 My name is James Pepper. I'm the chair of the Remind Cannabis Control Board. It is January 24th, 2022. It's 1101. And I call it meeting order. Just a few administrative details before we get started. And our reminder that Mondays at 11 is our new official meeting time. We're going to be adopting a regular meeting schedule in a few minutes that lays out the dates of our regular meetings, including our after public comment meetings through the end of May. We may need to add some special for emergency meetings in between these regular meetings, but we'll do our best to give the public as much notice as possible before we do those do that. In the continued spread of COVID in Vermont, the legislature and the governor passed Act 78, which suspends the physical location requirement for open meetings. So until further notice, our meetings will no longer include an in-person participation, though we will of course continue to live stream the meetings so that members of the public can participate electronically or by phone. And we'll continue to record them and post them. So please feel free to participate that way. And of course, our public comment portal is always open. So looking at the week ahead, we're going to begin reviewing public comments on rules one and two today. I expect that we might not get through all of the comments that we've received. We'll see how far we get, but we may need to schedule a follow-up meeting for Thursday. We have our regular after hours public comment meeting tomorrow evening from six to seven, which will be live streamed. So please join that. And then also later this week on Thursday, we're going to have our first social equity and economic empowerment networking event starting at five o'clock. Julie, did you want to say anything else about that? Sure. The first one is it'll be remote as well. So we won't have an in-person. We had talked about doing it this hybrid, but given that we're changing kind of how we're doing things as a board, that would be fully remote as well. We have three folks coming, one experienced business person who's been through the permitting process recently, regional planner, and then a person from a local city who is a planner. And the goal is to talk about how to build relationships with your local government and navigate the permitting process. Great. I don't have any other announcements. So I guess has everyone had a chance to look at the minutes from January 18th? Yes. I think I have a motion to approve the minutes from January 18th. Seconded. All in favor. Aye. Aye. Okay. So next I'd like to just adopt a regular meeting schedule. And I just created a document that we can all just kind of look at quickly. Kyle, if you could pass me the HDMI. I'm not going to. Sorry. Nothing fancy about this, but it's better for us to just all be on the same page here. Okay. So not including today. But our next these are all Mondays, unless otherwise noted. And I also have the kind of public comment meetings included. And we did. We did Mondays and we only went through the end of May for now. Just because when the hopefully the legislature folks are in at some point. In June. And we can kind of reevaluate whether Mondays are working for us. They're working for members of the public. And I'm not going to just, but this is kind of the basic most Mondays meetings. Unless otherwise noted on an agenda will begin at 11. You know, just a note about the board's spending in person meeting attendance until further notice. Reminder that people can always access our meetings via our link or by the phone. So just to be clear, the board is not going to be a part of the meeting. It's just we will record and post our meetings unless some sort of unusual circumstance prevents us from doing so. So this look okay to everyone here. Yes. 28th of town meeting me. I don't know if you wanted to take that week off. Oh, okay. Up to you of course. And we may need to schedule a special meeting, but as far as a regular meeting, maybe we should just take that off. All right, so with that one at it, I take a motion to approve the schedule. So moved. Seconded. All in favor? Aye. Great. All right. So we'll maybe post this to our website with that. Let me see. Next on the agenda is really to just review the public comments on one and two. We received a huge amount of comments. They range from being very general to being very specific. David has organized them for us. He's going to help us get through them systematically. Again, I think this will likely take longer than the three and a half hours that we have scheduled on our agenda. So if that is the case, we'll see how far we get today, but we may need to call a special meeting on Thursday. So other than that, I'll just hand it over to you, David. Sounds good. All right, so we are going to go through the comments. I think what we'll do is, and just so folks know, let me back up for a second. So you all know, I think if you know, and the public knows, we do have all of the comments, all of the substantive comments are there. Where there were multiple comments on the exact same subject, we're not going to repeat them. This is just a summary of each of the substantive comments that were made, which are many, even without any repeats. And for those who may be listening for their own comments that are in here, the way we say them in the meeting may be a shortened version of what you wrote, but I do believe we substantively put in the key ideas and of course the board has either heard your comments for those of you who gave them in person or has read them, all of them, for those who submitted them in writing, the board reviews those as they come in, at least every week, if not more. So everything's been seen in full and what we're doing here is a little bit of a summary in some ways, but it's still a very complete set of the comments in terms of all substantive comments are here. So with that explanation, I'll dive in as Sarah Pepper mentioned, these do range from the general of the specific and the earliest ones are very general and they kind of are applicable to everything, which means that I'm not sure you're going to be able to make any decisions on them specifically, but more just for you to keep in mind as we go through the rules and potentially make adjustments in accordance. And on some of these, I may have some comments myself, just in terms of how the drafting went and things like that that give you context and give everybody context as we're thinking about that. First comment for you. Just pause quickly, you know, there are potential areas that might lead to litigation, I think or we might need David's kind of confidential attorney client advice. And so I think David, if you could note those areas for us as we go through, and I think we should have potentially if needed an executive session at the end of the meeting. Towards the end of the meeting at least, not kind of ad hoc as we go. That makes sense, one of us will keep a note of where we think those come up and we can tackle them in an executive session before it votes to do that. So at the outset here, we've got the following comment. For ease of administration and the regulated community, it would be helpful to include all terms defined and statute in the rule. And if the statute guides the regulated community in some way, advertising, packaging, et cetera, it would be helpful to have directly included in the rule. We'll make a comment on this. I basically agree with this comment, but it was a considered decision not to include the all the statutory language in the rule because we anticipate that these statutes are going to change. They're probably gonna change this legislative session and they will probably change again in future legislative sessions. And part of the reason not to include the statutes, the statutory language in the rule was that we would have a rule that would immediately or very rapidly be wrong, which we don't wanna have. And ultimately, we thought it would be less confusing for people to have rules that required them to go to the statutes to know everything as opposed to having rules that in some places were simply incorrect. And then they'd have to figure out where they're incorrect and then go to the statutes and sort of do a matching game, which ultimately is even more confusing. So that was the idea behind that. That was sort of the drafting decision behind that. I think we'll make every effort to make the, if you agree with going forward in that manner, we'll certainly make every effort to make the statutes very readily available right alongside the rules to the best we can to make it accessible and easy for people. And maybe in future years as the sort of statutory change slows down, we can reconsider how the rules are constructed. But for now, that was the idea is that ultimately having conflicting statutes and rules is worse than making people go to the statute to find stuff. So I'm fine with the approach that we've taken as opposed to adding all the statutory. Yeah, me too. And I think we can start pivoting towards guidance and FAQs once we kind of have a better understanding of the finalization process of these rules. Thank you. The next very general comment applicable to everything or applicable generally is that regulations that are outside of the jurisdiction of the CCB may not be suitable for inclusion in the rule when the CCB does not have the ability to enforce that other jurisdictions law statute or rule. This could change if the CCB uses compliance with other laws as a basis for revoking a license or as a barrier to obtaining a license, but this should be outlined explicitly. And I'll just say here, it certainly is the case that the CCB doesn't have the jurisdiction to enforce anybody else's rules, but there actually are places in the rules where you have conditioned compliance and potentially violations on people following other entities' rules. So even though we couldn't step into the regulatory role of another agency, it is possible that you could say, hey, we know you're not following these other rules. And for that reason, you're out of compliance with our rules as well. One can violate them potentially or at least work with them to come into compliance. And so that I think is present in the rule and that's why we do sometimes reference entities' rules. If there are no comments, I'll keep rolling through these general ones. That makes sense to me too. From our friends at the Department of Agriculture Food markets noted that reporting to the board or requiring giving information to the board should generally only be required when it may trigger some action by the board. Otherwise reporting or the requirements to report is burdensome for both board and the licensee without serving a purpose. Again, I don't think there's any response needed to this in general, but just something to keep in mind as we go through the rules and think about what's being asked of licensees. Here's another general rule of comment. Unless you're coming from the illicit market having already paid for your growth space and your equipment without the additional fees and expenses associated with the legal market, starting a legal indoor cannabis business as a tier one cultivator is not a profit-making enterprise. I suggest including tier two cultivators in the licensing and regulatory exemptions to make a fair and equitable marketplace for all small cultivators, not just the legacy growers who already have a significant head start in their startup cost, customer-based genetics, et cetera. Again, that's sort of a broad comment, but as the board knows, you have a specific statutory requirement to lower the regulatory burden on tier one cultivators. You don't have that for tier two, and that's sort of the direction you've gone in, but I don't know if folks have further comment on that. Welcome to... So I mean, we have the discretion, though, to tailor regulations to four tier two cultivators, right? Yeah, I think that's right. Wave things for tier one. So maybe we can just keep that in the back of our minds as we're, you know, once again, fine tuning these rules. Yeah, makes sense. I think, again, even some of the language, like it's not profitable, it's not a profit-making enterprise. You can appreciate that in how year one, a lot of those startup costs might outweigh what you can. Growth, you know, or not, you know what I mean, but think over time, that would even out a little bit regardless of what we do. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Inefficiency of our minds just as always, keeping them back of our heads does have some incredible rebate programs, not that something to keep in the back of our minds. So moving not yet to super specific, but slightly more specific, a comment that is really focused on rule one on the licensing process says the following. I envision the following business for cannabis, growing a small number of plants, less than 50 processing onsite and selling direct to consumer. Though our existing network of contacts. However, under the proposed rule, I'd have to apply for three licenses, cultivator manufacturer and retailer, I'd hope that the board would provide an efficient and easy method for someone like me to apply and not require performing the same tasks three times. In some ways, that's an operational comment, but something we can consider as though that I don't know if you have other comment. You know, the way that I see this is that there's a lot of overlap between what's required in the various applications for these, you know, it's not like filling out three applications means that, you know, it's like three times the work, you know, you fill out one application and a lot of the same information that would be required in all three. So I actually don't think it's overly burdensome for someone to seek three applications considering they're generally contain a lot of the same information. This business type would require, you know, of course a cultivation license and a, you know, tier two product manufacturing license in a potentially, you know, a tier one retail license. So, you know, I don't think we should get into the work of combining license types into a single license type at this stage. No, I think this could be addressed in whatever system we use for an application. If it can save portions of your application and carry it over then that's, that's probably the easiest way to address this. Yeah, I agree. I think let's see how well that works over the course of this first phase of our program. And perhaps if we recognize that it's a little bit more of a burden and we perhaps anticipate to actually see if we can look at a different license type that kind of combines certain individual license type next session or thereafter. And now jumping to the super specific, we looking at the definition section, rule 1.1.3, there is a recommendation that we define employee, which is, and this is relevant to section 1.49 of the rule, which is the social equity, social equity criteria, technology we use there, but sorry, positive impact criteria section. So the definition of employee would impact the requirements for the positive impact criteria section. So anyway, that is the comment is to define employee, which, and that was the extent of the comment, I'll say that from the lawyer's standpoint there are definitions of employee elsewhere in Vermont statute that we can, if this is something you wanna do that we can copy pretty easily and just use what's already known as the definition in other business practices. So yes, I think we should define employee. Yeah. And using what already exists in Vermont statute, like healthcare benefits and earn sick time and paid leave, et cetera, I think is the way to go. Like a full-time equivalency type of. Not quite. So 32 VSA, I wrote it down, 105.02 talks about it's the same definition as employee for the purposes of health insurance requiring to provide health insurance. That might be the one that fits this industry the best. Yeah. But there are a lot of them. I wanna make sure folks that only need more help at a certain time of the year don't get, probably been someone that's had. That definition defines seasonal versus kind of a full-time year. Sounds good. The next comment, comments really is few comments on this about subsections B and F, which are the indoor versus outdoor cultivation definitions. And one comment says, these indoor outdoor cultivation definitions leave some confusion as to where hoop houses would fit. The board could delineate the difference between indoor and outdoor cultivation by clarifying that outdoor cultivators may use an enclosing structure like a hoop house, which does not otherwise constitute a greenhouse under rule two, so long as they do not use artificial lighting. And then I'll also just do the next comment because it's somewhat relevant here. As noted below in 1.3.1, this may be a place to a combination of light rowing if the board chooses to do it. So, and then somebody else notes that indoor outdoor definition does not kind of like greenhouse buildings that don't use artificial light, basically the same comment. So, clarifying the indoor outdoor cultivation definitions is what we're getting potentially if, I think we could come back in a few minutes to the mixed light growing issue, which might make more sense to address when we talk about the cultivation tiers. Okay. We defined indoor outdoor by the type of light, right? We define indoor by growing cannabis using artificial light. I know we've heard a lot about mixed light. I know some folks need some artificial light to prevent their flowers from flowering too early or their cannabis plants from flowering too early. I mean, I think I would certainly want to consider a very small amount of artificial light that outdoor growers could use. A kilowatts per, it's usually kilowatts per square foot. Other states do this. I don't think we wanna create a new tier at this point in the system, but I think allowing a very small amount of artificial light for outdoor growers makes sense here. And would that be for any plants or would that be for plants that are not yet nearing maturity, like clones that are just starting? I think it would be for any plants. I do think, and maybe this is just more education that we needed or guidance that we need to put out, but it was our intent to at least mine or the sustainability committee, their intent to make sure that hoop houses were considered outdoor through that not in use for cannabis production over 180 days. They're more of your temporary style of greenhouses. So those, it's my understanding are considered outdoor. So I think we just need to clarify that a little bit. What kind of clarification do we need there though? To me, it seems pretty clear, right? Me too, but you know, whether that's guidance or, you know. So I do think that the outdoor cultivation definition needs to be altered slightly to make it clear that hoop houses could be included in it. And I don't think that's hard to do. I think just say that outdoor. Could include an enclosing structure. Doesn't use artificial lighting and then it can do the mixed light thing. We'll add another class that has that outdoor cultivation could also include acts type of lighting under a certain amount, whatever that that's up to you. Does that also mean a greenhouse that uses natural sunlight is outdoor growing? And we'll check on the rule too to make sure our greenhouse definition doesn't exactly have any conflicts, we can iron that out. All right, so I'm taking the decision there as we will clarify that outdoor cultivation can include hoop houses. We have at least one movement towards mixed light growing but let's like close that conversation when we get to the tier, if that's okay. So the next comment is about social equity criteria. There are two comments here. One has to do with ownership structures and whether a certain sections of the code of federal regulations which are definition references should be carved out in order to make it easier to do capital raising activities for business owners. And the second one is really about what qualifying groups should be included in the definition. So let's take, let's do the first one first. I think we can discuss that and we'll tackle the second one after that or at least address it, initially address it after that. So the 51% ownership rule, a commenter points out that, and I'll read through this, I think that'll be easier than my time to summarize it. By virtue of the reference to the federal Disadvantaged Business Enterprises definition, rule one requires not only that an empty of be at least 51% owned by socially disadvantaged individuals but that they own at least 51% of each class of interests in the enterprise. This would create an unnecessary hurdle to efficient capital raising as they would not be able to utilize common private equity investment structures which give investors preferred shares which serve to give investors typical rights like liquidation preferences, cost sale rights, anti-dilution