might understand with a little bit more specificity on what they can do from a cultivation perspective. Yeah. What's your thought on the 10% of director and direct control? I think in Massachusetts has that same, so it's baked into their director and direct control definitions. I think our legislation actually is pretty good on defining who might be an interested party or a significantly interested party or having director and direct control. But certainly the 10% is the threshold that I would want. I think generally speaking, DFR requires a 20% ownership, so this is more intensive than that. But I think we would tie that into these definitions. Do you think that the value of the ownership makes a difference, whether it's 10% or more or 1% or more? No. I think you could have less than 10%, but you might still have direct or indirect control. I think this is going to take some further clarification. I think conceptually though, if you have over a 10% interest or you have some sort of controlling authority that's been conveyed to you by the entity, then we need to know about you. Does this seem too onerous for folks? I think most small cultivators will be sole proprietorship, so I don't think that that's going to be too onerous for a small cultivator. It's these larger grow facilities, it's the larger retailers. I think this could get pretty prescriptive. But I think these are all kind of FinCENG slash coal memo directives. I think on first blush, if you're looking at the text of what's required, you might think it's a lot, but as you reference, if you're a small cultivator, you start knocking these off pretty quickly. It shouldn't be overly burdensome, I think. Okay. Well, I think before we take any real votes on this, I think we should also look at some of the criminal and administrative history records, because it's tied into this. So suitability standards for licensure. There's a couple of different models that are out there. One is kind of a give full discretion to the board to figure out whether a crime or a conviction should be disqualifying. OPR, for instance, does this. They say, you know, any conviction that's related to the practice of the profession or felonies. So felonies are disqualifying. And then they have discretion to say or a crime related. They don't have a list of crimes. And I know that the legislature, our legislature, thinks that that can be an unfair process. It provides too much discretion to kind of the oversight body. And it doesn't put people on notice.  Because of some conviction in my past. So what other states have done, you know, they kind of have either, and these are all specific to cannabis. They kind of have a model of either having a felony, a look back period for felonies, a look back period for misdemeanors. And then some of them have enumerated lists like these crimes. The problem with the enumerated list is you sometimes get into this problem of trying to compare an out-of-state crime, the elements of an out-of-state crime with an in-state crime, and to see if they're substantially similar. Like, you know, not everyone's crimes, state crimes are the same. So, you know, we could have an embezzlement felony charge, for instance.  But some of them are missing in Arizona. And so if someone's applying from Arizona, is that crime substantially the same as our crime? So in some ways having an enumerated list is not a real kind of benefit. It's easy enough to navigate, but it's not as straightforward as you might think. California does the kind of OPR model. Anything substantially related to the qualifications, functions, or duties of the business. I feel like that feels like, I don't know what your preference is, but that general statement I feel like is pretty general. You know what I mean? Right. It could mean a lot of different things, depending on the business. It'd be a slippery slope. So I can just cut to the chase here. I have a combination of all these, and I can just kind of pull it up for you. So I would say that someone is presumptively disqualified. And again, there's a way to overcome that presumption, which I have on the next slide. But, you know, we again have to look at the proper functioning of the regulated market and offenses related to public safety. That's the charge. We're allowed to get, we're allowed to look at criminal industry records, and we can't deny anyone unless it relates to the proper functioning of the regulated market. Or a threat, a present threat to public safety, I think it is. So to me, presumptively disqualifying convictions would be any state or federal offense involving fraud, deceit, or embezzlement. And that would be kind of Coal Memo, proper functioning of the regulated market. Any other offense that implicates the Coal Memo, you know, I think one of the Coal Memo restrictions is that you can't be diverting the children. So we could look at, like, it could be presumptively disqualifying if you have a dispensing to youth conviction. The trafficking of regulated substances. Again, there's a difference between mere dispensing and trafficking. Trafficking involves a larger quantity. So, and I exclude cannabis from that. So offenses related to public safety. And again, I'm excluding nonviolent drug offenses from that. Just have a simple look back. For misdemeanors, anything older than two years, we don't care about. For felonies, anything older than five years, we don't care about. And you see there's this listed, nonlisted category that's in here. The listed offenses are defined by statute in Vermont. I think there's 33 of them. And they essentially are interpersonal, usually violent crimes. There's an element of violence in them. Certainly an element of interpersonal. They're not property crimes for the most part. So I would say if you have a listed offense or if you have an offense, a misdemeanor within the last two years, or a felony within the last five years, or you have any of those top three offenses, then you move on to this next slide. Can I ask again about the Cole memo piece? Yeah. I see that one of the Cole memo in that Cole memo list is preventing violence and use of firearms in the cultivation and distribution of marijuana. So here's where I need a little education. So if somebody was cultivating and has a charge for that but then had weapons in their home, could they have a charge that in their background includes both of those things and then they would be precluded from entering the market now? Well, no one is categorically precluded from criminal history records. You just move to a higher level of review.  And I think that that could be presumptively disqualifying. And then we would move towards this slide where we consider evidence of rehabilitation. And so this is the criteria that Massachusetts says. I'm not wedded to it, but I think it actually gets at a lot of the things that you would look at if you were, for instance, a state's attorney looking at an expungement application. And so to me, this is kind of a decent list. And so anyone who has any of those presumptively disqualifying offenses, they would then submit to the board evidence of rehabilitation. And we could look at all of these and decide, okay, this person could clearly participate in this without any problem. Any thoughts on any of this? I'm pretty comfortable with your proposal. I think having this opportunity for review or appeal, whenever we want to call it, if somebody is presumptively found to not qualify for us to kind of make that case-by-case ability to seek a license is important, just recognizing that people find themselves in unique situations. And if you look at this one, it pretty much brings in elements of all of these. I actually think it's probably more lenient on the use of criminal history records than any other state. I mean, I don't have the list of enumerated disqualifying offenses for the two states that have them. But I really do think that this strikes a balance between what's required for proper functioning and present risk public safety. And it puts people on notice pretty well which offenses implicate those. And it gives everyone a potential path. Yeah, no, I agree. I think we'll have to spell out in guidance what those cold memo implications or issues could be for some folks who might find themselves in the situation like Julie mentioned, so they know. I have questions about the how, but I think that we will get to that at some point. Yeah. What information we get, how we get it, what we're using to consider and who it is that's doing that consideration. We could change this first one. Any state or federal offense, including fraud, deceit, or embezzlement to felony convictions for fraud, deceit, or embezzlement because there are some pretty minor petty crimes that could involve fraud like writing a bad check, for instance. Yeah. And so we could change that to just felony convictions. I'd be certainly comfortable with that. I'd be comfortable with that change, yeah. Okay. And then just, this is the kind of specific information that I think we need in order to get at any criminal administrative history. So nothing to, you know, knowing that I passed this through Sony, real kind of like glaring omissions or red flags. These are all the FBI and the CIC requirements, right? Yeah. These specifically came from Massachusetts, but, you know, they're all kind of copy and pasted from one another. Looks fine to me. Okay. Is there anything else? I remember our order. I think next is Julie, Julie. Okay. Okay. I'm always so surprised when like you plug it in and it works. So I looked at sort of the, I looked at a couple of things. One was the baseline application requirements in the baseline requirements for an operating plan and then also buffer zones. So I'll kind of start with how I, I'll start with my line of thinking just so that you all can follow along. So I looked back at our mission and vision and tried to think about what we can accomplish through our application process that directly ties to that, you know, what related to social equity in terms of like accessibility or related to small cultivators in terms of how, you know, how much we're asking them to document or acquire and all of those types of things. So I looked at what our mission and vision and our sort of ultimate goals were. Thought about those, looked at the directives in Act 164 and did a regional comparison, what Main and Mass are doing. Looked at some states that have some experience who have probably retooled their applications over time. I looked at more states than this. These are just sort of the ones that I looked at chiefly. And then I looked at our RFI thinking, so at the end all of this has to go into a system that's usable. Some just outset general considerations that I think we want to have in mind for this conversation is that ease of use and the guidelines that will ultimately develop. So everything we decide we want to put in the application, what is that going to look like to the end user and what they understand and what do we need to do so that they can understand what's required. We should also probably consider some level of translation services and accessibility for folks with disabilities and constantly considering our alignment with values and mission and what other information do we want to collect. So while we have someone filling out paperwork, which most people don't like to do, what else can we collect at that time that might be good for benchmarking for us. So in terms of the baseline application requirements, all applications should include, and also I looked at this after the provisional licensing. People have gone out, they've gotten their investors, they've gone most of the way. This is sort of like the last step in their process. And also I should note that absent from this are the details about social equity applications because we have more, I think, feedback and work to do on those specifics in terms of this part of it. But all should include some confirmation of local approval, compliance with local zoning bylaws or an agreement to remedy any outstanding issues that they have before opening compliance with buffer zones, which I'll talk about in a moment if we decide to have something on those. Business registration with the Secretary of State's office, which I think is going to be required for multiple lines of the application. And then any required insurance, so workers' compensation, general liability and any other insurance that's required based on that particular type of business. I had in here proof of standing with the Vermont Department of Taxes. We've had that conversation now. Documentation of possession of the business location, so their lease agreement or purchase agreement, completion of any required inspection. So if there's a local or agency to inspect the premises before it can be occupied, if fire safety needs to inspect it or if the Department of Health needs to inspect it for some reason or any other state agency, this was just a, for example, list. And then I think we also want proof that they've already registered with any sort of third-party tracking system that we decide that is part of our regulations and demonstration that their POS system, because I think we've talked about that in compliance enforcement, is going to read with the other systems that they're going to. Certainly completion of any trainings or certifications required by the regulations, the background check release. So if they have additional folks that they need to have background check before opening. And then there should be a series of acknowledgments. The reasonable care, there was one state that had a reasonable care acknowledgement saying I'm submitting this application and I have done my best effort in making sure that all these people that are on this list are able to be part of this program. Certainly a statement of truthfulness, which I think you're going to talk about, Pepper. And then other census data that's confidential. I think we should consider what type of data we want, whether it's gender identity or race or income or other things that we might want to be able to demonstrate what the market looks like. And part of this is also tying back to our social equity. We'll have some of this data for our social equity applicants, but do we need it in a broader scale? And I think the answer to that is probably yes. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, again, I'm all for collecting data and information so long as we have a plan to use it. Yes, and it would need to be, and this is where, I mean I didn't specifically list it because I don't know what our systems are going to be capable of, but we don't know where from their application. Because we don't need to know that a particular licensee, except for social equity applicants, has a particular sort of identity, but we might want to know on a broad scale what the identities of our applicants are. Yeah. So some of that would be pending what our systems are able to do for us. Great. Do you want me to move on to buffer zones? I have a question. What about reasonable care and then even moving back to local acknowledgement, local approval? Did you contemplate any thoughts on like a community action outreach plan for prospective license holders? And I'm thinking like in the retail sense I think other jurisdictions, some required or I know some folks who work in ancillary businesses with these businesses, I think or so on and so forth ask these folks to help unpack how they intend to be part of their local community. And I'm just wondering your thoughts there. So I did. And I think that that's probably part of their operations plan more so than the general baseline application. Cool. I would imagine that that would be part of sort of their general business plan. And I think that there is some outreach that we need to do in the legislation to support businesses in understanding what it is we're looking for. Okay. I know that these businesses want to be considered part of the community, not just a cannabis dispensary on the peripherals of a municipality. So how do we use carrots to foster that kind of relationship where there may be tension in certain municipalities? I do know that there are some states that require community meeting. So I didn't, I considered that for this and ultimately decided that I think that most of those processes are already in place. So if you're having, if your permit is going to be approved by your local select board then there's already a public comment period in place. The zoning board, the public comment period is already, so there's already options within our existing systems for people to share their concerns if they have them about a business and for the business to respond. Okay. Is the kind of like record keeping cash management stuff in your presentation like the kind of like operating plan? I don't necessarily have language, I mean I, I was just yeah, mine was just the additional checklist, I don't see it called to be ever since, yeah, yeah, yeah. So just if we're ready, go on to it. So I mentioned buffer zones before, so we'll move on to that. I've had multiple conversations with folks in the medical and prevention community and kind of looked back at our vision again. I looked at a variety of other states. Most of those are, you know, 500 to 1,000 square feet from a school, some define school as day care, they also include houses of worship. It really does run the gamut. It's an organization called Getting It Right from the Start. In their local score, scorecard, they give full points for a locality that has 600 feet or more from a school. And that I believe said K-12 school. Prevention Works recommended 1,000 feet from both schools and any places where children gather. What I'll share with you all and this is a recommendation that's absolutely up for discussion is a buffer zone of 500 feet to be measured from the property boundary of a K-12 school. So think about what a property boundary of a school is beyond, so it would be the edge of the athletic fields or whatever that property boundary is to the property boundary of a cannabis establishment. Measured along the normal right of way. So what I hear the concern is that is children passing or people passing a cannabis establishment. So I'm not sure if it matters. I'm thinking of the different schools in my area or around Vermont that I've been to. I'm not sure if it matters if a cannabis establishment is through the woods, beyond the athletic fields, and in a part of town that someone's never going to walk by so much as right next to the school. I think that's what we're trying to get at. So that's why I recommended that. And I also, you know, we heard in the municipal round table that towns would like the ability to make some decisions for their community because the landscape of the communities are so different. So I'm also recommending that a town may reduce the buffer zone by local zoning ordinance or increase it but not more than a thousand feet. I think one of the issues and I, the K-12 schools one of the issues that I had including childcares or places of worship is that those places I mean, childcares in particular sometimes are in retail store firms. And they might arrive and then leave and the cannabis establishment might be there longer. So I just, I wasn't I wasn't convinced that that particular age group was particularly at risk, you know, the pre-K and younger. And I wasn't convinced that that was something we could actually ultimately track in any meaningful way. Is there any data that you review that kind of that you can glean from that how effective buffer zones really are? So most of that data is really about advertising. So when I look at buffer zones I think, okay, here's the location. The next conversation we have to have is what can that location have in the window or on the storefront? What does the advertising look like? So and I think that's kind of what I'm gleaning from reading about tobacco and alcohol too. So for buffer zones for cannabis establishment we already know that you can't be in the establishment if you're under 21, right? That's not true for places that sell alcohol necessarily except for maybe the state liquor stores or tobacco. So kids are walking into a convenience store and are still exposed to the advertising where that may not be true inside a cannabis establishment. So what's on the outside? You know, I think we need to have a conversation when we get to advertising probably sandwich boards within a thousand feet of a school probably shouldn't be allowed that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean I've driven by the dispensary in Montpelier a thousand times, never even knew it was there until someone told me it was the other day. I like your, no matter where we land in this conversation of a buffer zone, I like the ability for towns to either reduce especially in small towns where the whole town is within a couple city blocks. You're never gonna I don't want these, if we're trying to normalize a lot of cannabis usage and kind of unlock the fear that a lot of folks still have. Forcing them outside of their communities into certain areas is not something I really want to see happen. So I think allowing towns to make that decision for themselves from a buffer perspective knowing their makeup better than we do is something that's important. And that's precisely what happened in the municipal roundtable. There were towns that said please make the buffer zone 1,000 feet because we are a densely populated city and then there were smaller towns that said can we have no buffer zone because we would like to be able to we only have one small downtown and that's our only place for an establishment. And this is to, I only considered this for retail establishments. Yeah, I just want them I want retail establishments to feel like they're being treated as part of their community. And not some monster in the corner. Well, for me when I was thinking about buffer zones and how we should be thinking about this, I went back to the governor's commission, his marijuana commission's report and they said do one of two things, one follow the kind of state what is it the state law on selling on school grounds kind of drug-free school zone law or do what they're doing for the medical dispensaries. And so this actually this proposal threads an between those two actually so the the state drug-free zone school zone is 500 feet from the edge of the border of the school property and then and it's just restricted to K through 12 schools and then the dispensary rule is a thousand feet from a school or a childcare facility. And that is like as the crow flies right like a radius so Massachusetts has something like that but they've also defined what a barrier is so if there's like a river or a mountain or a highway like that doesn't count. I was trying to not be quite so prescriptive. No, I think this to me is the kind of reasonable middle ground between those two and it makes a decent amount of sense to me and it allows some flexibility. So I support this. I support it too. Excellent. Good work. Are we talking about are we talking about operating plans? I don't have the list. Yes, that sounds good. Alright, I will carry on then. Alright, so the legislation requires that businesses submit to us an operating plan and it has some prescription of what must be included in that. I think there's other information that we want to capture. So of course main point of contact business name and what they intend to do business as their type of organization and the organizing documents so corporation documents so that sort of thing. I think for us particularly in the first round we're going to want a timeline for opening. I think about that market structure spreadsheet which is complicated and lovely but had all of that random and so I think that timeline for opening will help us with that and then location. I think by the time folks are submitting an operating plan they've gone pretty far in their thought process on this. So we want an executive summary that has a business overview their hours of operation and also in my imagination and this may not be true like some of this goes through the town as well like the town when they're approving gets to see this which is why I included hours of operation because they do have the ability to write zoning rules about that and then of course I think we want some description of the products and services to be sold for certain entities their pricing strategy and payment options you know in the types of like for testing the types of testing to be done and then I think Kyle's going to talk more about like the cultivation so I won't speak to that. We'll want organization and management information so all of the owners and affiliates but also the types of position and staffing levels and their general roles and responsibilities and the decision making structure if it's substantially different than the way you know like if it's a corporation for example and the reason for that is for that for me that ties back to the social equity so we want to know that a social equity applicant is actually part of the decision making structure and they can speak to that in a business plan and then of course the hiring training plan including safety training and the responsible vendor training it will require them to do and then general compliance plans compliance plans for sanitation, materials handling, storage and record keeping and how they'll control their inventory and in general so this is probably more general than the banking information that I think you're going to speak to in my mind this is sort of like a general overview of their business their general sources of capital throughout like their plan for the year their financial projections for the year, any banking relationships that they have and what they intend to invest in their business if they have a plan for that for the first year or for the year I think this would be a good time for the organizations to submit any advertising and marketing plan that they have so that we can approve that at the time of licensing and then I would really like and this was in some of the it was spoken to mostly in financial information but I would really like to see that businesses have thought through some sort of emergency shutdown or staffing or supply chain interruption or an abrupt business closure would probably all think of businesses in our communities that have just