rights and the like while founders retain common shares. Instead, socially disadvantaged individuals and their funders will be forced to structure their investment documents in less typical ways which will only serve to increase their lawyers' fees. So the recommendation, the commenter's recommendation here is to carve out the requirements of a certain set of sub parts of the Code of Federal Regulations while retaining another set of sub parts that sort of ensures the majority interest requirement. In other words, that the socially disadvantaged individual does in fact retain majority interest in a certain level of control. So I'll sort of make a couple of comments on this from the lawyer standpoint. I think that this is a valid point in that the way the Code of Federal Regulations is structured it would make it more difficult for venture capital money specifically to come into an enterprise like this. It's not impossible but it would require unusual structuring to do. And so it does sort of close that off a little bit. The counter to that is that, or I would say the counter to that is that when you do allow those types of structures to come in there is going to be some inherent tension in terms of what control means so that it would remain the case under this type of structure where there's a venture capital money coming in that the person who's actually running the business still has a tremendous amount of control over the business and sort of daily business operations but venture capitalists don't put money even having any say. They will have some sort of veto power or certain decisions that might be made around the structure of the business around changing bylaws, things like that. That's usually how those sorts of funding streams get structured. So I certainly think this is something you could do. I think it will make it easier to raise venture capital. I think that there will be a little bit more tension between the actual control and what the VC's control. That's not to say I don't think we can do it. I think what that'll mean is it'll be a little bit harder frankly for the board to assess control when we're looking at this. One of the benefits of the way it is now is that it's very easy for the board to just say do you have 51% of all these type of this whole pool of potential equity? Yes, great. And that's not the whole story of course. There could be other clever structurings that happen that effectively undermine that but it is a fairly straightforward check mark. It becomes less straightforward when you have something like this because then you have to start looking at the documents and seeing what sort of control the socially disadvantaged individual actually has retained under the various funding rights. But that's not impossible to do by any means. It can be done. And I think there is a sort of reasonable assessment that can be made to say, all right, this is a normal VC funding round and the conditions are normal and the person is still retaining all the sort of general ways in which we'd say they retain control of the business. They've gotten this money. There's some conditions attached to it but they're basically making all the business decisions and retain the benefits of ownership. So that was a little bit long winded in part because this stuff is very complicated. And I would say, I think the point made by the commenter is fair. I think it does put a little bit more onus on the board and the board staff to figure out exactly what's really going on, but that it would open funding streams at a lower cost whereas the current rule would require some very creative probably layering to get funding streams in. And if we were to do this, is there are there other places in the rule that we need to amend for the types of documents that we get or the type of information we get from the applicant? I think that we already had, that we're actually, there are some comments on the disclosure requirements that we're gonna get to. I actually do think our disclosure requirements are very robust already and allow us to get at a lot of the information but when we get to those sections, we can look and see if we would need to. I think we can get all the information we need already though even if we were to do that. So yeah, this, you know, we want, we know that access to capital is the most difficult piece of starting one of these businesses, but we also don't want these predatory relationships to develop. I'm fine with accepting the recommendation here because I really think that, you know, people are just not gonna invest in this industry if they have to change the way that they're used to investing, yeah. And I think people do go into those situations with their eyes wide open about what they're signing into. You know, it happens in the, VCs exist in every industry and I think people just need to really be clear about the contracts they're signing. So I'm fine with accepting the recommendation here. That's great. So the next one, I'll, I'm gonna read it out loud and then I'll have a comment on it. This is about the qualifying groups, which is not in the text of the rule but is effectively in the rule by reference as we know in section, a subsection of this section of the rule, 1.1.3. So under the current definition, the qualifying groups would include within African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Americans, subcontinent Asian Americans. Other minorities found to be disadvantaged by the Small Business Association, which is a federal entity. And then the comment is basically that the board may want to consider this. This is not exactly what the board's recommendation had been, not recommendation, you're, because you were adopting a socially disadvantaged individual definition or I should say a social equity act definition. And so this is a comment about revisiting this given how the rules kind of worked out. And there's a number of other comments on this issue and I'll read through those as well. One commenter says, can you please define what constitutes a community in the social equity definitions? And that's specifically down in subsection L, I believe. Another comment says, it is my understanding that the advisory board recommended that the control board remove women. This comment is referencing the CCB's advisory board. The advisory board recommended that this board remove women from the social equity guidelines in Vermont. And just to clarify what happened there, it wasn't so much a removal, it was that your original proposal was really focused on people of color. So it wasn't so much a removal. We're just talking about making the federal guidelines fit the board's proposal here. The commenter says that women are included, which is true in this, under this rubric and the federal rubric, there's language throughout the regulations and licensing that states women are disproportionately affected. Email CEOs in the cannabis industry are declining, they're increasing as the business grows, they're increasingly taken over by large corporate, predominantly male boards. Females historically work harder to be heard and respected and taken seriously in this industry and in the business world in general, until these numbers change, I believe females should be part of the social equity conversation in Vermont as it is federally. Two more comments that'll go through and then discuss this as a whole. The 1.3.1J, somebody has a technical correction, which I always appreciate and is, I will just note, I think they are right, the of was supposed to be, or you're right, thank you. And then the final one notes, adding a state residency requirement. And I will just say, it's understandable why this might be missed because it's basically at the bottom and it's in a different subsection, but there is actually a requirement for this that people are currently residents of Vermont. There's no requirement that they have decided here over any length of time, but just that at the application time, they are residents of Vermont. So one thing I'll just note is that the board is free to discuss whatever pieces of this they want if the board would like my advice as your attorney with respect to who the definitions of socially disadvantaged individuals should include social equity, business applicants should include, I would recommend to the board that you take that as professional legal advice and also even what has happened in other states, the likelihood of litigation, I would recommend that the board hear my advice on that piece in executive session. Of course, that's up to you, but that would be my recommendation if you want me to weigh in on specifically which the sort of group definitions. And again, for the reasons I just stated, but you're welcome to discuss as much or as low as you want. And then do the executive session later, I'll leave that up to you all. I say my advice would be we hear from David in executive session and then get his advice and then come back and kind of come back and have a decision outside of the executive session. Yeah, that sounds good. And I will just remind folks listening that board can have executive sessions but can't make any final decisions in executive session. So you will hear what any decisions they will be made in public. So we're skipping now to 1.3 licensed tiers. And this comment I put here, but it kind of could apply potentially in the renewal section too. We'll just see where you guys land on this, but it's a comment saying that the board should provide clarity around how a licensee can move between tiers. Can they do it at renewal? Could they do it in the middle of the licensing year? What would you like the parameters to be? We don't have any sort of explicit provisions on that yet, what would you like the parameters to be on moving between tiers? So Massachusetts has a kind of change of tier request application. They get pretty specific that you have to demonstrate that you're cultivating at the top of your production tier and that you've sold 85% of your product consistently over the preceding six months. I don't know if we need to get that prescriptive on this. Obviously you can't pull two licenses of the same type simultaneously. So in thinking about this, we need to think about how does someone expand, particularly if they're changing locations, I think, because you're gonna have to wind down one operation and then wind up another, but you can't own two licenses simultaneously. So seems to me like we can either have a fixed period where people can change their licenses like after six months or they could do it as needed at their kind of at their request. And I think that's one decision point we should make and the other one should be kind of, is there an overlap or you're allowed to kind of wind down one operation and start up another? Kind of operate under both at the same time. So on your first point, I'm thinking allowing people to do it whenever it makes business sense for them. Yes. Like some sort of mid-year amendment that they make to their license. And then I wonder if the grace period is until their next license application. So if you were to scale up, for example, you would apply for some sort of amendment and then you'd have to apply for the new type of license. Then you apply for your, when you apply for renewal. You just pay the difference in the licensing fee at the point on which you make the amendment. I think we could do it that way. I do like the mass requirement of proving that you've sold over 85% of the product you've grown. I think if we don't include something like that, it's really going to mess with our supply demand models because we're then giving a higher tier of a license to somebody who, we might end up in an oversupply situation or an anticipated one, which could just really, I think impact some of how we make decisions. And then on the other side for scaling down, we want to know what happened with the product that they're scaling down from, right? So if they're growing 2,500 square feet and want to grow less, we'd want to know what happened with, we went down actually through the tracking system. So people can change, graduate at any point, but they have to file a new application that I'm hearing. A supplemental or an amendment to the existing license. Okay. Pay the difference. Pay the difference. So I'm trying to work this out on my head. Like if you get licensed and in day two, we go out and inspect, we've spent all the money that we are, I mean, we've incurred the cost of what your license is intended to cover. So to me, I'm not really sure that there should be any kind of proration or any sort of refunds for the existing license that you saw. That's the part where I'm getting caught up. So it seems to me like what you should have is you could allow people to graduate at any point, but they just have to kind of apply a new, essentially pay the fee. And that's kind of just the cost of doing business. I mean, there's nothing that's forcing people to upgrade them in here, you know, so to me, I think it's just a new application, new license. I mean, again, the application, you can probably upload a lot of the same documents that you applied for the first one. I think it's overly onerous to require just a new application and a new fee, you know, at the discretion of the person, you know, when they're ready to do it. And then as far as whether they can operate under both at once, I mean, maybe there's some sort of sixth year, you know, if you're changing, if you're not changing locations, there's no reason why the one can't be revoked the second a new one or rescinded the second a new one takes effect if you're just expanding your canopy in your existing kind of facility. You are changing locations. I could see how there might be some kind of time where you need both operations going simultaneously. How do you feel about the proving that you've sold over a certain percentage of your product in order to graduate? You know, it makes sense, obviously, you know, it helps us from a supply-demand perspective, but I wonder if we really need it. I mean, Well, to the extent of making this overly complicated, which is easy to deal. What if we said, if you can prove to us that you've accommodated for over 85% of your product and at that point you get prorated, if you choose not to certify that you've gotten over 85% of your product sold in a demonstrated way, it's a whole new application. Well, we already have that information though in the seed to sale tracking system. Like that is sold when we already have that. We have somebody to crunch the data for us. I don't know. I'm just trying to get creative here. If we require the 85% to graduate, it kind of leads me down the path of, are we gonna claw back unused, can't we? And it seems like two sides of the same point. Like, are we gonna require? I'm not opposed to doing that either, but, you know, I'm not high to it either. So there's a couple of different ways to do it. I don't know if I have a clear path in my head on the best way or at this point in time. Just trying to think from a practical standpoint, how much staff do we have to really, you know, go out and free to evaluate all of these, like, you know, decision points? I mean, Massachusetts has over 120 people working for them. So I understand that the value of this kind of thing, and maybe the graduating is more important than the kind of coming back to know that people are actually operating in full capacity. So they're not overextending themselves, but at the same time kind of feels a little nandy-state-ish. Like they're saying, oh, you know, you have to demonstrate that you can actually do this in order to do it. It's not like very free market of us, but... Yeah, no, I agree. It's just at that point, yeah. Okay, I guess if it's data that we would already have, I would rather not require the licensees to collect duplicate information provided to us. So assuming that that's data that we have in our sea-to-chill sale tracking system and what we need is staff to look at it, then that's a different person. What a better way to look at it be, like prove to us that you've got the existing relationships and potential future contracts, to the extent that we can require that to... We wouldn't require that of just someone who's coming in fresh. Well, we do, though. Their business plan would work. I mean, they would put all that in their business plan. So if you're applying a new, which in my mind sounds, it sounds onerous, but it depends on kind of what our system looks like, right, if we can re-upload the same documents or use documents that are already saved in the system, maybe it's not so bad. But we wouldn't have all that information about if they're applying a new, we would have all the information about, you know, their financing and what they have to support the growth of their business. Right. So what I'm just saying that we wouldn't necessarily, if someone was applying a new, we wouldn't say we need to have, I mean, it seems like we're adding in a requirement for someone who's already has a track record that does not apply to someone who's applying for the first time. Yeah, I know, I agree with that. I was just trying to think of, if somebody's asking us to pivot their license midway through, there may be a reasoning to looking as to more of the why, you know? But again. But if they're just gonna apply for a new, like you're a thousand square foot cultivator and you're applying mid-year for a 2,500 license, we're gonna get all the same materials. So I don't think we need a requirement necessarily that they have this 85% sold. We're gonna see it anyway. Right. Well, that jump scares me for different reasons because there's so many car valves for small cultivators that we're gonna need to double check regardless. That's a separate competition. Well, then they would, I mean, they would have to apply a new, right? Because they're gonna have to meet new requirements. Yeah. All right, so I don't know where we are. I think we're at not doing the proven 85% and applying a new. That's where I'm at. Okay. Cool. I mean, the only thing about having a fixed date when like a mid-year review or something like that is it makes our lives a little bit more predictable. Our compliance works a little bit more predictable. We're not gonna have to necessarily review applications. I mean, we're gonna have to review applications on a rolling basis, but we're not gonna have to review renewal or upgrade applications, graduation applications, kind of, you know, on a rolling basis. So it'll all be at a set time. I feel like once the market's matured a little, it's easier to set that date. Like we might know better like when in the year, that makes sense. So early on, more flexibility. Maybe we're fixing this in here, right? That sounds good. The only piece that I didn't hear a conclusion on is like the transition period. If somebody's granted a license, do you have a new license that's a different tier or potentially, I guess, even different type? Is there a transition period or? 60 day. Sure. 60 day overlap. That's good. That's filled on the second end of the day. So now we are going on. I'll wait for 10 seconds here while Kyle went back. Is there a reason not to do that or do not allow like somebody who has a 25,000 square foot? If we don't, it just has a chilling effect. I mean, it was be like a sedative on the market, really. You wouldn't be able to boost, you wouldn't be able to ramp up. Like, I think it's, we need to have some sort of overlap. Are we legally allowed to have an overlap? Do you think if we... I think if we called it something else. Yeah. Yeah. That's a transition period is exactly the way I said it. I think if you draft it in a way that makes clear that they can't really like be fully operating to licenses at the same time, but there's some ability to maintain multiple locations without being in violation of either their older new license. I think that is within the spirit of the statute. But yeah, you couldn't use the transition to be operating to licenses in contravention of your... All right. So you'd have to apply first, then ramp up, right? Yeah. And I think you could have potentially like, say you're moving from one location to another, have some grace period where the move, the process of moving doesn't put you in violation of your license. But you couldn't be like, oh, wow, I'm growing at it, cultivating at it two locations. You know, that I think would be a violation. And I think to some degree, this will end up being an enforcement that's being as well as discretionary as much as it is like defining it precisely. But well, the short answer is yes. I think you could be something like that without being in violation of the statute. Yeah, given outdoor and indoor growing, you're just jumping up on square footage tier. That transition should be relatively quick, I would imagine. It's just these unique situations where it might just take a little bit more oversight from our enforcement division to make sure it's done appropriately. Absent kind of