suddenly shut their doors so what happens to the contents inside the business and again not necessarily specifics but I think we're going to want to see that people have thought through this yeah I've got a similar point one of my slides but I actually like this better well I think there's the money that they set aside for a wind down and then there's I can think of at least one business in my community that just shut the doors so you know there may have been money for a wind down but it didn't get used I got one question if you want to go back a couple slides I think to ten maybe yeah so products and services and I'm just thinking out loud and how I'm just curious as to how you think the retailers for products to be sold pricing strategy how how specific do we want to be an understanding products being sold recognizing products being sold could change over time many times over in the span of even a year depending on consumer preference and market dynamics so to me this is conceptual you know like if a retailer intends to provide both CBD and THC products and also perhaps sell dabbrake not dabbrakes because that's not but types or something you know I think it's a general concept okay I just didn't know if it was something that we would require them to update in like a renewal you know situation probably yes I think in a renewal but I don't think that they have to be I don't think that they have to know in December I'm going to sell this strain and then in February I'm going to sell this strain I think understanding how specific you thought and I'm not against wanting to understand that from our perspective but just how specific they need to be a question I have is about and I think this is spoken to in the legislation about how because this is all proprietary so how we may want to speak to at some point how we will keep things there's some of the stuff that I would propose in my slides that we need to make sure it's confidential as well so that's just something we'll have to figure out internally and make sure that our operating platforms have that capability yeah this is great okay I think it's your turn it might be that you have to like slide it over like it's assuming that you have two screens you are correct that was the problem that one time Brandon we couldn't figure out new every day where's Gina when we need her right okay sorry about that okay so one of the tasks that that Brandon gave me was to kind of think through additional kind of checklist items in addition to the kind of skeletal structure of our application that the two of you were looking at in our previous slide decks and what would make sense to be required specifically for cultivators for this meeting and I just want to start out by saying that just because it's not necessarily asked of us in any perspective cultivators application it doesn't mean that they still might need to go out and seek a permit with other state agencies depending on what they're doing if they're going to be constructing any new buildings if they're going to be retrofitting any new buildings local land use permitting issues that would have to be addressed that would not necessarily be part of what we had asked for on our initial application so one of the first things and this is something that I'd like to discuss and we kind of saw hints of this in both of your presentations first of all let me back up a second you both so eloquently described your processes and who you talked to I didn't catch that memo but very quickly I talked to all of our consultants the agency of agriculture the agency of natural resources environmental auditors third party certifiers and I took a lot of I gleaned a lot of information specifically on this from Boulder County, Colorado kind of environmental cultivator additional requirements in addition to San Diego County in California and also Humboldt County California I also looked at how Canada looks to ask specific information of cultivators and that was kind of where I started to really form my opinions on how we should require some stuff so I think and you both hinted at this under recognizing that folks need land to cultivate especially outdoors an applicant they need to indicate whether or not they own a space and if they do have a title or right to occupy the question that I have and we need to think about a little bit more substantively is if somebody is looking to rent land not everybody is fortunate in Vermont or elsewhere to be able to own a piece of land that they can actually cultivate onsite and because we're kind of especially for outdoor cultivators we're looking and running up because of the way the legislation works and our timelines and deadlines we're running up into the growing season once we start getting to licensure folks may at this time not necessarily have a rental agreement already in place because they're waiting on us to signal what certain requirements may be necessary for them to actually decide on a parcel of land also I would imagine that there's a lot of landowners that traditionally rent to agricultural usage that just have a lot of questions about cannabis on their property and that's something that we can work to educate landowners landlords so on and so forth throughout this process to kind of make sure that there isn't any misconceptions about liability so on and so forth but what I was thinking was recognizing this and I saw that it wouldn't necessarily be needed in a pre-application I kind of tried to even push the envelope a little bit further at the time of application if somebody's still on a rental agreement do we need to know specific information about that rental agreement at the time somebody applies or can we hold off on that until somebody to submit it until they actually receive their license so let's say the application window opens in April they want to submit recognizing that they don't have a rental agreement in place yet because they're still looking or working out the finer details or educating a prospective landlord can we still allow them to move through the licensure process and they just can't receive that license or the ability to cultivate until we actually see proof of a rental agreement so I just wanted to pause there and gauge your thoughts yeah I mean I understand the desire but at some point we're just making our lives incredibly complicated like an application to me a final application should be complete before we start to review it it shouldn't be partially open and partially complete so I would advocate in favor of having a physical address for the location and you know folks that don't want to sign the lease early can do the provisional licensing process and wait until they're ready to kind of submit their application I mean we also should it just seems to me like we're adding too much variability by waiting at three different stages for someone to complete their application yeah no I certainly appreciate that I was recognizing that this is like an equity issue trying to think through the best way and it's hard I start off with it because it's hard to give us latitude and longitude of a site if you don't have a site you know that you've already signed up for if you don't own the land yourself so you know I'm comfortable moving it back to at the time of full application but I thought I'd start the conversation here to just give you thoughts I'm pretty sure Massachusetts requires a site inspection before they grant a license as well so again like I know what you're saying that we could wait until that point for the site inspection but if we've reviewed an application and it's taken us let's just say we've lost all of that time yeah and I mean I don't think we want any rogue licenses out there where there's a license that somebody owns but doesn't or you know holds but isn't tied to a specific parcel of land I think your point is well taken though once we get far enough in our rulemaking and decision making at least when we have some initial rules like what then do we need to do to educate people so that they can make those decisions I'm comfortable pushing this back it was a weird online computer I'm comfortable pushing this back to that the time of full application submittal but you know again I thought that was a good place for us to start and again we're balancing being accommodating versus do we have the staffing too it's April for cultivators too right is that right no cultivators yeah yeah I'm just wondering if we waited any longer would they even be I mean I suppose you could start later I just you know we're running up against time crunch just based on the way that our climate is here and I'm hoping that this conversation will help start informing folks of what to expect you know but um I guess I'm thinking like if we said you can you can figure this out and submit an application to us later would someone still have the time to grow in that season anyway you know or at that point would they just have to start over next year that's a fair point I mean you know you could still be doing the same thing with an indoor landlord you know what I mean somebody in here if you're trying to run a warehouse so okay I'm comfortable moving it back to at the point of full application I just wanted you know that to be our starting point okay so moving on I think it's important that we request the growth site address latitude and longitude this is something that's already done with the HEP program and there's a couple different reasons for it I think primarily you know we all understand the rural aspects of the state there isn't cell phone service everywhere if an inspector is going out to a farm we want to make sure that we can find the physical plot recognizing that they're not you know likely visible from the road or anything so just making sure we have that I don't need to go into this hyperlink but the agency of agriculture does have I don't need to click it folks can see it later because I'm already having screen issues with my mouse they've got a lot of resources on how easy it is to provide that information whether it's through Google Maps or elsewhere to actually get that information and everybody who's a registered hemp grower or has done so over the course of the last couple years has had to do this it shouldn't really be an issue again we can pivot my slide from the time of licensure to the time of full application you talked about the school property account number yeah this is required for everyone just because of current use implications the tax firm originally thought just retailers but then they said because of the implications on current use they wanted for a diagram of the premises yeah and that's that information isn't hard to find all of this of course I think not all of it but the locations should be confidential I know we have that kind of theme throughout we can figure out but we certainly don't want a list of every cultivator just somewhere in addition to GIS coordinates or latitude longitude diagram of the premises on our site plan so you know and I think we just need to normalize you know this would be like a drawing I mean think we need to think through how that can work conceptually as part of our application if we're gonna do things online but we need to get an understanding of acreage the cultivation site so on and so forth what other buildings are gonna be used as part of that not necessarily in that specific canopy but if you're drying you're curing stuff you know maybe you also have different licenses and you're doing stuff on one set of land we need to know with respect to that parcel what you're doing in specific areas of that that's my perspective and so the ways that we can normalize this kind of this drawing is you know a north arrow size of total property in acres total cultivation canopy dimensions standardized scale like you know two inches is a mile that doesn't make sense for this I think it's an example but you know what I mean and then use of land and then similar to some of the operating plans business plans and this is something that I just think is important as we understand how folks look to weather start small and move through our different hearing structures for both indoor and outdoor I'd like to see a statement from cultivators on their intentions do they want to stay in that thousand square foot canopy designation do they have intentions over the next couple years to potentially move up maybe they're starting big and they they you know don't want to get any bigger but maybe they might want to right size themselves in the future do they have aspirations for you know growing if federal legalization ever does happen do they want to just sell to the dispensary down the road or you know create a real you know lucrative business out of what they're starting so I just you know and this doesn't need to be you know complete it's an aspirational statement more so than anything conceptual like if we had an online portal would this be one of those required fields or would this be an optional field I'd like to see it be required not everybody again this isn't I don't want to come off as a formal you need to have thought out five-year plan style but what are your thoughts and goals just so we can again start to collect information on how certain people are approaching this project and the future and it sounds like for the RFI that's out there we need to make sure that the system that can have scans and uploads yes absolutely there's going to need to be attachment PDF attachments and probably in other formats too and so forth do you think it will matter if those are like hand drawn or do they have to be I think they could be hand drawn and then you can scan it and you get free apps to do that as long as you upload it as part of your application at the final I'm just assuming not everyone's going to hire an architect I'm not expecting that it's just literally you can draw it this is my total acreage of my farm this is where my canopy will be located and there's other crop rotating issues I think we're going to have to figure out what current use in the tax department because I don't think you can necessarily have your cultivation site the same spot every single year outdoors and expect the same quality product and nutrient uptake that you would have yeah I'd like to see also just maybe a check box like is your property under current use and is this plot within that and would this remove you from the 25 acre I'm having conversations with the tax department on current use starting next week I just didn't want to wander down that a gray area of this whole conversation until I felt a little bit more fully informed and on board with what the tax department is thinking so pending some update on current use yeah I think there should be some indication on this application about whether this this plot is within your current use or with that or not yeah so it doesn't matter for the small cultivators I just need yeah I just need more information from the tax department and I don't want to at the risk of over thinking it let's say your whole you have a hundred acres and it's all in current use you want to take a half acre out of current use can you just take that half acre out without penalty you have to take the full amount out you have to take a minimum amount you have to pay the penalty I take half just half an acre can I grow that thousand square foot anywhere on that half acre so on and so forth so this diagram may look a little different by the time we get to the full application but I still think it's important to understand what folks are anticipating and what outbuildings are on that property that you may use as part of your your growing life cycle harvesting okay moving on to municipal water you know some folks are hooked up to municipal water supplies some folks have their on-site water and wastewater honestly from my perspective and talking with ANR I don't think any of our operations are going to be so big and require so much water that many municipalities, local utilities can have problem servicing outdoor and indoor operations but nonetheless in talking with ANR how this is typically done in other sectors as you obtain a letter from your water utility to make sure they can supply the correct quantity and I thought what would be most helpful is if we could develop kind of like a form letter that we can distribute to all local utilities and municipalities that they can give to us that way we're not receiving the same information that looks in different maybe like a hundred something a hundred something different forms same with municipal wastewater and again this rental agreement information can be adjusted so on-site water I think our lower tier cultivators drilling under 20,000 gallons a day groundwater and have are planning to use under 25 employees don't need to submit anything as part of their baseline applications tier 5 and tier 6 that's where you could be drawing over that I think we want to kind of see how you're complying with ANR rules maybe even a copy of permit adjusting that you might need to do for your well and sewer for your irrigation purposes I just think that that's prudent again tier 6 is being held additionally anyway so both are looking at this larger tier 5 they might need to provide us some further information but I don't think it's necessary for smaller cultivators and Billy's taking a look at this these come as recommendations from ANR ANR honestly wanted all cultivators to submit certain information I just didn't think it was necessary permit triggers happen at 20,000 gallons a day one thing that we haven't discussed as a board quite yet is co-location of multiple grow facilities in a single defined area you had like an old storage unit shop and you had 10 storage units that all got converted so I think instead of saying for tiers 5 and 6 you might say any single location that needs more any facility that like if we do co-location you're hooking up anything above 25,000 or 20,000 total square feet of canopy okay I think we don't need to change this I just think that yeah I mean we can just take out larger tiers tier 5 and tier 6 and talk about it more on the total canopy total canopy so for indoor cultivators apologies for my line through cultivators that was a formatting error I think similar to requiring a diagram of an outdoor cultivation site buddy may seek a specific tier of our indoor options but we still need to know the size and square footage of that total building I also think we should get a diagram for where that you know and there will need to be again other state agencies like fire safety that you could need to come in and make sure your building is up to code with various different reasonings but we need to see where your canopy is going to be where you're storing your agricultural inputs pesticides fertilizers and so on and so forth if that's what you're going to use and how you're using your space let's say you did purchase a 20,000 square foot facility but you're not using that 20,000 square feet I think we just still need to see and make sure we understand how that building is being used and how you're storing stuff again all indoor location plans should be designed so they will not cause excessive or un-economic demands on public utilities you know when we're talking about indoor versus outdoor there's I think all indoor facilities need to provide us with wastewater and municipal water information I don't think we can wave those same types of requirements like I propose an outdoor oh yes so sorry I skipped one of my bullets the ability to serve letter from a servicing utility this was discussed by PSD this was recommended this is part of every other manufacturing building type of industry that we have in the state we want to make sure that that utility can service your facility without adding additional cost to repairs it may also be using that utility and it's pretty common utilities do that I think we need a form letter for that it's part of other planned use planning parts of our state laws and regulations I can't quite remember do the utilities in order to determine the ability to serve need to do a site visit or can they do it remotely I'm fairly sure they can do it remotely that's all I had on additional baseline requirements for for cultivators I don't want to be overly burdensome but I think just understanding a little bit more about the site other conversations with local utilities and municipalities are important even though especially because you don't need to be in a jurisdiction that's opted in so back to your point about relationship to the community that's an opportunity for businesses to build that relationship okay so another thing that Brin asked me to take a look at was additional baseline app requirements for labs I talked to Kerry quite extensively about this Kerry is the director at the farm division public health and resource management division at the agency of agriculture he is the one drafting a lot of our regs around labs and looking at other jurisdictions and our hemp lab program to kind of make sure things work for this new industry not saying that they haven't for the hemp program but I honestly changed some some words to kind of away from hemp to get more of a total cannabis thought into some of the way these are worded literally this is the same additional application requirements that are required of our hemp program if they want to be certified as a state lab or excuse me not as a state lab but a state certified lab so getting your accreditation certificates quality assurance standard operating procedures master list of analytical and non-analytical trainings so on and so forth resume or CV of all technical and management personnel and then just having a more of an understanding how you're going to be doing the testing and certificate of analysis for certain equipment and your organizational chart and I thought the agency of agriculture built out a really extensive application and checklist and Kerry even told me it was designed with this in mind so I wasn't looking to tack away from his thought process there it also includes an analytical methods work list for each lab that they can fill out can you ask Kerry whether or not if someone a state lab is currently certified to do hemp that we could just wave them in without any additional application in year one and then we could match up those two application processes in year two that's a great idea the application and the review of these applications I know is back and forth can be has been extensive and so any ways that we can cut that with quality in mind and not disruption of services to our hemp community but I think we need to do more outreach to those accredited labs to change their interest but I think that's a great idea because it seems like the application is the same essentially it's they shouldn't have to submit it to two different entities is my thinking like in year one I don't know if it's an annual renewal I think for the testing so like they might be all happening at different times so I think just year one if you're certified at hemp you can be a certified you can be waved in as a certified cannabis and then on your renewal you'd have to at least submit your application to biller which shouldn't be all that onerous but at least the timing would be the same moving forward some of them the only question there is I believe some of the labs either choose to not do all six of these some only do certain types so I don't know if all of them do the full suite that we might expect we can do just a limited this piece of it but I mean the potency here that difference is what drives cannabis for hemp versus cannabis for a high adult use market so I don't want to reinvent the wheel here great that's all I got on additional baseline requirements I think there's a lot of I'm noticing a lot of repetitiveness in some of the things that we're asking for for specific types of applicants so just as we're thinking about this what can we do with our application to make it like you're talking about lining up with hemp but I don't like I don't want someone to have upload the same information twice absolutely and I mean hey that's part of one of the we haven't seen these presentations or talk to each other about our presentations until today so I think if we see the same thing multiple places it's not necessarily a bad thing it means we're on the same page but that's a three person board where we can't really talk about the business of the board unless we're in this kind of setting seeing these presentations for the first time and I think I'm saying it so that when we get to a point where we see what those systems look like we're still thinking about what the repetitive areas are I will say that it was noted in my presentation but I can I can understand and respect that supplying a latitude and a longitude to somebody's physical growth site may bring a little bit of skepticism to somebody who's looking to come out of the legacy market and we will work as a board to make sure that information is kept confidential because there's public safety concerns in addition to I'm sure folks have their own trust of us as a board concerns but you know if that information is discoverable you know it could lead to folks trying to find these physical sites and so a big part of our RFI our database of information needs to be able to keep these in confidence with the board I totally agree I don't want to just list of all the sites that's public no it creates huge I think security issues but I also think most cultivators that are interested in this understand that we need to know where they are for site inspection purposes no absolutely just want to make assure folks that may be interested in skeptical that that's a priority for us I've got one more slide on baseline application requirements so we can do that and then we can take a breathe okay sorry we need to get the priority of licenses that's what I thought you were going to do we can do that after the break though so Bryn wanted me to look at baseline applications related to just banking and insurance requirements so you know again I met with DFR numerous times VSECU we had a banking round table with the tax department met with our consultants a lot of this just comes straight out of Massachusetts so general liability, priority of liability insurance coverage so this would mean of course that we're requiring general and priority of liability insurance this is