changing of tiers. People, licensees can change their location with the kind of amendments to the board or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Probably an operational thing, I think. So now we're moving on to, if we're ready. Yep. Moving on to license tiers, section 1.3. The number of comments first about cultivation license tiers, 1.3.1. I'm gonna read a few of these because they're all very interrelated, save some for later, but I think it's a little less related. So here's a few of them. Update, this should be updated to accommodate what I believe, I rephrased this comment because I believe the board's already made some decisions about mixed cultivation tiers. So this section needs to be updated to be in agreement with what I think you've already decided in some of your conversations and recommendations to the legislature, but we should be clear on that today and then make any final, just finalized decisions on that stuff or the purposes of this section. Then there are several comments on both sides of the following debate, either make plant counts equivalent, but plant count equivalents for all outdoor tiers. That's one side of the debate and you got comments strongly encouraging you to do that. And then you got several comments strongly encouraging you to eliminate any reference to plant accounts anywhere. So that's something for you to consider as you're thinking about these tiers and then I'll drop in the mixed light provision again here. And then the final piece, and then there's a couple of other issues that I think are a little more discreet and you can tackle after you've discussed this chunk of info, but I will just note there's a long comment here, which I know you've all read that essentially has a number of proposals around what the mixed tier licensing options could or should be along with policy reasons for doing so. And I'll just note those real quick here. This, these commenters recommend that they're basically be sort of like a scale that accommodates the economics of the different types of growing. Essentially it'd be a one to two to four scale in terms of sizing. So indoor would be the one baseline mixed light would get to grow twice as much for similar economic effect. Outdoor would get to go four times as much for similar economic effect. Again, that's their argument about what the economics of it are. So their proposal would be something like tier one would be 1000 square foot indoor, 100 plants outdoor, tier two, 2000 indoor, 200 plants outdoor, tier three, 3000 and 300. And then I'm gonna skip down and they have an alternative hearing plan. Again, just want to, this is what you're gonna be discussing but just want to make it clear that we are going through all the comments here. So we have what's this and these commenters recommend that mixed light not actually be an outdoor grow which is what was mentioned earlier this meeting but would instead be an artificial lighting would be in the realm of indoor and would be in the scope of artificial lighting what they mean by that, it was basically as it would be defined as indoor. And then they sort of recommend something where instead of having it be a mixed license type where it can grow some indoor, some outdoor and one license type that you can purchase one of each type of license. We can discuss that more if you'd like in terms of the limitations on that and the statute. But again, they sort of have another tiered system around that follows their one, two, four ratio around what the amount should be and they have recommendations regarding fees which as the board knows, you don't have the power to set but so yeah, they have a 4,000, 2,100 for outdoors mixed light indoors for the craft here and then a maximum tier that would be an acre for outdoors, 22,000 square feet for mixed light and 10,000 for indoors. So anyway, just wanted to put all that out there too that was an extended comment on the same subject but to summarize I think what makes sense to discuss now is revisit and finalize decisions about cultivation tiers you've already made plant count equivalents or no plant count equivalents and where does mixed light grow and go? Those are the three things to talk about now. Say those three again, sorry. Revisit and finalize cultivation tier decisions you've already made or that I believe you've already made about mixed tier and so forth and I think you have, yeah. Plant count equivalents or no plant count equivalents and mixed light, where does it go deep or do you have it, period? And if you do have it, where does it go? All right, mixed tier sizes. I can tell you where we ended up on that. A tier one was 1,000 square feet indoor plus 50 plants outdoor for $1,800. Tier two was 1,000 feet indoor, 125 outdoor. For 2,250 and then tier three was 2,500 indoor and 200 outdoor. Those seem fine to me. I don't feel like, I mean, we've debated this, we've heard a comment on this. I see the recommendation from old growth organics which seems to make sense but again, we're essentially combining the indoor tiers not creating new tiers of indoor. So those numbers don't fully square with what we've done on the indoor side of things. So, I mean, we can have a conversation about plant count versus canopy, but are those, do we want to amend those? The only question I really have for us, I mean, I'm not pretty much in agreement with you. It is like the middle mixed tier where it's 1,000 plus 125. I think we did that in spirit of trying to keep as many of these mixed tiers under the purview of small cultivator as we possibly could because, you know, we enjoy a number of exemptions. And so my question is, do we want to allow, the only thing I would suggest maybe having a conversation about is do we want to find an equal medium of indoor between 1,000 and 2,500 just to think about this graduate kind of approach. So yeah, I'm kind of okay with where we are, but that was the one spot where I thought we could have a conversation. Can you say that last part again, the graduate? So yeah, I mean, we have 1,000 plus 50, 1,000 plus 125 and 2,500 plus two. And I mean, I know that the 1,000, the 2,500 kind of fits in line with our current indoor modeling, but I was wondering, you know, that middle one, there's no room for growth indoor. So do we want to provide any, you know, intermediate stuff or put 2,500 there and kind of kick it to a higher tier in the third one? The cost there is you're gonna lose the small cultivator protections that you might otherwise have in that middle mixed tier, which from my perspective might outweigh just being able to grow some more, but then again, yeah, I'm sure folks feel might feel differently. I mean, it almost seems like you eliminate the tier one, 50 outdoor, leave the tier two, tier three and then maybe create a third tier with higher indoor or higher outdoor. I mean, is that kind of where you're getting it? I don't know, say it one more time. Yes, you both have said the same thing in different ways. Thank you. It's fun, yeah, it's fun, yeah, we're trying. Just kind of, because we wanted a mixed tier or small cultivator, we essentially just came up with, you know, 1,050, right? 1,000 square feet indoor, 50 outdoor. And then as we kind of thought about it more, we thought we should have some more of these tiers. And so maybe that first tier that we kind of just originally conceptualized isn't the best, like maybe we don't need that tier, but we need a larger tier, so. Yeah, I know, and again, it's conceptually, do we want these mixed tiers to follow up more within the line of the small cultivator mantra of how we're kind of conducting business or is there a point before the 2,500 and 200 or maybe we adjust that completely that would allow for a higher ratio of mixed light or excuse me, mixed indoor, mixed outdoor growing depending on what somebody wants to do from a business decision. I think if you, in kind of the same vein, if you make that what's considered tier two now, the first tier, you have a little bit more space to grow. And then you could actually, I think what we're suggesting is. We have a 5,500. Something like that. So cut the first one and make a bigger one at the bottom. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fine. You think it still accomplishes what you were looking to accomplish just in a different way. I wasn't trying to accomplish anything. I think I was just drawing attention to if we, the way it's structured now, there's more small cultivator protections for the mixed growing. And I'm okay with pivoting off that. I just want folks to recognize that if that's what we're going to do. I think we'll meet more folks where they want to be if we do put in like a 5,500 or some to type up equivalent growing. I know that there are some folks that want to grow indoor and outdoor and we might be limited from the statutory perspective with granting those license types, right? I think, I mean, you can just design them. So they're a single place. Right. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, my only hesitancy at changing this at all is we have a fee bill has been introduced. It's gotten at least three or four hearings and we keep on changing it every single time. It's not the legislature that's changing. It's not things that change. Yeah. Which is not helpful to them because it's kind of like, well, is this final or not? When can we act on this? I agree. Which is, you know, it's a little bit of a problem. Like we want to get it right. So I'm not saying that we should let that endure us too much. But the only reason that I even brought that up because it seems like who's gonna really get the tier one if for, you know, 400 extra dollars, you can, you know, almost, you know, you can get 125 plants and, you know, it just, it feels, I mean, and maybe there's someone, maybe there's a market out there for a smaller, but I mean, I almost feel like we should just leave this alone and see if this is a license type that people are really interested in. So while I think what we discussed in terms of the tiers is probably better, I'm concerned about, I'm a little bit more concerned about the fee bill and moving that through so that all of the fees are ready when we need them to be. Yeah. So I think I'm with you in terms of leaving this the way it is now knowing that the fees are reviewed every three years. Well, we can, the fees by generally speaking are reviewed every three years, that we can change fees in between. Right, but in a year or two or three, we would have a better assessment of the market and like you're saying, whether or not this is something people are really interested in. I think this does do a lot for the small cultivators that we're trying to encourage. You know, I think, you know, when you have a 5,000 indoor and 500 plants outdoor, I know everything's kind of scalable for the mom, but that's starting to get to what we would consider a larger tier, larger cultivation. So now we're starting to move away from trying to accommodate small cultivators towards medium and larger sized companies for Vermont. So why don't we leave it, why don't we leave it as is, but we should talk about plant, plant count versus square footage. I think we, you know, the reason that I wanted the equivalency for the small cultivator is to accommodate people's unique growing styles and not trying to force people to really, you know, sacrifice some good growing practices regenerative growing practices in order to kind of maximize the amount of plants they can fit into a plot, you know, allow kind of rows in between with other vegetation, allow kind of the chickens to run wilds for pest control purposes. So I thought that was a good justification. We got some calculations from some commenters about what the equivalent of a thousand square foot indoor should be as an outdoor plant count that I think we can rely on as the justification for the 125. Whether we apply that kind of same ratio to larger outdoor peers, we've run into the problem that we're very quickly going to get beyond an acre. Say, if you assume that a thousand square feet is equal to 125 plants and apply that ratio to 5,000, that creative plant count that's equivalent, it's impossible to kind of like say that that can happen under an acre. Now, do we care? I mean, it certainly brings in some other regulatory agencies that maybe don't want to participate in this, but it's not on us. We can just disclose to people or advise people that this might, if you grow above this size, you might have to talk to ANR. You might have to talk to, you know. And Erby? Yeah. Yeah, I still don't know how I feel necessarily on this issue. And I know we're coming to a point where decisions need to be made. I'm really anxious about Act 250 and how there could be a patchwork of interpretations among district coordinators in the state. If it's, if there's too much kind of discretion built into it all. From a, you know, the plant count so high that you can spread out on a large area of land and then how that land potentially could be counted for current use versus tax at a different rate. And I've just kind of bowed in my head on how hard that might be from a current use perspective in the use appraisal program at the tax department to identify a specific area of your land that might be taxed differently than, you know, otherwise, depending on if it's an agricultural product or not. The small cultivators are still relieved from all of that though, right? Like they're sort of protected from the, having to do with that additional regulatory burden. It's the larger ones that would be a concern, right? Yeah, I don't know. In my mind, I feel like doing a plant count for like a equivalent plant count for each of the outdoor tiers makes sense. Yeah, I mean, just makes me anxious. I agree. I mean, I agree. The failure rate outside is gonna be a lot more indoors. It's gonna be more equitable. Excuse me, the failure rates can be a lot higher outdoors. It's more equitable to do plant counts at least in the outdoor context to try and line up with that ratio that we've heard from some commenters about. But the way that our state laws operate, but the practical effect a little bit further, you know, behind the more real conversation about our 250 in my head. But I mean, if we wanna go in that direction, you know, you do it, I'm not opposed. I'm not gonna stand down on that hill. I just think we need to be realistic with what's in front of us. Yeah. So again, if you apply the ratio, you know, 20,000 square feet of outdoor would be the equivalent of 2,500 plants. So you're not gonna grow that in under an acre. So we either have to decide that we just, that was kind of, we designed that for a reason, but we don't care anymore and let the kind of cultivators figure it out with natural resources or their local folks, the agency of natural resources, which they might have to do anyway, honestly. Is it an or? Like it's, you could, I guess my question is, if you were to grow a certain amount in a contiguous square footage or a number of plants. We said or. Okay. I don't know if the square footage is really relevant. Right. If we're growing 2,500 plants, like what's the purpose of the square footage then? Well, I guess what I'm thinking of is if I were a larger cultivator and I thought, okay, I don't want to trigger these other regulatory issues, I would just grow less in a smaller amount of space outdoors rather than trying to hit the maximum plant count that I can have. And that would be a choice of the licensee, and they could decide whether or not they wanted to trigger those regulatory burdens or not. From an enforcement perspective, I wonder if one's easier than the other. The way I expected us doing plant counts is maybe taking the aerial photograph and just counting them, which gets a little bit more complicated when you're talking about 2,500 plants versus 125. You know, it's a little bit easier to kind of take an aerial photograph and figure out what the square footage of that area is. And I mean, my one other concern is, you know, there's a significantly more amount of plants that you would put plant under a license type under the plant count versus the square footage. And how does that also affect our supply demand model? We're gonna have a lot more supply, which is not a bad thing. I'm just raising it as a point that, I don't know if we have the answers yet to how much it could potentially affect our... I don't have a sense of how that affects that 80-20 split that we've been talking about. In either. Certainly it'll mean that those kind of oversupply peaks will be more exaggerated in the harvest time. But how much are we really trying to kind of be in charge of that, you know? As opposed to again, letting the free market kind of like help, you don't want that. Obviously it means that a lot of product might go on use, might end up on the illicit market. And the price will fluctuate pretty, you know, wildly in those harvest times, potentially. But how much is it our job to really try to control that? Do we know what the average sort of like crop loss is in like a first year growth outdoors if somebody were to grow the maximum amount of plants that we were talking about, the 2,500? What's the ratio of crop loss? I don't know if I have a set ratio in my head. I'd imagine if there's a hundred and... Well, first, this is a Pandora's box of questions. I would imagine if there's like 125 plants, I bet you maybe 80 of them-ish might end up making it a market in some way, shape, or form. You know, then we're also looking at plants that could be ales and everything else. So it's hard to condone a specific number, but that's my, I could be way off base. I'm sure somebody will let me know if I am. I'm just thinking in terms of the supply and demand, if we knew if people are gonna grow 2,500 plants, but 10% of them are likely to not make it, then that sort of evens out that supply and demand model a little bit in terms of the peaks that Pepper was talking about. But I don't necessarily know if I have a good answer on this yet. Do we wanna do plant number for the first two tiers as in 125 plants is the equivalent of 1,000? And if you're a tier two cultivator outdoor, you could do 2,500 or like 315 plants, which is a rough equivalent. I'm just wondering, like then we're gonna, then we're gonna like find more people trying to fit into that 2,500 square foot number and price range and fee. And we're gonna lose folks that are looking to grow at a higher square footage and would pay us a higher fee. And I'm just still wondering how the whole, how much money we generate from fees and how much supply and demand is really impacted here. Do you prefer to leave it as it is right now? I think where my heads at right now is let's leave the 125 cultivators and then move forward. And maybe, I don't know, after this meeting we'll kind of still opportunities that we have to ask those questions of our consultants and stuff like that without, and then we can revisit this in another meeting with some more kind of concrete information. Okay, I would propose that. So I wanna make sure that we understand the ripple effects of doing so. Okay, well, it also nicely squares finds a middle ground between the commenters who want us to eliminate it or keep the square footage. I brought the plant out to the conversation for small cultivators recognizing that inequity at the 1,000 square foot level and there's protections or there's exemptions for 1,000 square foot indoor growers that are the same as 1,000 square foot outdoor growers. And because they get the same exemptions yet indoor growers can generate four times the amount of flower, that's why I wanted to tie it specifically to the small cultivators initially recognizing that it would open the door to this conversation. I just don't think we felt I have a clear understanding of the potential impacts, move in that direction. I think it potentially could be easier to regulate from a plant count perspective. In my conversations with Vag they kind of thought it might be, but how it affects the overall market is more of where I'm still a little uncertain and I'm not opposed to it, it's just making sure we have all the information that we need to make that decision. All right, well, I think we should at our next meeting make a final decision on this, but for now the decision is to just leave it the way it is. So the one tier could have square footage or plant count tier one outdoor cultivators. You see what I mean though, even if we open it up to the second tier then technically you could have the same or more amount of plants growing outdoors in tier two than you could in tier three depending on how you, depending on spatial needs or at least it would be close. It kind of incentivizes folks to seek higher outdoor tiers and pay thus a higher fee to produce at that higher tier. And so that's a concern that I have just understanding that we need to be supported to the most that we fundamentally can be and also just figuring out supply demand issues. Yeah, okay. Do we need to clarify