the one that we briefly talked about Julie just Massachusetts requires a bond or an escrow account for wind down costs this is you know still a federally illegal product and you don't want a company to go bankrupt and not have a plan for dealing with what was legally grown cannabis and then you know have no outlet for it so just they they require I think a minimum of 5,000 I think that's probably a little excessive for all of our license types but I think we can work out the details of exactly how much we would require whether it's required for small cultivators for instance but I think you know it's a good thing for us to at least have on our on our radar tax IDs, band numbers we talked about that the criminal administrative history records that's from a prior slide authorization to release information all the documents needed for the provisional licensing we went over that earlier the big one that I would like the board to consider is whether we require essentially banking at a minimum of a depository account I can tell you from my conversations with the Vermont institutions that there is not a lot of uptake in people's willingness to participate in cannabis banking at least at the outset we have one financial institution in Vermont that currently banks cannabis funds I think that they're probably going to take a very cautious approach you know next year so this could be a real hardship if we required it it's certainly in an ideal world we would want this just so we don't deal with an all cash industry or even a majority cash industry but it's probably unrealistic to demand it I would say that there's going to be a huge amount of banking services available to folks at the early outset market so I was thinking what are ways around it we would certainly want to encourage having at a minimum a place to deposit your cash so what I was thinking is potentially you could require someone that doesn't have a financial institution or a deposit account has to demonstrate what they've done they haven't been able to they could say I talked to these three institutions and they all denied my application something along those lines some demonstration that you've made an attempt and then if you don't have one you have to submit a cash management plan and that could be I'm going to take my cash to I don't even know an out of state institution some sort of plan I'm going to keep it in a safe until I can kind of have someone come pick it up something I don't know I think that if there is an uptick in interest in banking that that is the best way to manage it for now hopefully that changes because it is a public safety concern absolutely I can tell you a lot of the financial institutions are looking at their compliance and enforcement because they have they've been doing it for a number of years it's actually while it is difficult to kind of wrap your head around all of it it's actually not that difficult when you have the template so I think that there will be there will be some options eventually I just don't see them being robust in year one do you know if they've had an opportunity to speak with banks in Colorado that have done this to sort of ease the concerns that they have or understand how other banks are doing this in other states so we had when I did the banking round table we had someone from Colorado come and address them address them I think really what they what the bankers wanted from us was some indication of what we were going to require on our application what information we could share with them versus what they have to collect on their own what they're going to require versus what they're going to have to require on their own and just how closely we're meeting the co-mental priorities versus how much extra they'll have to do in order to ensure it so they're the timing is not going to work out very well for year one because they're going to wait to see what our rules are as soon as our rules are approved we're going to start issuing licenses it's not going to be a lot of time for them to ramp up I think you probably remember Christian Sederward said that there are out-of-state state chartered financial institutions that are more than willing to come in to Vermont to come and bank our money but there's really high fees that kind of stuff so are you proposing demonstrating ARGIP or is that just a question that was the question for you all at a financial institution at a minimum deposit account with the caveat that if you can't get one you have to kind of explain that you tried and you have to have a plan for how you're going to deal with cash if we know that there's only really one bank right now in state that's willing to is that just an exercise that we're putting people through to get an answer that we already know a question to you know I'm not positive there's only one, there's only one that's currently doing it but I think that there are some, there were banks that are very curious about this and are I think actively talking to their boards about it whether they should do this I think we do have to have some sort of demonstration that someone tried to open an account I do think you know even if it's from one or two banks I don't think we want people to in the spirit of some of the FinCEN guidelines in the COLE memo we don't want people, we don't want to give people the option to not bank at all okay now I agree with just asking the question and then hopefully upon renewal we can adjust things because there won't be as much hesitation on the state charter things so one layer deeper on this is we could also require at a minimum deposit account for all retail licenses and I say that our department of tax they have discretion about whether to accept cash payments of the taxes they haven't made the final determination but I would bet that they say no, no cash payment in tax money which means that those retailers are going to have to have whether they like it or not depository you know well then so wouldn't everybody else I mean if you're paying on employment tax, if you're paying for paying the final taxes I think cultivators won't necessarily need anything if they're sole proprietors if they're sole proprietors I think you know I'm not convinced that everyone, I mean eventually this will come up for everyone especially if you're paying income taxes but I think the tax department said that they do accept money orders for instance they do accept kind of these like refillable debit cards so there are ways around it but I think we should try to encourage in any way we possibly can getting a depository account and really think about accommodations for the small cultivators so I guess the one caveat could be require a depository account with a financial institution for retailers and then for everyone else you know they could demonstrate hardship or we could just have it like this for everyone and if a retailer comes to us their demonstrated hardship might be a higher burden to prove why would their hardship be higher cause they're dealing with you know like a small cultivator is probably only going to have one major you know an outdoor cultivator cause they're going to play the sales tax all the time they're going to be paying sales tax excise tax with every transaction and so I don't know I just feel like with that number of transactions and that much cash that could be a real not just for tax payment purposes also just a very dangerous situation having that much cash in your store so why don't we leave it like that and just in the back of our minds think about what demonstrating hardship could be different I think that's a good way to at least for now okay I have one more slide on untruthfulness of the board but maybe we should just take a break right now and get back to that after a break just so we're roughly sticking with the agenda that we laid out I think that's a good plan okay so we'll come back in ten minutes is that about ten minutes okay Mely you can just let the recording go I think okay that sounds good we'll be back in ten minutes so last thing here untruthfulness to the board in an application or post application process the first two paragraphs here in the result is from Massachusetts is what they do so any kind of untruthful deceptive misleading fraudulent anything that tends to deceive either during the application process or afterwards is a presumptive negative suitability of determination so be kind of a presumptive denial of the application I think they have an ability to cure there's gonna it triggers an enforcement investigation and can lead to suspension or relocation of licenses it can result in fines I think we probably have under a cold memo a responsibility to share that information with appropriate state agencies and potentially our financial institutions depending on the kind of nature of the untruthfulness and then you know I was talking about how they deal with untruthfulness and they have kind of a statutory scheme that allows for a hearing it allows for appropriate action and it allows for fines per incident you know if we don't want to recreate the wheel we could try to just follow that of course it requires us to have I mean they have their own kind of like quasi-judicial body that oversees that process including four prosecutors and four investigators so I think we I think what we can do today is not to determine how we're gonna you know adjudicate those but we can say that you know conceptually that if there is untruthfulness in the or that it could lead to an enforcement investigation a suspension or revocation license or potentially fines and or and it will require us to share that info with you know state agencies and potentially financial institutions and we can leave out the one VSA 129A for now and just to be clear for anyone who's watching this this is not like you made a an error this is like an intent to be intentional yeah yeah and of course you know there's various levels of untruthfulness if you don't disclose that you had a hundred unpaid parking tickets when we asked if you have any kind of actions against you it would be much different than if you're not disclosing your financial interest in another application for instance okay great and then priority of licensure I know we have criteria in 7 VSA 903 we of course have criteria around social equity applicants I didn't want the medical patients to get lost in this they have a separate you know currently they've got a separate team of folks that just are continuously updating the medical registry and renewing those but I just wanted to make sure that we're not losing sight that that process will continue if we have a hundred applications before us I think we still have a priority to make sure that the medical patients are getting their licenses in a timely manner so I put that in there recognizing that it's under our jurisdiction starting January 1st they do have a separate team that's sufficiently staffed to do those in a timely manner but just wanted to make sure it's on the record the medical patients will have will have their applications reviewed in a timely manner for their medical card for their medical card that's right so the 7 VSA 903 criteria I'm happy to pull it up if we want but I'll just touch on these other two first so I think we should have some not to the kind of order in which we receive these applications I think there's certain events that would move the applicant up the queue but I think we need to have some chronological acknowledgement in our review process and we could do them in batches like the first 30 that we receive we'll do we'll review all 30 and then license them all in a batch but I think that at some point if someone's kind of first in time they need to have some benefit to kind of getting their application materials submitted in a timely way I don't know exactly how much priority we're going to give that but I think it's important and then just as again just a very general concept I think we need to consider every aspect of the supply chain and the proper functioning of the industry if we've just done 50 cultivator licenses we might want to consider doing some product manufacturing even if they came in after 50 cultivators we might want to consider doing some retail we want to make sure that every stop along the supply chain has at least some capacity Is that different than the timeline that we have or are you saying so the timeline that we have gives us a lot of flexibility and so I just don't want us to lose sight of the overall picture you know like if we again if we do some cultivation and we know that it's a lot of indoor cultivation they're going to need somewhere to put their plants in four months they're going to need a product manufacturer or a wholesaler to sell to and we don't have any then that's a problem so I just think some nod to us being able to pause things get complicated people are going to wonder why this person got a license and not me when I submitted mine over here in April and this person submitted theirs in October I think we just need to have some flexibility built in that allows us to consider the overall picture so I'll pull up this 903 criteria just so people can see it essentially this is the priorities that the legislature thought this