whether canopy needs to be contiguous? Let's hold off on that one, we aren't quite there yet. I wanted to make sure we had a decision on the mixed light provision. Yeah, so other state and we've heard a lot about mixed light I think in lieu even of like changing and I want to provide some type of clarity for folks that use a specific style of growing kind of because I think we're trying the best to meet people where they're at and you know we've talked about mixed tiering and we decided to leave things as is. There's some folks that are advocating for a new mixed light category, tiering or license type. I don't think in lieu of trying to make sure our fee bill moves, that's the right decision to make. I've been looking at California's rules. They do have a mixed light tiering option. One is at six kilowatts per square foot which is essentially a light bulb that kind of helps plants from flowering at certain times of the year. They have another higher license type that's six to 25 kilowatts per square foot. I'm tempted to just allow outdoor grower. I'm tempted to suggest to allow outdoor growers, these hoop house styles, these outdoor greenhouses. We already have some energy exemptions for folks I think utilizing under 40 kilowatts per hour of power in their greenhouse. But I think if we had clarity that outdoor growers are using six kilowatts per hour or less of lighting that could help folks meet in the middle on anything over six kilowatts per hour would still be thus considered indoor. So if you're using mixed lighting under six kilowatts it would be considered outdoor growing. And anything above that would be considered indoor. Yeah, I mean, trying to just split the difference and meet people where they're at. Is that where people are at? They have no idea. I think so. I mean, I'm sure folks would advocate for another mixed use licensing tier from the six to 25 like California does but I don't think we can pivot right now. I think it's something that we can look to in the future but for purposes of clarity right now allowing that very small amount of artificial light to be used in an outdoor loop house or greenhouse operation and signal that we understand that it's an issue and will help some people now. And if we continue to hear that it's not enough we can explore in future years. So is that enough to help if it's like a really dark summer or really rainy, cloudy summer? I don't necessarily think that it does but that's part of the risk that you take as an outdoor grower. But it does help if you have a particular plant that needs a little bit more help, right? So we have a very bright line right now between indoor and outdoor. This certainly starts to blur that bright line in a way that one might require some additional enforcement mechanisms meaning more staff. And two, I have some concern that okay just kind of like what you were saying Julie is if someone's seeing their plants needing more than six kilowatts per square foot they're gonna do it. If their crop is dying or it's not growing the way it's supposed to and then what we consider them indoor and then what if they're growing? Well, it's a different licensing. So the bright line is helpful for us and on multiple fronts. I just don't know how you really quantify. I mean, unless we're auditing their electricity bills which I guess, you know, we can do how to make sure that there's six watt per square foot kilowatts. Other states have specific tiers that allow for this which leads me to think that they have had a reasonable amount of success regulating it. I think part of it's on us. I think in my talks with folks whether it's Jacob or Kerry or something like that I think this is a necessary thing that we need to try and figure out a path for. I think it blurs a little bit of the line and creates a little bit more enforcement discretion in a sense. But in lieu of trying to create a new licensing tier right now, I think I still think this is a very small accommodation that'll be very obvious to any enforcement agent that's out there to kind of see what kind of lighting they're using to kind of draw that distinction. This is essentially the kind of light you would have in a tent. I don't even know if it's that strong. It's like the light you might find in your bathroom. As Jacob talked to you about this. Yeah. And how does he feel? I think it's essentially an oversight on our part on to address at this point in the process. So he thinks it's necessary. For some types of growing styles? Yes. I mean, we can revisit it in a future meeting if you would like and we can kind of build a record similar to the account conversation. But I think six kilowatts per square foot is not a very high amount of energy usage at all. So, and we've received this comment. I think it was from the Vermont Equity Coalition. Well, they're asking for a new tiering. They're asking for a whole new mixed light tier. And again, I don't think we're at a point in the process to allow for that. I think we've heard from some others who use certain techniques to prevent plants from flowering at certain points throughout their plant life. And are you able to comment on this? Yeah. From a staffing perspective? Yeah. Yep. So as the board knows, I put forth our staffing request budget requests to the legislature based on the recommended licensed tiers that you created in the October 15th report. So as I've said to the three of you many times, I really think that that budget request reflects the absolute minimum of what we need to achieve the objectives of the legislature and kind of the first draft of our rules. This to me seems like a different tiering. This seems like a different tiering structure. And I think I would want to revisit our budget request based on that different tier type, which doesn't mean you can't do it that way. I would just, I would want to revisit that, what we've put forward for our budget. But I think it complicates the inspection process. I think it refers to additional energy usage reporting reviews. And I think it's going to result in needing some additional staff. Then why don't we put this off till our next meeting and really try and decide what the staffing looks like, what the compliance looks like. Okay. And we can make a final decision on this and whether we need to apply flame counts to other outdoor tiers on Thursday. I think it might be useful also to consider that we know that we'll have to come back and look at our rules again after the market launches. I mean, there is no regulatory body that launched their market that hasn't had to go back. So maybe this is, maybe we need a parking lot of things that we have to address in a year when we have a little bit more data to look at. One thing to add to that is we will know how many staff we have in a year and what they can do. And we will know what the workflow looks like. So I think I agree with that point. There are several areas where you may just wanna, it may make sense to wait for a year and revisit the goals then because undoubtedly you will be doing that anyway. And we'll go by quickly as this past year has. Thank you. Okay, David, those are the three areas you told us to discuss. Yeah. Punt it all. We punt it almost. All right. Next step. Next substantive thing is clarify whether canopy outdoors needs to be continuous. I don't think it does. Yeah, I mean, I would suggest that perhaps we have some limitation as in the same span number, same property number, same address. Yeah, address can get somewhat complicated. But I think, and then, you know, people are gonna draw a map for us. And if it's just too impossible to regulate, I think we can send it back and say, try again. You know, it's one's in Bristol and one's in Starksboro or half your plot is there, half your plot is there. But I think, I don't think it needs to be continuous. Yeah, I think it recognizes that we're not a negotiation state that's flat for miles upon end. So both benefit folks that have unique land that they're trying to take advantage of to allow many plots to happen with it then. A lot is perfect. But perhaps on the same property, the same span number. Same span number. No, yeah, absolutely. I don't want, considering our staff, we don't necessarily want them hiking over, looking for planes. Excuse me, okay. Brent, is that okay from a staffing perspective? Yep. And then, all right, we're good on that. Thank you. And then the next one is really a drafting plan unless somebody wants to say something you don't have to. This is just noting that the mixed tier terminology was all inconsistent as currently drafted. So I just need to go through and make sure we, system moving on from there. You're going to the next section, 1.3.2, which is the retail tiers, is that right? Yes, the retail tiers. And this was a comment talking about basically that the nursery retail tier is a little thin in its definition. And some decisions seem to be made about it in terms of what you want to do with that. Plush it out, fold it in, fold the sort of effective operations in somewhere else, whatever that's going to look like. But there needs to be some discussion about what are we really trying to do with that one. So I've been obviously thinking a lot about this and there have been a lot of questions in the Ways and Means Committee about this license type, which really just aren't unanswerable at this point because we haven't decided yet. So the reason that I think this license type is very important, mostly because I think some cultivators will really want to just focus on genetics and R and D and really have their kind of cultivation be more around kind of creating new strains, new cannabinoid profiles, et cetera, and then selling those to other cultivators. And I'm not as concerned about home cultivation at this point, but it's really about how does a new cultivator start up a business? Where did they get their seeds and where did they get their clones? So to me, having a retail nursing license made a lot of sense, but it does open a kind of Pandora's box about what this looks like to buffer zones apply. Is it unlimited canopy? What happens to mature plants that become mature at the nursery because they're unsold? Is there a kind of outdoor allowance, indoor allowance? There's a lot that needs to be decided on this. And frankly, if these folks are selling, then I think there are some kind of people under 21 that are doing ID checks are all the same retail regulations applying to these folks that are really kind of mostly selling interest supply chain. There is the home cultivation. But to me, I really think that what we should do here is move in a slightly different direction. There's language in S188. It's in the Agriculture Committee that changes the definition of cultivator ever so slightly, but it has a big impact, which would allow cultivators to sell seeds and clones to other licensees. It also allows wholesalers to sell seeds and clones to other licensees. I think one thing that we could do is take that language from S188, hopefully S188 passes, but if it doesn't and we're in trouble here, eliminate the nursery license, but add that language around the definition of cultivator to the fee bill potentially, if it's allowed. I mean, we can't just decide that, but make sure it's moving in at least a couple of different places to help its chance of getting over the finish line and allow cultivators to sell their genetics to other cultivators or other retail storefronts. There's other licensees. And that to me really allows us to not have to, I mean, to me, if we keep a nursery license, we honestly probably should create nursery license tiers about how much canopy they can have indoor, outdoor. And it just opens up a can of worms. I don't think we really necessarily want to go down. From a compliance perspective, it makes things a heck of a lot easier to just say cultivators can sell their plants to other cultivators or other licensees. Those provide kind of, cultivators have asked us to do direct to consumer sales. That's not what this is, but it offers a kind of, it starts to ease into the idea that cultivators should be allowed to sell their, the products that they've spent a lot of time, building the genetics of them. So to me, I really think that the thing to do here is eliminate this license type and add language that would allow cultivators to sell other license types. Only to other license types, not to consumers. See, I really, if we allow members of the public to come in and purchase, it opens up a whole, yeah, so I do think that the retail storefront allows sales of plants and clones, or seeds and clones to members of the public. So this would allow cultivators to sell their genetics to a retail storefront that could then be sent to the home cultivators that kind of, but I don't think we necessarily, it's a much bigger regulatory lift on our side if we allow home cultivators to buy from a nursery site. So that was the kind of thought that came to mind. I did run it through our partners on the advisory committee and the agriculture. And in some ways, it was kind of like, well, I guess that's a good way to deal with it. I wasn't like an enthusiastic two thumbs up, but it does solve a lot of the problems that this license site was intended to solve without having to create this infrastructure to support this license site. I agree with that. I would agree, it's not a perfect alternative, but it's where we're at in spirit, like we've already talked about of having a fee bill that needs relatively quickly, less questions associated. I think it's probably prudent for us to try and move in that direction for better or worse. So, you guys said that. Right, so moving on to section 1.3.3 manufacturing license tiers, this is actually commenting on not something that isn't yet in the rule, but which the board has, I believe they had the final, they had a decision to put in the rule and leave one of the commenters listening to you had a verbal comment about just making sure that we can understand what tier three manufacturing will be. Another proposal had sort of sales, gross sales limit and otherwise similar to tier two, but just wanted clarification on that. So I think in August, because I proposed it, in my mind, it was very clearly a home occupation and a sole proprietorship or a partnership or a family business, but not a business that has a multiple employees. I'm wondering if this comment came in before we kind of talked more sensibly about this. It's like last week's meeting or whenever we did actually talk about it. And I put every substantive comment is in here. Is that general outline good to everybody here? What's the general outline? Like home occupation and that under what 10,000? Able to do everything that a tier two license can do and not a business that has like a number of employees. So maybe one employee sole proprietorship or a partnership family business, but not playing people. Okay. How much of the kind of home food processor, home baker regulations can we lift from the department of health? That seems to me like kind of where I was thinking that we go on this, which is anything that applies to a home food manufacturer selling less than 10,000 would apply here to these folks, including the inspection requirements, which are actually none. There is no guarantee even, I mean, we're allowed to inspect, but there's no, we're not gonna commit to any sort of inspection inspecting regimen. Does that seem like the direction you were thinking? Yes. Yeah. And there was a comment in committee discussion the other day that 10,000 might be actually low, but I think we just leave it there for now. And I just like the graduation and cultivators, these folks can graduate. Yes. It's intended to be a startup or a psychic. Yeah. That 10,000 gross? 10,000, yes. Yeah. That's in sales, not just like the product that you need. Yes. Okay. Okay. But all the same testing and labeling and packaging would apply. Yes. Yep. All right, so moving on to section 1.4.1, this is Operating Plans, the sort of basics of a application. One is just to add that email should be a requirement since it's sick. And then asking for a business address if available. The reason for the if available there is that this could, this also is the, what we're currently calling provisional license rules. And it is certainly possible. I think part of the intention of provisional license was to allow somebody to apply before they necessarily actually have a location but have other stuff getting into place. So we will require business address, we already do require business address elsewhere in the rule. But for here it would say, we need an email contact for sure and business address if available just to clarify what we need. There was nowhere where we previously asked for email which doesn't make much sense in the modern world. Yeah. Any issues? All right, great. And then from the tax department on this our colleagues tax department noted the following and have the following comment. There's a requirement for applicants to provide the CCB with a federal tax ID number but no social security number is needed for the individual principals and those who control an applicant. Tax department suggests that you collect these social security numbers. Otherwise the system of individuals who operate on behalf of the licensee who is a non-person entity is very similar to our system. We call them persons required to collect tax. That's a quoted term they used quote unquote persons required to collect tax which are those individuals who control the corporate taxpayers and they have a statutory site to that. So I believe what they were, this comment isn't 100% clear but I think what they're basically saying is it makes sense for you to imitate what we do in tax which is collect the social security numbers in addition to the federal tax ID number for those people who own and control the entity. Yep. So the next comment is pertains, I'd say both to 1.4.1 and 1.4.3. 1.4.3 is the financier provision. The comment is that in order to ensure that applicants cannot use clever corporate structuring to script the one license rule established by Vermont statute. It is critical that the board require applicants to disclose all persons having both direct and indirect control of an establishment. The current rule requires disclosure of all principles and persons having control of an establishment but may not reach deep enough down to capture all indirectly controlling persons. And to put that another way, sometimes entities use complex corporate structures like nesting to all type structures. So an LLC owns an LLC owns an LLC so that you may ask for the controlling person but person is a defined term that includes entity. And so all you're gonna get when you do that is another LLC. You don't know who controls that LLC. And so somebody could hide behind those LLCs and effectively subvert the one license rule using corporate structuring. And so the recommendation to ensure that doesn't happen here is twofold. One, this is from the comment still, required disclosure of all principles of any controlled persons in addition to the listing of principles of the establishment. Then specified that the list of control persons must include both indirect and indirect control regardless of the number of intermediating entities which may be involved. Such that for each directly or indirectly controlling entity, the identity of at least one natural person is ultimately disclosed. So basically it's saying, you have to tell us the human beings who are behind this thing. And the point of that is again to make sure that the one license rule is not subverted by clever structuring. I'm fine with that. And I would just say from the lawyer standpoint, I think that the way it's currently written, it would allow for somebody to hide behind corporate entities and we didn't give ourselves enough authority to look behind that. I think that was the intention. The intention wasn't met. So I think that this makes sense. 