isn't useful oh that's helpful I lost the slide bar there we go so the priorities that they gave us and we need to I think probably weight these as in provide like a pointing system to this to say you know how much priority these individual criteria will give an applicant but whether you're an existing medical dispensary in good standing whether the applicant would foster social justice and equity or would want something like this on our application if you have a plan, specific plan to recruit higher and implement development ladder for minorities women, individuals who have been historically disproportionately impacted the specific plan to pay a livable age and then environmental resiliency and sustainability and then geographic distribution so I mean I think this warrants a lot of further conversation but it's good to just keep these in the back of our head and New Jersey and Massachusetts and I'm sure other states as well have this sort of scoring built in as well so as you're thinking things come in a problem of that order and then based on the weighting of these items you might go up or down in that order that's what I'm thinking, we might do kind of batches you know just so that we're not constantly just pushing certain applicants further and further down the queue eventually if that's the kind of chronological priority that I was talking about you come in first but you don't have anything on recruiting and hiring or minorities women etc. you're not going to get pushed down forever you won't get constantly being pushed to the bottom of the pile but yeah it seems like I think that's a good idea but I think we need to be real clear about parameters on dates when we're accepting those so that we're not either pushing someone down to the bottom of the list for a whole year let's say or making it so that we end up approving applications that have none of these items and then maybe not of minority women on business so we'd have to do like here's the first month or the second month or whatever that is and I certainly think the legislation is clear on social equity applicants whenever they come in get an expedited review priority review okay that's it okay so one of those one of those I think what six requirements was on sustainability and I have taken a crack in a very conceptual way of trying to think through how we could develop something related specifically to environmental considerations this might be strictly applicable to this but maybe we could broaden this to include what I'm thinking that incorporates other elements of that statutory requirement of us there's a lot of words on this page if you're not though so again this is pretty conceptual and I'm thinking the way we could do it is develop kind of like a scoring matrix each one of these bullets at least bullets that aren't tabbed over could be a well defined area and I did this in the Grower context but I think the same could be adopted for other parts of our supply chain how we could look to develop buckets within a scoring matrix that you add up your points to a certain point threshold and you get moved to the front of the list depending on how the strength of your environmental considerations from your growing operation are so we talked a lot about operating plans, business plans, something that we could adopt here is what I'm calling a sustainable cultivation policy and that looks at the triple bottom line benefits that we would hope to bring for each growing site when I say triple bottom line that's environmental, economic and social benefits some of that kind of bleeds into some of those other requirements around who you choose to hire and so on and so forth again there's other kind of attestations or indications that may be a part of this and less about your cultivation plan or policy but attesting that sustainability is a business priority and you've got a clearly defined plan to actually implement the cultivation policy that you're talking about and so I don't think we haven't talked about baseline inclusions at the time of an application where we want to see every single agricultural input or expected way and growing style that somebody would be looking to grow but if you want to give us that information and we understand the type of quality product that you want to put into the market maybe you should get priority if you are willing to provide us that information up front I had discussed about additional baseline water issues that we might not require of small cultivators to understanding how much water they're withdrawing if they're under permit limits thresholds if they want to supply us that information maybe we give them a point or two or some kind of combination in our scoring matrix so we better understand the real environmental impacts and climate change impacts of your growing operation have you conducted a soil assessment type composition and mineral content and then will you attest to a soil test at harvest time to kind of see what's been up taken through the production of cannabis and how it's impacted the land both good and bad a growers production has a neutral or positive impact on biodiversity these cultivation sites can have an impact on wildlife what's the type of security and we'll be discussing outdoor cultivation security next weeks I don't want to put the cart for the horse but let's say you have cameras that show up when a deer is coming that there's an impact there are you going to plant perennials and other plantings around your cultivation sites to encourage pollinators and bees to kind of be present what are your thoughts on sustainability as it relates to the cultivation site and how you're not looking to overly impact in negative ways the area around your production site are you going to be seeking a third party certification from an environmental body you know there's no you can't get into the organic program because that's a federal program but there is other we've heard from the third party certifiers around the country that are certifying products that look to seek a higher standard for their quality and are you willing to undergo environmental audits not necessarily conducted by us but by a private party that would come in to your cultivation site your practices and you know on a holistic level to kind of understand how you can do better and we can do better as an industry the one thing that I think we need to talk about now and in the future is what's the overall purpose of priority I don't think we've talked in this setting about how many licenses will be awarded are we going to allow license types to start I think we've all talked about small cultivators and letting everybody who's well positioned to enter the market enter the market are we going to limit license types at the higher levels this is separate from not starting with our higher tiers but the priority in this type of information will be helpful when at the start of our program when we have a bunch of different license applicants trying to all get their license squared away and then after that what's the point how can we provide a benefit to folks continuously instead of just having their application become a priority at the top because these incentives don't really mean as much if it's not an issue pass that initial way where we have a lot of people trying to enter the market so my thought was I think the city of Denver actually does something similar and I'm going to use very loose terms but if you're following practices like this, in addition to seeking a priority they might put a gold star or something like that on your application and certifying your operation that if you do make a mistake down the road if you are found in non-compliance with something you're not looked at with a degree of anything but you're looked at still favorably and that's information we could share you can do corrective action plans without fees or penalties related with somebody who isn't looking to be this sustainable and that's information we could share with other agencies with permits that they might be holding that are applicable to a specific site and so can I ask a question? Is that specific to sustainability so if you air somewhere down the road in your sustainability plan or just in anything compliance related? I was thinking more broadly that being said, this is conceptual at this point and I'm just trying to think how else can we make somebody submitting this type of information to us worth their time and effort other than wanting to sell a high quality product and differentiate themselves at market with that product and that's something that could be it could be found, I'm thinking about it even in the statutory requirements of what we need to look at pass that initial wave of receiving potentially a couple hundred applications what's the point for anybody? You know what I mean? Because there'll be a time where we're on a rolling basis or doing batch applications where they don't need to provide this additional information and they should get their license fairly quickly you know what I mean compared to it out of the gate so Can they use it in marketing? Could they use this and could that would that be a benefit? Yeah well yeah that's kind of like I guess not like a certified organic or anything like that but I don't know it was some type of internal I said gold star earlier that's a pretty generic term but you know some... I didn't see myself putting like a gold star Well it's just you know some type of program that we could stand up and it could work through those other statutory you know things for us to contemplate when it comes to priority but what does this mean past the initial wave is what I was wondering as I was putting together interesting and cool concepts to help folks differentiate themselves I mean I always thought you could have a reduced application fee if you had certain criteria you know like you're willing to grow follow some of this but our application fees I feel like really aren't going to be they're low enough that they're not going to be the ultimate barrier I feel like and you know trying to accommodate some of these is going to cost certainly more than whatever we can reduce the application fee by Again this is conceptual I'm happy to keep exploring thoughts and hearing from the public on ways that some doing these types of activities and scoring high on a matrix might help you beyond just getting your license reviewed quicker How can we as a board develop a potential certification style program that encourages folks to do so and that was kind of where are any of this that's similar to the discussions around building a Vermont brand for aren't there discussions about that It's similar yes but I didn't take this specifically from that brand but they are working on that program and Carrie and I talked about that but it didn't get much further than that it's just conceptual something to think about I think in just thinking of ways we can prioritize things it would be exciting to see how innovative some folks can get with making sure their their growth site again some of this can be translated to other retail establishments and indoor facilities but how how we can keep in mind our climate goals as a state and protect Lake Champlain and other lakes that are operating on total maximum daily loads for nitrogen and phosphorus already making sure we're not a part of the problem but a part of the solution when it comes to environmental conservation yeah that's great so I think the priority of licensure criteria it certainly needs some it needs to be a little bit more comprehensive I think before we vote on it so again very conceptual at this point I just thought if we could develop in this specific and sustainable context a matrix with buckets and then ways to five points out of five points within that bucket and it's kind of like doing a self-assessment for an environmental audit before you even start so great well what I'd like to do then is Bryn has been listening to our comments our conversation I'd like to do a subcommittee update do public comment and then have Bryn come and join us and kind of walk through the various slides that we can vote on today and the changes that we've made based on our discussion and try and put together a package and vote on that okay so why don't we do a subcommittee kind of hopefully one of our last roundups about what's been going on this week and let me pull up the ones that have met Kyle did either sustainability or compliance enforcement met I can go first compliance and enforcement met on Monday was our last scheduled standing subcommittee meeting afterwards we'll meet kind of ad hoc as issues arise I think and we talked about transportation not delivery but a continued conversation of the transportation and the security requirements within our supply chain as a cultivator tries to get their product to a processor to a wholesaler to a dispenser or something along those lines and we kind of you know I think what the subcommittees really landing on is having a baseline and this is like true for just about every every aspect of compliance and enforcement that we've discussed or they've discussed as a subcommittee having like a baseline and a best practices list for our smallest participants in this industry and so like for instance if we're doing outdoor security maybe there's seven best management practices small cultivators would pick one of those seven but if you're as you move up your tier your tiers into a larger square footage size you might have to pick three and then you might have to pick five and the largest might have to comply with all seven and I'm just using that as a proxy to say that's kind of the theme with all security whether it's retail security, transportation security outdoor and indoor cultivation security allowing some flexibility for the small cultivators to participants to knowing their land and they have their own vested interest in protecting their product deciding what may be best given their specific unique physical location and then just making sure that if there are issues because not everybody can be as rural as others we have some safeguards in place to come in and help folks change adjust those security measures do a combination of such if it's necessary that there is the after diversion problems so that's really where the subcommittee stood they just at the end of this the charge was create a tiering system for security based off of the size of your operation yeah I mean to me it makes perfect sense like the greater the potential public safety risk the greater the kind of compliance regulations yeah that's where they that's where they stood I heard what they had to say and we're going to try and see what we can do to turn that into something that that's resembles how they approached it on sustainability we we met on Wednesday we talked about social equity in the context of environmental justice and issues around technical and business assistance for some folks that are low income and don't have the opportunity to develop a succinct business plan and you know I kind of gave an update on some of the conversations I've had with certain technical and business providers around the state like intervail, UVM extension so on and so forth when we first started back in the spring a lot of folks in those industries were looking at ways to kind of compartmentalize their funding since a lot of them accept state and federal funding to make sure that they can service this this industry and I need to do some follow up with those organizations to kind of see where they're at that was that was a you know it was a very general conversation Gina was there and we talked a lot about the the rental property kind of convent room making sure folks who want to participate here have the where to do so recognizing that there may be some consternation amongst landlords, landowners so on and so forth about this this product being a part of their being grown on their land so that's kind of where the conversations like this sustainability committee will meet next Monday and next Thursday but that was kind of our last thematic meeting we're going to start really ramping up Jacob is developing reports for the subcommittee members to review of all of our discussions for specific topics related to air, water, waste so on and so forth to really get a direction and a vote on so the last meeting will be next Thursday that's great, yeah the winding down Julie do you want to do I think both public health and social equity met they did so public health wrapped up this week for now their last well they did two important things one is they looked at the response from the department of health on the warning labels and the symbols and went through some of that and kind of recommended that out of committee to us and then they also talked about the manufacturing of edibles and in the end what they sort of approved was this overarching idea that regardless of who regulates the edibles that there should be laboratory testing there should be some compliance and enforcement around distribution and transportation the packaging and labeling should be constantly reviewed and that the point of sale flyer still needs to be written and then the regulatory piece to figure out which is what's going to need to happen and then with social equity they will continue to meet for a couple more meetings I believe they have moved on to talking about diversity or they will be moving on to talking about diversity equity inclusion and as a broad picture having more inclusive marketplace in general they talked about reinvestment and the cannabis excise tax in disproportionately impacted communities they made a recommendation that 20% of the excise tax go to disproportionately impacted communities for a variety of reasons one of those touches on the land piece that you were just talking about education, mental health and other things like that and then they talked about cannabis social equity boards that's constantly looking at these programs and looking at the data related to them and the benchmarking for the social equity programs and the content of that board I think they ended up with 15 members of a board from a variety of different perspectives they are actually going to move I think in November to a time where they want to receive feedback I think they've built so many recommendations and now it's time to hear feedback from people who will be impacted by these programs and so that's the next thing that they're going to plan great awesome okay so the medical subcommittee met one last time they've really finalized their recommendations for the board I don't think you'll see any surprises they haven't given it to us yet delivered them but it's all around patient caregiver ratios, plan accounts just expanding access and quality of the program so I think there's 14 points they'll submit those to the board probably this week or next I think they're they're done now they've kind of adjourned for this regular meeting schedule the exploratory committee also met so this is their inaugural meeting on the exploratory committee is Nader Hashim, Chris Walsh, Stephanie Smith Jim Romanoff and Meg Delia Kerry was it? there is kind of a representative to walk us through some of the issues so we have I called them together to review the recommendations we need to make to the legislature on November 1st so this is whether we should allow production of solid concentrates for use in non prohibited products or whether we should just have them be per se illegal at all stages of the supply chain so the committee subcommittee was pretty emphatic that trying to dilute them at every stage of the supply chain these solid concentrates could have some pretty serious unintended consequences and negative health consequences so they made a recommendation to us that we should allow both solid concentrates for the use in above 60% for the use in non prohibited products but then they went a step further and suggested that we should eliminate the solid concentrate above 60% prohibition and they gave a number of reasons mostly public health related reasons for that and then they talked about conversion of CBD into Delta 9 THC or Delta 8 or Delta 10 and some members of the subcommittee were kind of on the fence about whether to allow it or not others were very kind of emphatic that they do not want us to allow that that it should be prohibited I think the question from the actual report requirement says should it be under the purview because it kind of Delta 8, Delta 9 this kind of CBD conversion into the psychoactive cannabinoids is it somewhat of a legal gray area right now the hemp program has said these are not hemp products so you can't label them as such and we're not going to regulate them so the question is do we step in and say that they're under our jurisdiction and if so how are we going to regulate them one thought that was on the table is we bring them into our jurisdiction and we have kind of we hit the time out button on them essentially anything that involves this conversion process any product that you make needs to be get a kind of approval from us and then we could just kind of pause on the approval process mostly because people don't know there's not enough kind of research around the secondary effects or the public health impacts of these converted products so I don't know I need to go back and fully just grasp everything that was said during that meeting but I think the general thinking was they should be regulated and maybe just prohibit it for now but if they are going to be in the stream of commerce that they need to be regulated by us and then the last one is just the new recommendations for the medical cannabis oversight advisory panel Jim Romanoff's panel and he actually just sent the final recommendations today so we can take a look at those at the next meeting before we approve those I don't think it's necessary to call the full advisory committee together on the November 1st report I do think that we should send it to them when it's prepared once we voted on it and seek their comment but I don't think it's necessary to call them all together into a public meeting Any thoughts on that? I think it depends on how we seek their public comment or their comment I was thinking we email it to them and we give them a time frame to respond back to us individually like as in BCC everyone then hit reply to this if you have comments by October 30th personally I think that makes sense I think that makes sense as long as we include their comments when we vote on it okay okay so maybe we kind of get to a consensus on what that report should look like then send it to them and give them five days or something to review it and then try and incorporate any comments into the final okay Brenda are you in a spot where you can kind of walk us through or I guess maybe we should pause the public comment first sure it might actually be helpful for you to review everything first okay if you review it then people it'll be fresh in people's mind for public comment I'm on my chair so I can slide in and out so I'm not going to go through all of the slides that you just went through because I don't want to deal with my computer I'm trying to do that but I just will start out by saying I think what the board should do today is to vote on a package of recommendations that you've made incorporating four changes that I heard that you made in discussion so the package of recommendations that you've made today are on the provisional license requirements which were on Pepper's slide there will be one change to those requirements which was on Pepper's slide 5 and that was that and please correct me if I didn't correctly understand what the board decided on but there was a question about tax compliance demonstration whether or not an applicant would have to demonstrate tax compliance and the board confirmed that you would an applicant would need to demonstrate that they are in compliance with their taxes except for cannabis profits and profits related to cannabis will not be subject to that tax compliance requirement other than that the rest of the provisional license requirements were as recommended in chairman's slides the second sort of bucket of things that you decided on were the suitability criteria and again those were in the chairman's slides and there were no changes made to the recommended suitability criteria one change sorry I did say for that fraud, deceit, or embezzlement there would be a felony conviction generally speaking and this is not true across the board but the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony for these property crimes is generally a $900 threshold so if you write a bad check for under $900 it's a misdemeanor over it's a felony got it the third category of recommendations that you made were on the baseline application requirements and I did note two changes to those the first was and this is really more of a clarification than a change that Julie's buffer zone recommendations which were on slide 8 apply only to retail applicants and not the rest of the licensees and the second clarification was about banking requirements and this was on the chairman's slide 10 and that was that if an applicant can demonstrate a level of hardship and demonstrate a sufficient cash management plan then the board can waive the requirement for a depository account that there will be criteria for demonstrating hardship that will be dependent upon the category of license that the applicant is seeking so those are the two change it or two clarifications to the baseline application requirements that you presented to each other and then lastly you have the additional requirements for cultivators and labs that Kyle presented and there is one clarification there which was on Kyle's slide 1 and that is that the rental agreement if the applicant is engaged in a rental agreement that the rental agreement be final by the time that they're submitting their final application so those are the four sort of categories of things in your package of recommendations that you're voting on today so the only thing that is left out is the priority of licensing which there will be more discussion on and untruthfulness should we just pause on that as well yeah, yes great, okay alright and I think at this point we should pause for a public comment so we have one person in the room I feel like we made the drive you should deserve first crack but other than