1.4.2 subsection G, this commenter says, this provision requires an applicant to describe criminal actions against an applicant, principal or person. Quote on, that's a quotation. This appears to be unintentionally overbroad as the reference to person is not qualified by any proximity to the applicant. Recommendation, this is still in the comment, revised so that the disclosure is required with respect to any person directly or indirectly controlling the license. I'll just say that I think this is essentially a technical error. I think the commenter is right that that person is sort of floating out there without any attachment, but I think this is really like a grammatical drafting error, not substantive, and I think that we should fix it as the commenter says, but happy to take any. All right, so then looking at 1.4.2, H has the exact thing error as G, so fix it there too. Then moving on to the substantive issue, this is about disclosure of civil actions, which is required in G. Is that right? Do I have that right? No, H, sorry. H is about disclosure of civil actions, which is required right now under the rule draft. This requires reading the comment here, requires the disclosure in the description of any civil action to which the applicant, principal or person was a party. This requirement may exceed your rulemaking authority as the Vermont statute does not direct the board or view civil records as opposed to criminal administrative records and it's not tailored to achieve the statutory goal of ensuring that applicants do not pose a threat to the proper function of the regulated market. And the recommendation from the commenter is to either eliminate this requirement entirely, which is the commenter's preference or narrow it substantially so that it only requires disclosure of recent civil actions with no, for example, within no more than the past five years. Most the applicants, principals or controlling persons was accused of conduct that would reasonably demonstrate that the relevant person presently poses, sorry, presently poses a threat to the proper function of the regulated market. And just to make one spoiler point at the beginning, I don't agree that this exceeds your rulemaking authority. I do think that section 881 of chapter 33 gives you very broad authority over the applications, but that does not address the policy question about what you need to know. And I leave that to you to decide what you really think you need to know here. So I think that there are some civil actions that could implicate the proper functioning of the regulated market. And so I'm fine with narrowing this. I don't really think that we need to narrow it in the way that it's being recommended here just because I think there's a lot of discretion in a lot of gray area about what the person might think poses a threat versus what we might think poses a threat to the proper functioning of the market. So I would say we just narrow it to past 10 years. Civil actions can take years to resolve. So I don't think five years is necessarily sufficient. So I would say that we just look at civil actions within the last 10 years. I'm with them. Sure. Moving to 1.4.3, this is the section about financiers. Commenter recommends that there should be an exception to this disclosure requirement for traditional lenders like banks. This could be done by building in a reference to the definition of financial institution if you have elsewhere on statute already. That's the first substantive comment. Oh, I don't think you're really looking to understand who owns the banks or things like that. You're really looking at non-conventional financing and making sure that somebody isn't getting behind the license rule. But I leave that up to you. Yeah. If someone's, we're talking about kind of chartered accredited banks, you know, so the financial institution definition here should cover that. It will cover that, you know. Okay. And then subsection B of one point, subsection B one of 1.4.3, I believe is comment or kind of drafting are essentially, apparently says that the following maybe require, following disclosures maybe require at the board's discretion requirements disclose information to a licensed establishment, the board or department of financial regulation. I don't think, I think licensed establishment is not what we meant to say there because I don't really know what that means. And I think the commenter didn't know what it meant, they were right. I think we were saying the intention there was really just to say require disclosure to the board or the department of financial regulation. Not sure why licensed establishment stuck in there. If any of you board members have another idea about that, I can change it otherwise, I think we just delete that, right? Okay. So now moving on to 1.4.4, subsection A of 1.4.4, this is about the submission of various plans inspired by the rule. And it says that the commenter says, it's unclear what benefit the board could derive from seeing a plan to register for a system that the board may or may not have notified applicants they must register for at the time the application is submitted or what such a plan would look like other than a conclusory statement that the application must apply. And the commenter recommends that the requirement be eliminated. Yeah, I mean, we talked about this for tier one cultivators. I'm fine with just an attestation like saying that you will comply with the inventory tracking system, something along those lines or maybe we just eliminate it just knowing that there's a requirement that they do it. So they don't really need to attest or deal with it. If they're not doing it, if they're in violation projects, maybe we just get rid of it. I think we'd wanna know that they had signed up for it before they're issued their final license, right? But that's, I mean, if it's required in the role then we can just do that, right? Or do we have to write it separately? I don't think you need to write it. I mean, if they're not on it, then they are immediately in violation. You can suspend if you need to. And I think you have other ways to get it done. Thank you. We have an application checklist, right? It doesn't allow you to kind of like finish, start operating until you've completed the checklist. This could just be one of those things on there, essentially. So yeah, why don't we get rid of this? Okay. All right, moving on to 1.4.5 insurance, taxation and banking requirements. We have a number of comments on here. So let's move through. We have from our colleagues at the tax department again, we have a comment saying there's a requirement to provide the span number. If the applicant owns the site of operations and then the tax department asks, is the applicant required to own the site? What if they lease? Leasing land for agricultural use is permitted for current use, which is the tax designation that they're referring to. And the tax department says, so if they're leasing the space for the license, we would suggest you still collect the span number for those parcels. I believe that is in reference to, I think that we put in there that if you're, the owner needs to do it, but not, yes, we put in the owner needs to do it. This isn't subsection E. Sorry, I forgot to note the subsection here. And they're saying if they lease it, they should put in that designation as well. And this, yeah. So then moving on to a comment about subsection A of the same section. The commenter says, recognizing these are commonly required or recommended for many, or for most types of businesses. What is the accessibility and affordability of this type of insurance coverage for different types of cannabis establishments given the federal prohibition on cannabis? There isn't real, yeah, this is a comment. It's not really a recommendation, but I did think it fell within the comment purview here. So putting it in there, I don't know if you, the board had ideas on that. Let me just see. I think there is a comment that's related that may is worth stating here as well in order to get similar subjects all out. This comment, I'll try to summarize it. It's a long one, but essentially the commenter is saying that in order to secure some of these types of things, like insurance, at times you need to first have a state-issued license. And they don't just limit it to, this isn't just about subsection A, they're talking about things like a bank account or an escrow account or liability insurance. So they're saying that in order to get the license, it could become impossible because you're asking for information that requires them to have the license in the first place. They do note that constructing a two-part system might help where you can get a preliminary license. And then that would help because then you could go back and get the rest of these things. I would note that there is provisional license piece that he's built in already sort of is that system I think. But I guess those two comments together are more just talking about the reality of acquiring these things in this market. And I don't know if there's a specific recommendation other than the preliminary license idea which you already have, but I guess I'll just open it if there are comments on that issue, the sort of word in it challenge. We can't be the first state to have dealt with this. I wonder, PS has looked at this and this is in the comment. No. You know, I'm fine with offering some flexibility here like within the 60 days or something along those lines, 60 days of issuance of a license, but I just don't know how real this concern is or it's just all kind of theoretical. Well, I mean, if you apply for the provisional license first, none of that information is required for that. So you could then go get your insurance and, but I suppose if you wanted to just apply for a license and skip the provisional process, that's where you would need it. Yeah. A number of days. I think I'm wary of allowing a business to operate without insurance, even if it's for 60 days. So I think, you know, if there's going to be some kind of leeway here, I think that there must, there should be part, you know, some sort of escrow, I don't think requires, you know, I don't think, I never asked that to like financial folks where they have a problem creating escrow accounts for cannabis businesses and imagine that they do. Usually it's really just a holding place for. Yeah, I don't know. So do we want to, you know, in other places in the role as we have said, you have kind of 60 days to come into compliance or submit additional information. Is this one where we want to give some window where people can, you know, submit their. I don't know when this comment came in, but it seems like we've already addressed us with the provisional license process. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I guess my only thought is what happens in three years when somebody's trying to get a license and they're, are we still going to issue provisional licenses past the first year? I think we're going to get to that. I think it's on the list of things to discuss. All right. Never mind. I mean, one thing you could, I'm very hesitant to recommend putting anything off, but we could check with fellow states and see what's happening as a practical matter or elsewhere just to confirm whether or not this is a real issue and how their hand looked at it. Yeah. Why don't we do that? And I'll reach out to, I'll just, yeah, I'll reach out to VSECU and just ask them, you know, are they going to require an operating license before they're willing to kind of even consider opening a bank account for someone? You know, it's essentially a business is coming to them saying, I want a bank account, you know, whether you get a license or not is kind of irrelevant to that question in a lot of ways. I mean, they have their own hesitations about giving bank accounts to cannabis businesses, but it's kind of not really tied to whether or not they actually have the license, I imagine. For a bank, it might be, right? Because they have to follow all those FinCEN guidelines. And so we've written our rules kind of around those guidelines. So when we issue a license, we're saying, whoever we issue a license to meets all these guidelines which we sort of built around those Coal Mental FinCEN guidelines. So yeah, they might want a provisional piece of paper that says, yep, at least this person's in this process. I'll reach out to Elise VSECU, they're named in this comment and just ask them what they think. And in the meantime, we can ask VS Strategies, what's going on in other states on this. Otherwise, I think for now, we'll just leave it the way that it's written. That's good. So moving on to one, are we ready to go on? All right, 1.4.6, location information. The first bullet point here, I think it's really pretty technical, just noting that the rules should be clear that the business address that's provided is going to be like the official point of contact for the board. And by that, I mean, if there's any violation issues or something like that, mail to that address will be expected to be, if we mail something there, we expect you got it, basically. And we'll draft that in a way that makes that clear. But just being clear that, put that on there, you're expected to check it, receive me all there. It's not just a sort of placeholder. I could imagine there is some far out there places that might be a physical location where something's growing and they might not per se receive mail there. I mean, in that case- It doesn't have to be the same, it could be a PO box. That's what I was going to suggest. If you don't receive mail to this address, you need to have some form of PO box or something else. Yeah, we can clarify that they don't have to be the same. So the next comment is that there should there be a requirements diagrams of premises are provided currently. This is only required of cultivators in a different section. Probably. Probably no oversight on that. I don't think we need it for testing. No, but I think we would need it for manufacturers probably particularly tier one, right? Yeah, we require a security plan from retailers. I think that's kind of where I thought this was, it's just present in other ways in other words and other sections. That we want to provide clarity that I'm not here to. You know, honestly, we looked at each one of these more intensely than we are. I mean, we're doing a pretty intensive dive, but when we originally proposed them, we've really looked at other states and what they require. I think it's fine. I think the security plan is essentially a diagram. I don't think this is necessary for testing. I don't think it's really necessary for product manufacturers. No, no. Well, don't they have to separate, like do we need a diagram if they have to separate the out the more dangerous solvent instructors in a different room than the less dangerous? Gonna have fire safety be in charge of that aspect of it. I think this is kind of like a paperwork exercise, but I do think it's good to do it for cultivators because we have to go there and make sure when they're going to smash something. I don't think it's necessarily true of the other places beyond what we have, beyond what we've asked in there. I mean, it's okay to do it, but it's kind of like, I don't know how much value it adds for us. The only other thought I have is, is it useful for inspectors to know, to have some idea what the layout of a space is when they're going to inspect? Similar to how firefighters, I mean, they don't have the layout of every, like apartment building, but they generally get some information about that. So is there a safety reason for that? I don't know the answer to the only other question I have about it. Fire safety would still have those, especially for the more dangerous ones. Yeah, I'm fine with just remembering the work we did on each of these various license types. I'm, you know, I think, I think I'm comfortable with it every day. And there is special attention played to cultivation here, just so we know where these plants are being grown and easier to figure that out from a manufacturing or a testing or retail perspective because they're happening within a specific building. You know what I mean? There could be outdoor growing operations that are in multiple little plots and up to a certain square footage and, you know, kind of off the grid preferably speaking. So. I'm just kidding. No, probably not. Next comment, depending on the type of establishment, particular business owners may or may not want their location information made available to the public. How does the CCB and state plan on making information about different types of establishments, which the establishments provide available to the public? I would just note here that there is a confidentiality provision and the statutes built in. And I think that the board is interpreting and will interpret that especially locations of things like cultivation. Establishments will be considered to fall within the confidentiality statute and the board would not make that type of thing public. But obviously if you have stuff to add or different ideas. I would assume also that the state has security requirements for whatever technology we bring forward. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, ADS would probably take care of that for us. Yeah, and I mean, in addition, I think we're trying to be pragmatic or progressive for lack of a better way to describe it in terms of our outdoor security measures, how other states have done it. I think recognizing that we need to keep some stuff confidential will help back end some of the way that we hope to approach outdoor cultivation security from a knowing specifically where a proside is. Yeah, Dave. I was gonna add, I mean, I think some other license types will likely be confidential, okay, like manufacturing sales, there's no reason for general public to know that. There's good reason to not have that being up like for obvious public safety reasons. Retailers are very different situation, but that's really the one exception there. So, Dave, it's one o'clock and I think we're in between rules or sections right now. So maybe we wanna pause, does everyone wanna quick lunch break? Yeah, sure. 45 minutes. Is that good for everyone? Sounds good. All right, well, why don't we come back at 1.45 then. And again, this is the Vermont Cannabis Control Board meeting on January 24th, 2022. Why don't we pick up where we left off, David? All right. So we left off at section 1.4.8 of one and the rec versus to the comment is from our colleagues. Again, a tax department saying, we suggest in addition for something like quote to the department of taxes for purposes of administering the sales tax and canvas excise tax. From a lawyer perspective, I think that's fine. I also don't think it's necessary, but it doesn't hurt, so. It's kind of a wash. Do we need that second part? For purposes of administering the sales tax. I don't think you need any of it, but I think that they saw that two other agencies were specifically mentioned the sale. Maybe we'll do it. I guess. Yeah, why don't we just say to the department of taxes and not clarify for what? I think it's pretty obvious what they're gonna bring if it's moving on to 1.4.9. There's a bunch of stuff on 1.4.9. This is the plans related to positive impact criteria. So let's do that piece by piece here. One comment is make clear that the update progress slash progress plan. Sorry, this is a should have added this before, but make clear that update slash progress 1.4.9 plans are required as part of a renewal. So and on another part of the rule, it's that when you renew, you have to scale your progress on these plans if they apply to you. And this commenter is saying, let's make it clear in this provision that that's something that's required, which is certainly fine to do. Yeah. I think it's fine if that helps people understand that that's the case. So a couple of comments on moving on to 1.4.9 subsection key. A commenter says, I'm gonna read two comments here because they're both about the lab, except it. One commenter said, is this intended to apply to labs that exist currently? Question mark, should new labs be carved out as well? And then the another comment says, why are testing laboratories exempt from meeting the positive impact criteria? Without further explanation, this commenter and their coalition feel strongly that testing laboratory should be required to meet the same positive impact criteria standards as other cannabis establishments. My recollection is that they're having to be starting just about ensuring that we have enough testing laboratories, but obviously that's a solid question for you all. In the way that I feel about this is, we know that this is a block in the supply chain. There are potential hiccups in the supply chain that we're not gonna have enough testing capacity, at least initially to meet the demands that kind of 55,000 pounds of cannabis, et cetera. So I mean, that was part of the motivation too is these labs are not purely, at least the existing ones. And I assume that the future ones are not strictly cannabis labs. They are licensed through us to do cannabis, but they can also do food testing. Allergy and testing. Allergy and testing. So to me, requiring them to change their entire business structure because they also test cannabis seems a little odd. And then finally, I lost my train of thought there. Well, I'll just leave it there. And if we have third point comes back to you. I understand about labs that exist, right? That are already in business, but what about, I mean, could we apply this to new labs that enter just to serve cannabis businesses or primarily to serve cannabis businesses? I do remember my third point. I can't remember. Sorry. You're welcome. All of these things require additional costs and those costs are gonna get passed on to the cultivators. They're not gonna get passed on to the consumers. There's additional compliance costs and it necessitates increasing the fees that they charge to cultivators. And that's not, to me, that's not the area where we want those fees to be passed on. And I find if the price of cannabis, because it's tested, costs a little bit more to the consumer, but I don't want the cost of testing to go up to the cultivator. So those are the three points that I thought. But at the same time though, typically companies that invest in diversity and embrace it perform better financially. So there may be, and I don't know what the cost is. I mean, they're really, I wouldn't say that there's that much of a cost to an inclusive hiring plan, right? Or an inclusive contracting plan. Maybe the community reinvestment, there's a cost too. But I don't know that the cost is that unachievable. Most companies are finding that they have to provide a little wage to meet market demand anyway. So I just, I think if there's an opportunity here, particularly because this is STEM, right? This is a science and technology field. There's a way to make this more open to people of color than there's an opportunity to do that. So I think there's a difference between there being a benefit to a company that does these things anyway, and then us requiring it. I just, I can't get over the fact that we're gonna need testing capacity and we're essentially gonna need it immediately on day one. And so, I say we will continue to waive labs from this section and then revisit it in a year. When we know exactly how many labs we have and how short we are testing, we actually are gonna be. I don't think there's any reason why, we couldn't say, revisit this in a year and say, all right, new labs that are coming online, let's see both of them. But that's just how I do it. I guess my concern is having a different set of requirements for a new lab that only does cannabis versus our existing ones just creates a two track system that might be harder for us internally to keep straight, but maybe not, I don't know. I definitely appreciate that existing labs that have staff already in place that are good at what they do, that are doing stuff not within the cannabis world might feel less inclined to have to redo the ways that they operate in order to enter this market when they haven't had to do it for a half. And if we're thinking that it's a guide path for them to come into our program from that perspective, I don't know what kind of laws they might. Consider it coming in, I don't know. It was a little like a missed opportunity, but perhaps it's just delayed. Yeah, I just, you know, various points of supply chain, they don't need to all come online at once, but the second we start having our vests, we need the last, otherwise, what, you know, the product can't move any further till it's tested. So may I just, I feel like we need to do everything we can to get, you know, I was thinking about even having less restrictions for labs, even around some of their employee training, because they're going to have to do it anyway, you know, so it's not like we need to require it. You know, anything we can do to encourage more labs in a year one is pretty essential to a proper functioning of the market. So I just, I'm pretty convinced that we just need to do whatever we can do, encourage. I mean, if that's kind of waiving the use and thinking about them again next year, to me, that makes sense. I agree. So lab waiver applies across the board or until reconsidered. The next one is in subsection B2, comment noting that it is ambiguous as to whether or not the three criteria, you need to have three criteria from each section and three criteria in total. So my memory on this is not perfectly clear to be honest with you, I think the original intention had been that it'd be three from each, but I could be just remembering that. I think that was the case. I think that's the way it reads to me. If that is the case, then you probably want to change the language. I agree. There you have one criteria from subsection C and at least one from subsection D. And then that's why I think there is a confusion of three criteria from C and D. Okay. Yeah, I agree that that was the intention and that if that was the intention, this is ambiguous. Moving on to subsection C, a commenter stated that they would like a commenter stated they want the freedom to hire people regardless of their chromosomes. That's how the commenter put it. And I assess that this is related to their, this appears to be a criticism of the inclusive hiring plan and respond as you want or not. I mean, I think the policy decision is already in there and it's already been made. So unless you're going to change it then. So just to be clear, an inclusive hiring plan doesn't dictate who you hire. It's about a process, process equity, right? It's not about, you know, ensuring it doesn't ensure a diverse purpose. Everyone is given an opportunity equally. They're an equitable opportunity. So I don't think we need to change that. I don't either. All right, let's move on. 1.4.9 C2. So the commenter says paid leave is already acquired for many of Vermont businesses pursuant to Vermont statute. So should that stay in? Regardless? Yeah, I was almost thinking on this to change. And for providing a livable wage or other employee benefits, you know, I don't know the best way to frame that, but just kind of, you know, livable wage, paid time off, you know, a whole list of other things. It could be anything. It doesn't have to be those two. And in this, it kind of seems like it is just those two. Like flexible work hours. You know, I don't, I didn't think it would ever be just this too, but I do realize that we've only listed these two. And I think we could take out paid leave and just leave livable wage. I think that like the flexible time, those, I mean, I think businesses end up having to do that to compete for employees, especially right now. I just was thinking when I was looking at this in relation to that comment, a little wage is not required of businesses, but paid leave and health insurance are. So it's not that we want them to, the point of this is not for them to comply with what already exists, it's for them to do something extra, right? Yeah, it's acknowledging that minimum wage and livable wage are not necessarily the same thing, that's right. Is there a definition of livable wage? The JFO has a livable wage calculation. Taking into account someone's status, it's in the same order of livable wage, it's different than if you're in a business. I don't remember what they use in the calculation, it's certain benefits and. All right, well, if there's a. Housing. Yeah. These people want some guidance. Next comment. Recommends that the rule clarify that livable wage does not include the value of samples, clothing, or other product provided to employees. I feel like we dealt with that somewhere else. The employee benefits. We did talk about it somewhere in here. We're sampling, couldn't be considered a benefit. Did we put it in the rule? I remember we talked about it somewhere else. But it was probably not specific to this, and maybe we should make it specific. I think it was in the January 15th report that Brandon. Okay. Maybe. I know it was there. Yeah. I'll start with the rule. We all agree that that's not what we mean by. Correct. Livable wage. Yes. I don't think it's a rule, sorry. So do we want to verify or sort of rely on the definition. of livable wage that already exists? Yeah. Excellent. Okay. Do you want to hear the statutory definition of it? Yes. Help them. The hourly wage required for a full-time worker, pay for one half of the basic needs budget for a two-person household with no children, and employer-sponsored health insurance. Average for both urban and rural areas. 1339 and up. Between 39. And the current minimum wage is like 1250 or something like that. Okay. There's it. And there's nothing in there about cannabis samples. There's nothing. No. I'm going to be right there. I'm going to miss that. Somebody recommends on 1.4.9 C3 that you add workforce reentry program. Yeah. I mean, it's including but not limited to, but that's fine. 1.4.9 C4. So the word including be removed. That's third word in that clause. Is the intent just for contributions to the Cannabis Business Development Fund? Is the intent to limit it? Or sorry. Is the intent to just be for contributions to the Cannabis Business Development Fund? Or are there other community contributions allowed? If so, should the parameters be defined in order to avoid issues? Like parameters in terms of who is an acceptable entity to contribute to? And what level of contribution would be acceptable? Well, so here we have, if you look at the language and see, it says applicants must propose plans to do these things. One of the plans is community reinvestment. So we actually have some discretion to say a contribution to some made up charity doesn't count. So I think I don't think we necessarily need to get more specific on community reinvestment in rule. What we could decide is it's just contributions to the Cannabis Business Development Fund. That makes things slightly easier. And also, it's not as far-reaching, potentially, because that's somewhat limited. But there's also a nexus to what we're trying to do. So in some ways, that's good. I also think that if the option is invest to a nonprofit that focuses on community reinvestment versus invest in the Cannabis Business Development Fund, one is tax deductible. The other is not. No one's going to choose the non-tax deductible version. So maybe we just want to push people towards the business development. Yeah, I think that would be great when we've identified that as underfunded. And that would be an option for on-way for it to get funding. With the community reinvestment, something that you said, the made up charity, well, who does the looking to find out if it's made up charity? Like, who on staff is responsible for figuring that out? All right, so we'll eliminate community reinvestment. And I know that this commenter wants us to get specific about how much. Is that right? They asked about that, yeah. What level is acceptable? It's kind of very probably. Like, could it be a dollar? Like, what is there a minimum? So there has to be, the applicant has to propose a plan. You know, I just don't know. I don't know the answer. And I think it's got to look, it's got to, on its face, be a good, good and made contribution. Like a percentage of profits cap at a certain amount or something. I just don't know what that number is. So is this something that we could address and the guidance that we give? Yeah, I mean, that's a Massachusetts does. OK, so we'll just leave it as limited to the Business Development Fund amounts will sort of be determined by policy and probably as we, as you accept a plan, you'll make assessments on a case-by-case basis, right? I guess. Commenter says on 1.4.9d about carbon offsets. Carbon offsets and market, carbon markets more broadly are rarely legitimate means of reducing pollution and equitably affecting climate change. Pollution must be reduced at its source and we must also increase carbon positive activities such as particular forms of agroecology and regenerative agriculture. Allowing pollution to continue in exchange for improved outcomes in other areas, carbon offsets and markets, quote unquote net zero, does not lead towards our climate change or policy or pollution mitigation goals, rather perpetuates the problems of pollution and inequity we face. That is the whole topic. I take that, I would take that as a recommendation to remove carbon offsets, but that's discussion. Yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily agree with the commenter here and carbon offsets and carbon markets generally speaking do have a mixed bag of success, but I think they've gotten more nuanced. They're not just slush funds that you pay into. That would inevitably be a tax, which there's been cases to lay out how these kind of effectively work in other jurisdictions. I think, you're always at the same time, unless you're in like a deregulated energy grid style system, you don't get to choose where your energy comes from. You're still, and it's unique to Vermont. Or that's not unique to Vermont, but I know we don't have in other bigger states, there's so coal-fired power plants, so on and so forth. You don't get to pick where your energy is being sourced from unless you have the means to go fully renewable through solar or wind or, you know, co-gener, whatever the case may be. And I think there should be an opportunity to help back in some of that, you know, stress or good nature, a good faith effort that you wanna do elsewhere. I think that this comment also doesn't recognize that there is other kind of, on the flip side of that, you know, and I'm thinking about it in the context of hemp because there's a lot more studies to this point done on hemp than high THC cannabis, but you said as a proxy for the conversation since it's the same plant, you know, hemp is really good at sequestering carbon. They can sequester like 16 tons of carbon per acre better than woody biomass, meaning trees that are sequestering carbon. It's a good cover crop. There's state programs like payment for ecosystem services. There's ways that farmers, and again, I'm using the word farmer broadly here, can receive payment for premium on their products based on the agricultural techniques or methods that they're using to grow their crop and there's certain folks that will pay a premium for that. I also think, you know, it's my understanding that at the federal level, and again, I'm gonna use hemp as the context here, the Trump administration put billions of dollars into what's called the Commodity Credit Corporation, which helps the commodity groups, it kind of helped them stay afloat during COVID, but I know the Biden administration is really looking to create a carbon bank with that money that will help, you know, incentivize a lot more carbon trading to happen at the national level. And we're not there yet, obviously in this context, but if this does get federally legalized, depending on how it's regulated at federal level, it could mean certain folks would be eligible to participate in those types of programs. I know a lot of that at the federal level has support from everybody from American Farm Bureau to the Environmental Defense Fund and Nature Conservancy. So all that goes to say that I don't think carbon offsets or carbon markets are completely out of the question for the direction that a lot of folks from the UN to the federal government, to certain states and private market operators, you know, to go down, I appreciate the comment, it's not the cleanest path to improving our environmental footprint, but it provides options for folks that otherwise can't do so on their site-specific place. Is there any kind of play in the joints of the earlier part of the sentence, which is contributing to anti-evolution efforts? Like we think that, I guess we would approve the plan, but like investing in a like fracking company might be considered anti-evolution because natural gas is a cleaner energy source than coal. I don't want to get into the fracking conversation, because that's a method for extracting natural gas. You know, I think, you know, we'll still look at what they're intending to do, but I think removing it completely from somebody's ability, I wouldn't be in support of that. I just think fundamentally where your site-specific plan is, you're only limited to doing a certain amount of things, especially if you're a retail establishment in a commercially-zoned area of a specific town, what kind of options do you fundamentally have to do certain things on your site-specific area versus being able to help facilitate change elsewhere that kind of all make up our broader pollution diet? That's my thoughts around carbon markets. You know, I think the devil's always in the details with them. Again, there's been a mixed bag of success, I think limiting it to, you know, and they're using basic carbon positive activities. I think they need carbon negative activities. That's the terminology that's typically used referring to these types of programs. So I would just say we leave it as is. All right. Okay. So then skipping ahead to 1.5.2 is our next comment. This is the wastewater and wastewater requirements section and the commenter says, we don't have a specific recommendation, rather a question as to how burdensome this requirement may be depending on a local utility certifier, whether they're timely in responding, how they exercise their discretion and so forth, and whether this leaves room for further discrimination against cannabis establishments in general, as well as communities already facing bias and systemic discrimination. You know, we put this, or the Sustainability Committee recommended that this be part of the conversation. Local utility operators are not all too unfamiliar with doing this for other commercial assistance activities. They also do it for the current medical dispensaries and prospective integrated license holders. Timeline from, you know, getting that approval from a local utility from first contact to getting it. It's my understanding that it's relatively quick. Like it's not gonna be a burden as long as you make the effort. I feel like we heard testimony on that like months and months ago about how quick it was to get the letter back, right? Yeah. And I mean, we've got language everywhere. We might want to make sure it applies specifically to this where you can treat a cannabis business any different than any other commercial business. I would imagine that same line of thought applies to utility operators. I also just don't see the scale of which we're operating really being, this is something that it should happen. It's not gonna be, there's not gonna be a lot of hard decisions based on my talks with ANR. And those that provide that through them, the local utilities that actually do these letters, these sort of fine letters. We waived this for home occupation. Right. So if you're a home occupancy, this section's waived, I don't feel comfortable going any further than that. I don't think it will lead to further discrimination. And if it does, we'll, you know, I'm not even, yeah, you know, so I don't think we need to make any further adjustments there. All right. Moving on to 1.5.3, commenter asks, what happens with on-site septic? And just to say 1.5.3 is about indoor cultivators identifying whether they're water supply must comply with DECs, some of DECs rules to start Department of Environmental Conservation rules. And so the commenter asks, what happens with on-site septic? Does the board need information that on-site septic or wastewater drainage can support cultivation or would that be included with a local permitting process? That would be included with to me local permitting process, or if you, you know, there's certain triggers that might make you need to reach out to DEC through ANR and they've got the expertise there. So that's just us working with state partners. Then go into 1.7, which is a license application requirements for retailer, somebody basically just made the argument that we should limit the number of retail stores. Don't think we should at this point in time. Limit the number of retail or is this like a retail density problem? Either way, I don't think we have much control over it. Yeah, I mean, I think the commenters was making both points. So they didn't like density, but also just asked for a limit overall. So, yeah, okay. Me, just with license caps, it creates kind of a secondary value to these license fees. I just don't like the idea of there being a license fee, but then there's also kind of this monopolistic dynamic happening. So there may come a time where we need to kind of close specific license type application windows for various reasons, but I don't think that we should set some sort of hard cap on the number of retail stores. On section 1.8, we would like clarity from the board related to these unique privilege is being close to testing laboratories. Why would the licensing requirements or fees be waived? Have the fees potentially already been paid to another state program, for example? I think that was the idea. Yeah, that was the idea. As in, they've already paid for their cannabis license certification to the agency of agriculture, and they're testing the exact same plan for the exact same things. Why do they have to double pay that fee? Yeah, and I mean, some licenses are only right now accredited through the agency of act to do certain parts of what will be a full panel test. So we can waive the specific, whether it's THC percentage or whatever the case, maybe THC content, but we don't need to waive things that they haven't already saw accreditation for from a specific testing perspective. Yeah. Great. Go into 1.9, 1.9A, subsection A specifically, the commenter asks, or the request rather the board remove free cannabis, quote unquote, free cannabis as an option because the medical dispensaries are already required to provide a sliding scale fee system. The dispensaries already offer significantly discounted product and do so at a cost to their business. We recommend continuing the sliding scale fee system as it has clear requirements and qualifications that have been in place for years. Say sliding scale, they can't go down to zero. Sliding scale, I just don't get the purpose. I think, I think it's fine the way it is. You wanna feel all right with that? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Moving on to license application periods, section 1.10, number of comments here, mostly about the sort of acceptance period, the windows and so forth, but let's go through these. Subsection D, what happens in the one month window? Is there a time limit for when day applications need to be completed? What if it isn't completed until after the one month window? I would just note that the board under this same section windows have to provide 30 days of notice, so a licensee would have, or a applicant I should say, would have 60 days to complete an application. But you can discuss changing the windows, changing the notification, whatever, if you want. So the window is spelled out in the statue, right? The initial, so the beginning of the section says the board will accept license applications according to legislatively mandated time period. So the initial acceptance period is laid out in statute, but after that, you have complete discretion to set windows as important. And what it lays out in statute is that it has to stay open for a certain amount of time. It doesn't say that it has to close. That's right. So again, this to me is just a staffing issue and kind of a needs of the market issue. So right, if we, I mean, we may never close the small cultivator window. I don't see why we would, honestly, unless it's just, you're just so swamped with other applications that we have to kind of focus on some other stuff first, but. Well, so I just want to understand we give 30 days prior to opening or closing. So either if we open it, if we intend to close it within 30 days, we'd have to say that let's start, right? Or you could end up having 90 days or 120 days because we have, if we leave it open, like you're suggesting and we have to give 30 days notice before we actually close it. So it could be quite a while that somebody has to close the patient. I'm not. I don't think we need to change it. I don't think we need to change anything here. I mean, if someone's, because I mean, the thing is, is they're tying it, this comment is tied to a one month window. And I just don't really see, I just don't really see us really having one month windows, but maybe future boards, well, maybe, but again, they would have to notice that they're planning on closing, you know, 30 days before opening essentially, or that you notice that you're gonna open within, I mean, you have 30 days notice. Then you could say the day that it opens, we're gonna close it in 30 days. Right. And then everyone kind of is on the same playing field. Right. Yeah, I don't see any real reason to change this based on the current. Okay. Kyle. Nope, I'm good. So moving to subsection D2, a couple of commenters requested that the annual application period be required to open for all cultivator tiers, not just tiers one and two. Would we have to do that so people can scale up? Do we have to open under this period? I think that's the only, I think, I mean, our intent was to make sure that regardless of market demand, we still provide an opportunity for small cultivators, no matter what. I think that's the only point on the other side of the equation, you know? So the fear here is that, you know, some future board has all license types closed, except for one and two for 30 days every year. And then someone, you know, is a tier two and needs to become a tier three and the board, one, could do that if they opened that window. But then they'd have to do it but then they'd have to give 30 days notice. They're not required to open it, they're not required. I don't know, just have a feeling these, I just have a feeling that these windows are gonna remain open. You know, I think this is a fail-safe for future boards that don't want to open windows. Yeah, I mean, looking through the comments on this section, I think folks are afraid that we're not gonna operate it on a rolling basis. I don't think that's our intent. I think it's making sure that there is windows open regardless of market demand for the future. But if you look at our nearest neighbor, for example, in Massachusetts, I mean, they're constantly approving new provisional licenses and new licenses constantly. So it's, I think, I agree with you, Pepper. I think it's unlikely that we're gonna not, we have to have anything other than a pretty rolling period application. So no change. No change. Yeah, no change. Thank you, Collin, if you're just looking at it from the opposite end of how we're trying to explain our rationale, which is fine, but I think we're good. So this person is saying that the next comment talks about the 30-day period, saying that they are able to go over to a restrictive. They say ideally there would be an ongoing application period for licenses. It's important to consider a particular time seasons in which cultivation licenses are due for renewal, outdoor in particular. They'll need to have approval very early in the calendar year. I mean, I think this is similar to what you were just saying in the sense that this provision was not to allow you to close things down. Your intention is to keep things open. It was to prevent a future board from completely shutting down the market. So it sort of was constraining a future board, but not so much a signal about what you were planning to do. So I guess, just the only thing to consider here is do we want to get more prescriptive in the rule about when the 30-day mandatory opening period should be in order to ensure that outdoor cultivation, at least as a shot of getting a license that year and using it that year. Yeah, no, I think that's the one. Maybe we say in February, it will open. The board shall accept applications for no less than 30 days each calendar year. Applications must open February. For all of them are just starting in February, starting February first, 30-day window starting February first. That at least gets the whole process done for small cultivators that are operating outdoor to get plants in the ground when they need to. Okay, so I believe this comment, the next comment was saying that the license, they were nervous that the license renewal was somehow tied into the application acceptance periods, which I don't think was the intention. I actually think the commenter understood that it wasn't the intention. They just wanted to be clear that in fact it was not, there wasn't going to be a tie between here. In other words, if you've got a license, you can renew it yearly as long as you meet the renewal requirements. Yeah, I think it's new licenses. Because it's about the annual application. Words can't line down the market. You know. I'll look to see if there's a simple way to verify that. But I think there's nothing in here that says this is anything to do with license renewal. So I wouldn't think that a future board will use this to shut down that process. All right, going ahead to 1.11. This is the criminal records piece. A number of comments on here. So I'm going to read through one comment that comes with several recommendations. So the commenter notes that the statutory provision that gives you the power to look at these things says that the board's discretion to deny license applications due to an applicant's criminal history, it's limited to those situations where the applicant's criminal record reveals, quote, factors that demonstrate whether the applicant presently poses a threat to public safety or the property functioning of the regulated market, end quote. And further specifically excludes nonviolent drug offenses, talking about the statute. The commenter says that this section or the following section 1.1.12 is not sufficiently tailored to the statutory limitation, creates a presumptive disqualification for all, oh, I'm sorry, I misspoke. The commenter is referring to multiple subsections within 1.11, clear. Unfortunately, 1.11.2 is not sufficiently tailored to the statutory limitation and creates a presumptive disqualification for all misdemeanors occurring within the last two years, all felonies occurring within the last five and all felonies at any time, involving fraud, deceit, or embezzlement, without regard to whether the crime has demonstrated a present threat to public safety or the property functioning of the regulated market. While section 1.11.13 does allow an applicant to overcome the presumptive disqualification by presenting mitigating factors, requiring an applicant to present such factors to overcome a disqualification, turns on its head, the express statutory file on the disqualification, only be based on factors that demonstrate those threats in the first place. Separately, the legislative intent in denying applications on threats to proper function was in part based on the co-memorandum second priority, which is preventing revenues from the sale of marijuana from ongoing criminal enterprises, gangs, or cartels, end quote. While too restrictive in other respects, 1.11.12 fails to squarely disqualify applicants based on factors that demonstrate an ongoing involvement in such criminal enterprise. So there are four recommendations all within the same comment. I think it makes sense to go at them one at a time. Place a time limit on 1.11.2, right? Yes, place a time limit of 1.11.2B of no more than 10 years and expressly exclude money laundering offenses which were charged as is very common in connection with trafficking cannabis and any other nonviolent drug offenses. I don't think that's a good idea. Again, we had this section and I'm willing actually to accept one of the other recommendations here that will make this even broader or what more restrictive I should say, but this is the most permissive use of criminal histories in cannabis in any state and anything that is tied to money laundering, it's important for us to know and nothing is permanently disqualifying. Everything can be overcome based upon the circumstances. So when it comes to money laundering specifically, I think we need to take a closer look at it if nothing else to make sure that all of our financial institutions and our federal partners know that we've kind of signed off on every crime that could implicate a fencing violation. So agreed. All right. Okay. Second recommendation still on the same comment is to exclude all nonviolent misdemeanors which do not involve fraud, deceit or embezzlement and all nonviolent felony from 1.11.2 E and F. So the bottom two sub-sessions are bad. Right, so that's the recommendation. Both of those currently exclude only exclude nonviolent drug offenses. The recommendations to change it to all nonviolent offenses. So this is the one where I think I'm okay with this. However, I can say the reason why I chose the phrase nonviolent drug offenses was because that's what the statute said specifically. So when, you know, this comment is talking about what the legislative intent was, you know, it's really hard to absent kind of express language to really determine what a legislative intent is because there's 181 people that get to decide this for 181 different reasons. But that being said, I think I'm all right because I'm trying to think about what specifically nonviolent misdemeanors or felonies I would think would preclude someone and I mean the most intense ones, David and I kind of had a conversation about this are really like the luring statutes, the luring crimes. You know, those are serious crimes, but if they're five years and older and there's no subsequent convictions and, you know, does it really implicate someone's ability to grow and sell cannabis? Maybe, maybe not, I don't know. Essentially the question is, should we eliminate the word drug from E and F? And your thought is yes. I mean, obviously I'd be more comfortable with doing it in E and not F, doing it for misdemeanors and not felonies. And again, like then it just comes down to us evaluating on a case by case basis whether or not this person poses a present risk is upon the factors in the next section. I don't know, I'm honestly like, I've thought a lot about this, I've had conversations, you know, this is David Silverman's request. He's spent a lot of time thinking about this section as well. I agree with that. Yeah, E and F are just the... So my understanding of, you know, this part of the criminal justice system is limited, so I'm trusting you. So I think you said E, but not F, right? That's, I mean, you know, I'm on the fence about F. I think I'm copacetic with E. I'm a little bit on the fence about F, but honestly, I could probably go over F as well. Yeah, I mean, this is a place where I follow you as well, but I would, I think E and F, that's something we can do. All right. As long as you're another varying levels of comfort, but. I mean, essentially, you know, the really serious nonviolent felony convictions are mostly for property crimes, you know, and we've already got the kind of FinCEN, you know, the property crimes that implicate the proper functioning market already are kind of not or presumptively disqualified. So what are we really talking about? You know, I think like DUI death resulting, something like that. That might be a list of, oh, is that a list then? Okay, so like DUI with serious property damage. You know, is that, is that something we care about that happened within the last five years? Do we need to know that? Do we want to review that application with the kind of under the kind of one point, one point, three criteria? If someone was trunked into someone's house. I don't think I need to know that. In the last five years, within the last five years? Yeah, because we're already saying if it happened five years ago, that we're going to treat it as if it never happens. No, probably not. I mean. Yeah. And there's the luring one is the one where you're, you know, trying to entice an underage person to or sexual assault. I mean, that's, that's, yeah. I mean, that's, I think considered a non-violent offense. I think I'd be comfortable with the NF. I mean, yeah. All right. Let's eliminate drug from the word drug from working. The next recommendation is to create an express presumptive disqualification for recent criminal records that demonstrated ongoing involvement with organized criminal enterprises, including violent gangs and drug cartels. And this is in reference to the coal memorandum provision that the commenter cites earlier. We know what those crimes would be, like conspiracy charges. Like what, I mean, how do we even like, you know, quantify that? I think the terminology maps much more closely onto federal charges or you have much more common like rego charges and things like that. Organized crime type charges. And, you know, people could certainly apply to work in the market who have those types of charges in Vermont. So it may be one of those things where there it's, there aren't that many Vermont specific crimes where you would be able to identify that this is the type of activity, but there are other, there are federal charges or charges from other state where it would more clearly fit within these categories. So I'm fine with that. Do you, if you feel like you can translate that into a rule? I'll do the best I can. The final recommendations go in the same comment in subsection one point, or sorry, section 1.11.3 require, as opposed to simply allowing the board to request additional information to overcome a presumptive disqualification into place in application and pending status, pending receipt thereof from the applicant. So the applicant has a meaningful opportunity to respond when the application window would otherwise close. We talked about this at the time. Requiring someone to kind of talk about this when almost everything here is just factual that we're gonna get from the criminal history record. Anyway, you know, dragging someone in or making this into the comment. Again, when they don't want to, to me, it's just silly. You know, nothing would prohibit them from making a comment if they wanted to. I don't agree with this recommendation. Does that make sense? Yes, although I have a question. So they, you can overcome, how are we, how do people overcome presumptives? It's the 11.3, it's the nature and seriousness of the crime. Whether it was kind of a isolated incident or kind of a repeated behavior. The age of the person when the crime was committed. Any subsequent offenses? So the, like, social conditions might be in the area. No, this is the answer to my question. Sorry, the license application will allow applicants to provide additional information. That was, how are we getting the information was really my question. Yeah, so. And I got it. Yeah. I think it'd be one of those things where, you know, you can explain the circumstances if you want to. If you don't want to, then we just don't include, we don't consider it. Yeah. And we just consider the other factors. Yeah, okay. Sounds good. All right. So another comment, I'd say a little more broadly about this section 1.11 that came in is that we feel that the CCB has defined an overly broad net of criminal history which would lead to presumptive disqualification. And all of the CCB has left room for overcoming presumptive disqualification. This process is fundamentally inverted, presuming guilt of someone with a past criminal history and asking them to effectively prove their innocence and the validity of their rehabilitation to another government entity in order to run a legal business with substantial oversight regulation. That last clause was long, but I think it was just saying that they don't agree with that approach to dealing with criminal history records. Yeah, we're not requiring anyone to prove their innocence here. That's not what this is about. It's really proving that they're not going to disrupt the market in a way that's prohibiting. So I just, you know, we're being very, we're being very loose on criminal history records based on this compared to other states, I should say. And we're giving everyone an opportunity to we're going to consider everyone potentially viable. You know, someone might be presumptively disqualified, but it's easy enough to overcome that. So I just don't agree with this comment. The way this is set up really allows someone to give more information than we would get in their background check, which we could just make a determination based on what's written on the page, which doesn't really tell the story, right? Right. Yeah, so I don't think we need further discussion on this kind of it. All right. Moving to section 1.12, this is the issuance of licenses, two recommendations here. One is to add a bad actor provision so that somebody with a revocation pursuant to rule four. In other words, did something wrong or revokes your license under our compliance and enforcement role, which is rule four. So add a provision saying that somebody to whom that happens must wait for a year or some amount of time before reapplying for a license. Fine with that. We need to get super specific on, you can't be in control. You can't be, you know. Right. You can't be a financier. Right. Yeah, so now let's just, I don't know how to write that. So you can be a license holder or be an owner of a. Yeah, that can be. Yeah, let me just add it out here. In one year, since I'm suitable. The next recommendation I would say is more in the nature of a drafting note. While it's on the drafting note, there should be a provision added to clarify that a licensing grant or denial constitutes a final decision of the board for the purposes of appeals pursuant to the statutory section that deals with appeals in our statutes. I think this, from the lawyer's standpoint, I do think this makes sense. We need to be clear that this is a triggering point for an appeal, that there isn't an internal appeal process for a license grant or denials. The license grant or denial is the final decision. That's the triggering point for going into the administrative law process. That's good. Going on to 1.13. Potentially renamed provisional licenses is something like pre-qualification approval. The term provisional licensing can be confusing because it sounds like someone can get a license and start operating on an interim basis, which the section says that you can't, but the name arguably makes it sound like you could. So that's the... I mean, I kind of like it only because someone having a license or us calling it that gives people the impression that they do have a license and really all we're saying is, at this point in time, these people will not be categorically disqualified from getting a license. So to me, pre-qualification approval is actually closer to what we're saying. It's not really a license. I know it's a... It's some way semantics, right? Will