that anyone who's joined by the link please just raise your virtual hand and we'll get to you Dave Silverman I'll try to be fast in your provisional license requirements James you noted that you wanted to have people list all financiers above 10% I'm not sure that given that you're also going to require everyone who has control I don't think a 10% requirement is going to add anything statutorily 10% is control it's just one issue of control and I really appreciate that you've gone beyond that I would recommend that you that you require disclosure of smaller financiers as well because even though they are not controlling or they might not be controlling due to their percentage they might be indirectly controlling in other ways and you know somebody's a 5% holder and they happen to be you know the head of the Cineola Drone Cartel you want to know that so you want to know that even for non controlling people on the criminal records and the suitability I had a couple of areas of concern here and you know this is one that I've talked about with you all before that I think is really really important I didn't I noted that you don't seem to be suggesting a look back period for the sort of proper function of the market part but the statute the statute says that you're supposed to use factors to demonstrate whether the applicant presently poses a threat to public safety or the proper functioning of the market so it does require that you demonstrate a present threat to the proper function of the market and so I think that does suggest a look back period is appropriate you know somebody with a 20 year old investment charge with no additional you know run-ins with a law that would suggest a threat to the market I don't think should be excluded based on that very old conviction I also want you to note that folks who have been convicted of cannabis distribution charges are likely to have been simultaneously convicted of money laundering charges and whether you consider money laundering a crime of deceit it certainly is a crime of deceit over the financial system but we wouldn't want to deny someone a license because they were convicted of money laundering in connection with selling cannabis I also didn't see I also noted that it looks like you're not going to have a look back on listed crimes and look I get the listed crimes are generally very serious crimes although not all of them it is a rather exhaustive list and so you know and again even if it's a truly horrible crime you know I think the board ought to be able to accept the concept that everyone is capable of redeeming themselves after some period of time so again the statute says present threat I think you do need to demonstrate that you also suggested that applicants will have the ability to submit evidence of rehabilitation to the board and you know I kind of went back and forth in my mind of whether that's an appropriate shift of the burden because again the statute requires you to demonstrate the present threat and you know maybe okay you say they've had these crimes in the past and so we've demonstrated it but they can rebut it and maybe that shift is okay but it would be I think if you're going to say that then you should at least try to make it easy for people to identify the kinds of information that they can that the kinds of things that you would look for specifically because I think folks especially people with criminal records will just not you know folks with criminal records by the nature of our system just have fewer resources than everyone else and so they're going to need more help I'll come back to buffer zones I want to talk quickly about priority of applications in the order that they are received I talked about this a little bit at a market structure subcommittee meeting I remain concerned there are very few attorneys in the state who are specializing in cannabis business law they're probably all in this call and you know there's I think like probably a majority of your applicants are going to be served by one or two lawyers by one firm and and so if you want good quality applicants good quality applications instead of slap dash work I don't think you want to encourage everyone to think I got to be first and maybe you can hold off on this decision point until you've seen how many provisional license applications you get because you had you did previously discuss perhaps giving those folks with the provisional licenses some sort of priority review as well and so maybe wait to see what that universe looks like before making this decision because I really am afraid that you're going to put a lot of stress downstream on the service providers to this industry and then finally and thank you for giving me the time buffer zones I've discussed with the board members before my concerns with buffer zones I continue to think you don't have statutory authority to impose buffer zones I think the legislature passed a law that did not include buffer zones after in previous iterations previous bills they looked at specifically having those buffer zones there is a buffer zone in the statute for medical dispensaries the legislature chose not to put that in here what the legislature chose to do is to give municipalities the right to regulate cannabis businesses within those municipalities through zoning and I think that's what is allowed I very much appreciate the way you've tried to limit your buffer zone proposal to only retailers and to 500 feet instead of a thousand and to be 500 feet along the right of way as opposed to as the crow flies line to property line because those things are currently working to prevent medical dispensaries from being in parts of town where we would want cannabis stores to be like in commercial retail parts of towns and I appreciate that you've proposed allowing towns to reduce from the status quo but I think it's going to be very politically difficult for a town to take an action to reduce a state buffer and if instead you were to make a recommendation rather than a rule and still require towns to adopt something I think that would be a better result where towns will do what they want to do as the statute allows them and you're not usurping that authority from the towns so that's my recommendation to you and I appreciate all of your work and thank you very much for your time I say we should pause on comments until I mean not the public comments but our discussion until we've heard all of the public comments so first on my list is Amelia hi so while we're talking about application requirements things like how many licenses we're going to give out I just want to bring a little focus back to the issue of the number of medical dispensary licenses that are currently allowed just while we're having this discussion in legislation we cannot have more than our current number of medical dispensaries until we can expand it when we have 7,000 medical patients on the registry and that's a problem because that leaves us with only the dispensaries that are currently available and nobody else can come in to serve specifically the medical patients and that is a clear issue it's been spoken about a lot up until now but while we're talking about things like licensing applications I think it's also worthwhile to mention that this rule is still in place that is keeping people from applying from even applying to open a medical dispensary and that needs to change so that if somebody wants to serve the medical patients and only the medical patient community they should be allowed to and making it so that we can't even change that until there are 7,000 patients on the registry is ridiculous when patients are dropping off the registry since legalization is my only thought Thanks Amelia Sherman Ham Good afternoon, hi my name is Sherman Ham and I'm the director of regulatory affairs for medicinal genomics and I'd like to speak briefly concerning my concern in the slide that was presented this morning that was entitled analytical methods work list I apologize if I misunderstood but as I thought I understood I focused on the required microbial testing that listed only two tests and that was for total yeast and mold and total aerobic bacteria counts and previously as you know I've sent in public comments to both Chair Pepper as well as I think her name was Kim Watson who was the science or laboratory person on advisory committee our recommendations required testing focusing in testing both the medical and adult use cannabis to detect specific pathogens that have been found in cannabis meaning in more and more state and those are simply the salmonella species the shigatoxin producing E. coli in the four pathogenic strains of aspergillus and more and more states are adding these required tests to their to their regimen you know inhalable products in California it's all of those tests and for non-inhalable products is to salmonella and E. coli and Colorado and Oregon and a couple other states have added the aspergillus strains so I really strongly recommend that you consider our recommendations thank you very much for this opportunity to speak just quickly on that because I didn't want to signal that any regulatory proposed lab testing decisions were made I was using the hemp lab certification workbook as a proxy for the type of information we would look for from that perspective I didn't want to suggest that we were working on looking at other jurisdictions and tying it to our hemp lab testing program and so there might be adjustments there it was more about the schematic workbook itself than requirements included in that workbook if that makes sense I just would like to just point out that simply as a request of all the states and countries that are legalizing both medical and adult use cannabis the digital genomics has put together a compendium of all the required microbial testing in every state and it's freely available on our website it was updated to November 2020 and I am in the process of updating it to the present and so when I was with the New Jersey Department of Health Public Health Environmental Laboratories in 2019 I put together my own compendium and there is a lot of diversity but I want to just say one thing is to bear in mind is that results total counts I continue to just ask myself and ask government regulators in which I was one what kind of information do you actually get concerning the pathogenicity of a cannabis sample when you just ask for a total count and put an action level on it in my mind you get no information and that's what I keep trying to understand why so many states have total counts I'm not pointing at any fingers at Vermont or anything but it is amazing when there is such diversity and we need federal regulation so that there's one set of required testing that's based on science so if you need any help just open to just having a general dialogue I was with New Jersey Department of Health since 2012 I started the lab there I've been in regulations since 2017 and now I'm with industry I couldn't wait for New Jersey any longer thank you Ben Ben Mervis Hi everybody happy Friday I'll try to keep this quick if my notes and thank you by the way this was great seeing you just get through all this with regards to tax compliance if my notes are correct I don't believe the tax compliance was a hard and fast reason for rejection that there would be an opportunity to go back and revisit it I just wanted to bring up with regards to tax compliance that there are a lot of folks particularly in the social equity space who may have complicated tax histories and so if it is a hard and fast reason for rejection including that maybe a carve out to examine and see if an attempt has been made or if a plan is in place to address tax compliance and if it's a hard and fast thing to put that carve out if it's not just to consider that in your or methods for evaluating whether or not it's reason thank you Thanks Ben Bernardo I'm Bernardo Silva policy director for VGA I just wanted to bring up two issues the banking aspect for retailers and other processors and then I had another question about the priorities list for application as far as banking goes I'm just going to relate some things from my own experience main for example only has one bank that allows for cannabis businesses it's a seaport bank before that bank opened its doors to cannabis caregivers and producers those businessmen were operating in cash and we were using postal money orders to pay our sales tax monthly because in Maine I had to be reported monthly that wasn't really a huge burden in terms of safety especially for producers I mean at that time all producers were retailers doing deliveries stores didn't exist yet and so the emergence of stores kind of arrived at the same time that seaport opened its doors for that kind of banking and basically it just gave producers whether retailers or just growers a place to deposit their money daily in cash and then have a debit card to spend money on third party businesses or use checks to cover purchases laterally with other wholesalers or producers etc. but before that those people in the market were using cash and there wasn't any theft within the market because they're all registered license holders so background information goes