a financial institution reflect more, or reflect better upon the word of a provisional license or a pre-qualification approval? That's kind of where my head's at. Is it gonna matter to them in terms of the wording that's used? Or getting a lease or any of the other... So I can tell you that in the two banking around tables I've had, the financial institutions like the approach. I don't think they care what we call it. I figured as much. I wanted to make sure that we weren't... It wasn't a super semantic oversight. It helps them kind of decide at one point they need to start engaging with this company. So if they have a piece of paper that says they're pre-approved or that it's a provisional license. Yeah, they're not gonna care quite as much. The only thing, I get the patience that I'm pre-qualified for credit cards all the time. Not necessarily the case. Good on that. All right, great. I'm gonna keep saying the term provisional license just because that's how it's written for now, but we'll change it in the redraft here. So next comment is on 1.13.1. Comments are asking the board open slash reopen the provisional license process at any time. Can applicants apply for provisional license at any time? I think this is actually provided for in... Where was it? 1.13.4 where it basically lays out if the board can open and close as discretion similar to the experience of the regular license today. So is there something that needs to connect 1.13.4 to 1.10 where we have the... So if the board has to open certain licenses first for every year, do they also have to open the provisional license process? Does that come with it? Right now, it doesn't say that. I think this is really at the board's discretion if they wanna offer this up as a possibility. I think financial institutions need this type of signaling that a well-qualified applicant how do we not provide some type of provisional or pre-qualification process for all prospective new license holders? That's just a question. And it really only matters if we at some point close the application process and need to reopen it. Otherwise, we would just assume that both the provisional process and the licensing process are open. And roll it. Great. Yeah, I know it's... I was just... Your question made me think like what if someone applies for a provisional license for a license type that we don't have or we're never gonna intend to open it. 25,000 square foot. If we decide that the whole market can be satisfied by the lower tiers. I mean, I guess we would just deny it. Deny the provisional license application. So I don't think the window necessarily has to be open, but I think it would be a denial. If someone applied for a provisional license for a tier that we had no intention of opening, I think we would deny and refund. Okay. But do we need the provisional license for like the 30 days small cultivator window? Like the provisional license for that license type, if they're gonna be opening February 1st, the provisional license needs to open by next date. I don't know. So based on this, the board doesn't have to open the provisional process. Only has to open the licensing process. But if we know that folks need provisional license to go get a bank account, let's say, or other get a lease or what have you, do we always have to open the provisional license too? I think it's the question that I have. Yeah. I mean, really, like. Or will like lending institutions, once this market has been opened, you come a little bit more, and I mean, that's not a question. Maybe you know through the banking round table. So once we've reached maturity, will they feel a little bit more confident in working with somebody before they get a pre-qualification or provisional license? It really comes down to the financial institutions in this state particularly, they don't know what to expect. They don't know how many applications they're going to receive. They don't know, you know, at what levels, whether it's going to be a request to just open a bank account or you know, some other lending possibility. They just want as much of the work done by us. First, the company. So the people that they're dealing with actually have a legitimate shot at actually opening a business. Or they won't be denied by us, you know, to their whole effort was wasted. So it helps them to see something like provisional license because it shows some real, you know, intent and some approval by some authority. But they don't need it. I mean, there's nothing that would require them, a financial institution to look at one of these, you know, to demand a provisional license. Anything, once they get used to working in this specific market, it might be less inclined to feel the need for that over time. I guess that's right, I'll wait up. You are going to be looking over the next day or whatever, two days, about the question about how much in other states there's been any bottlenecks in terms of insurance, bank accounts, things like that. And that might inform this discussion of whether you also need to provide assurance that provisional or whatever we're going to call pre-qualification is necessary. If it turns out that as a practical matter in other states, everything's been going okay, getting stuff before licensing, then this matters. So I would say to this kind of, we don't need to ensure that there's a provisional licensing window open like we do in the other rule. Is that what this is asking for? Yeah. And that just, I think the rules are pretty clear that we have discretion to not grant a provisional license. So if someone can apply at any time, but if it's for a cultivation tier that we never intend to open or have no plans on opening, we would just... You should tell them, yeah. Yeah, right, yeah, it's not going to be a big rush to the starting line for the highest tier if we have to get a provisional license with the hopes that it opens one day and we have a fast track. So are we good for now on that? Yeah. Looking to 1.14, which is the priority of board considerations for license applications. It says, should the details of priority processing be outlined in the rule? If the board wants to open up licenses annually, this process will likely be needed each time licensing is opened. And this is in the rule because it's required by statute, I think given some of the complexities about how this will roll out, the decision was that it made sense to allow for that to be developed in guidance and additionally made sense because this will change as the market is up and running. The initial acceptance period is going to be a big of licenses all at once. And after that, it'll be a rolling basis, which will make for a very different system. Okay, so we don't really need to do anything with this. I think it's better to stay put where we are. Can I just ask, so the 903 says that we will create a system of prioritization by rule and just because this is gonna go somewhere else and they're gonna look at it, right? Tell us whether or not we've met the intent. We all feel like this section meets that intent of that requirement on us. That's our argument. Yes, go into a 1.15 license renewal timeframe or no, license no for secret in general. So I think we actually already dealt with this because we already talked about the license tier change, which kind of implicates this too. But anyway, first comment on the section in general is the rule should allow a licensee ability to move to a new location and pay a relocation fee. We didn't talk about a relocation fee, but we did already talk about the notion of changing tiers and potentially changing locations. But I think based on that conversations, that piece will be allowed. You guys can discuss relocation fee if you'd like. You know, one, we can't just set a fee. So this would have to be included in the fee bill, I think unless we just treat it as if you're moving locations, it's a new license and you have to just reapply. Seems a little bit harsh, but again, like if we've already assumed the cost of going to inspect the place and someone changes their location and we have to go inspect again, that's what the fee pays for is the inspection and compliance. So in some ways, I feel like if you're gonna change locations, you should probably try and just have the foresight to do it within your license window or understand that you're gonna lose a portion of your fee essentially. Is there any thinking about different scenarios how this might play out? What if you have a landlord that's kicking you out because they don't want a cannabis business operating on their premises anymore? Do we wanna make any special? Not saying we need to, but I'm just thinking about different ways that this specific issue may come up where it's not somebody making a business decision. It's more about a decision that's been put on the license holder. Yeah, we do have, if there's a change of ownership that we can waive the fee. So maybe we do the same language here. Right, like what if the building burns down or there's some sort of tragedy, yeah. So maybe it's just a change of location that's not a change of location. Do we do the exact same way or the change of ownership? Okay, see some folks not wanting to or landlords. It's gonna be a mixed bag, I think. Well, if the building sells, the new landlord might have different plans. Yeah, or if that person finds himself in a predatory cannabis tax kind of relationship and they're like, I need to get out of here. Like, this is somebody's holding me hostage, you know? Sorry. I'll go ahead. So essentially it'll be, it requires a license. If you're gonna change location, let's say not at the, you can change location at the renewal. If it's not at the normal renewal time, we'll say it's similar to the change of control, except obviously the change of control provisions that are specifically relevant to change of control, we wouldn't apply to this. So it would just be updating location information. Okay, great. So you update location information. Okay, you pay the fee with the fee, can be waived by the fee, right? Yeah, that's the same as change of control. Okay. Next comment is specific to 1.15.1, license renewal time frames. The commenter says, we are asking the CCB to allow integrated licenses to renew medical and adult use at the same time to maximize efficiency. Renewals are time consuming and provide the review of large quantity of documents. Integrated licenses be allowed to renew medical and adult use simultaneously. They will save significant amounts. What's preventing them from lining that up themselves? My, know that they're on a schedule now. I guess the question is in year one, they're not gonna, you know, there's a lot of folks that have to renew in February. Are there some of the dispensaries that have to renew in February? So they can't line it up, but next year, I think that's great. Yeah, I mean, I guess you could explicitly provide that the integrated licensees, their dispensary portion of their operation, I'm thinking I'll add a little here, which is always dangerous. Look into our part of the, I think my read would be that once they have an integrated license, that covers all of their operations and they don't need to have a separate renewal. And I believe that rule three explicitly says this. I will check it before we are done with rule one and two. I believe it provides that once you get the integrated the license, you're like out of the dispensary, the civic regulations entirely, and now you can still run a dispensary operation, but you've got to abide by all the rule one and two stuff that applies with respect to license renewal and so forth. So effectively, I guess what I'm saying is they're gonna get exactly what they're asking for as soon as they become an integrated licensee. I was gonna say that that was my kind of thought on how things would roll after year one, regardless. That makes sense from a practical standpoint. That means from a fee standpoint and the separate funds that exists that pay for the medical program versus pay for our operations. You're saying that the integrated license essentially includes a dispensary license? Essentially, yeah. It allows them to operate as a dispensary. Just write two separate checks when they apply for that integrated license, like one to the medical registry fund and one to the CCP fund. Yeah, I mean, the rule only says that because we can't set fees, the rules pretty much always just say you've got to pay the fees as laid out. So I think the answer is yes, it'll just be whatever fees apply that the legislature's assigned will still be applicable. Yeah, there's just this thing out there and this concern that those funds will be co-mingled and that I actually think that there's probably some reasons why our program might end up subsidizing the medical program, but fear currently is that it would be the other way around. So we'll make any specific changes here, but I will note for when we get back to rule three that we need to be clear about that, the issue at least. Yeah. Okay. All right, so then moving on to 1.15.2, this is the change of control section. And the first comment is about terminology with respect to when you have to submit this information and yeah, anyway, I'll just read it. This requires a licensee to apply for renewal prior to quote, executing unquote, a change of control transaction. The choice of words is unclear and suggests that the board may be requiring a renewal application prior to a licensee. Signing an agreement would affect a change in control. This may have an unduly chilling effect on both fundraising and exit transactions where in the public interest lies in ensuring the change of control transaction is not consummated rather than executed without the board's approval. And the recommendation from the commenter has replaced the word executing with the word consummating. And I'll just say from the lawyer standpoint, I think this is fine. I am not, I think there's a number of different terms that could be used. It could be like completed or takes effect or something like that. Consummated is fine if in fact, I also think that there are other terms, like if somebody is really trying to close financing or something like that, terminology is somewhat, it's not set by statute. It's somewhat substitutable here. So like you could say, yeah, this is an agreement to complete XYZ financing. You haven't used the term executing. So you haven't, I guess what I'm saying is I'm not as worried about this either way. And so I'm fine if changing into consummating will be a clarifying change for some individuals in this field. I'm fine with that. Okay. Yeah. I'll take your advice on this one, David. Yeah. On justice. So then the next comment is about social equity applicants and the changes of control. Basically the recommendation is to update this section but parameters on transferring licenses of social equity applicants that were recommended in the social equity report from the advisory committee. And as a reminder, this is just that people are getting the benefits of a social equity license should not be able to retain those benefits if they are in fact, if they in fact no longer meet the qualifications to be a social equity applicant. And that is not explicitly provided for in this section. So do you know how to kind of update that? Essentially what it is is you, isn't it, if you transfer your business if you're a social equity applicant you've been receiving, you know, let's just say two years of benefits and reduced fees and you transfer your business and you have to pay back those two years of benefits. Yes, yeah. And I think it shouldn't be too hard to, I think the fee piece, yeah, it shouldn't be too hard to put that in. Yeah, it's just one more. Yeah. So section again. And to be clear, if you transfer to another social equity applicant then you maintain their same kind of fee schedule. Yeah. So then jumping ahead to rule 1.16, this is the cannabis application cards. There should be a requirement here or in rule 2, that employees, owners or principals carry their ID cards at all times along the license premise. This should be made explicit except for owners of home-based businesses and employees of retail establishments who entered the establishment off-duty as a customer and do not access any area of the establishments which is generally off limits to customers. I'm fine with that. I'm okay. My only thought was, do we need to be that specific? Probably helpful to the establishment to have it in rule. Yeah, just asking. This makes more sense actually in rule 2 which is the thing that governs what you do when you have a license. So we'll probably put it there but I think we'll accept the recommendation and figure out the placement. Commenter notes that in light of ending legislation to allow employee portability of identification cards and requirement in 1.16.3A, that an applicant list the licensed cannabis establishment of the individual intent to work may be overly restrictive. This should be drafted to accommodate a potential change. From the lawyer perspective, the drafting perspective, I think that's right. The intention here originally drafting it was to write language that would accommodate both the current statute and also a potential change in the statute. In other places, we have simply relied on the words of the statute including it in the rule. I think we can just do that here. The statute doesn't change, the statute still exists. People have to follow that. Our application process can accommodate that. We don't need to say it here and not saying it here allows for flexibility to legislator makes a change. Okay. There should be a provision still in the same section. There should be a provision for a replacement process and for the final fate of the ID card. In terms of the final fate of the card, would it be sufficient to ensure the cards of expiration dates on them? Question mark. I think they should have expiration dates. I would say final fate. You could destroy or send back to the board. You know, give people an either or there. What would you want to set the expiration date on the adequate? The two years that we've been thought about, if the legislation changes the... It'll be, yeah, we'll just rely on, we've already relied on statute and we'll continue to do that just to say whatever the time period is and statute and that's it changes. Do we want people to send them back to us if it's suspended or revoked before the expiration date? You know, it's just one of those things where we're not gonna be able to really or someone to send it back. Yeah, so we should just give them the option of send back or destroy. I mean, we could just say destroy, right? Yeah, send back or destroy, I don't want to explain. No. So then this is a comment about the criminal history requirements which largely, well, don't largely, they do track the requirements for the application in general. You don't want us to deal with replacement process? Oh, yeah, thank you. I would say whatever the DMV does for a driver's license is sufficient for me. I mean, the DMV, you know, I was just on their website, they just, it's just like applying for a new one. Yeah. They're the first one. I'm fine with that. And you have to pay for it, right? There's no reduction in cost. Yeah, you just pay for it, right? They're just reapplied essentially. Is it a full reapplication? Except that, do we need to check their background again if they're replacing a lost card? If it's unexpired, I would say. Yeah. Okay, so reapply, but no background check where it hasn't expired, you know? Anything else that's missed on this? They would still be under the provision and employee that if they, while they've reported their card, lost damage or stolen and they're reapplying, if they pick up a disqualifying criminal offense during that window, they would still be under a requirement to notify the board, I think. They're still essentially operating under their own license. What if someone loses a card and they're waiting for us to issue a new one, still need to work? Get the temporary one, right? Is there one of those? Okay. There's like a temporary issue. I was making sure we had that. Yeah, the temporary one essentially. So there's a comment here that very much tracks the comment earlier about the criminal history background checks saying the same argument that it is overly restrictive, too many crimes are caught up in the net and presumes guilt and they don't agree with needing to approve rehabilitation. They asked the CCB recognize that much of what is normally left up to the discretion of business like whom to hire and his qualified is substantially overseen by the CCB and requires processes and costs like all the application costs. They know that that will be burdensome and they urge the CCB to be permissive and understanding and supportive. They do appreciate the allowance that the employee can work once the application has been submitted with the temporary ID card that we just mentioned. And that's basically the comment I can discuss as you wish. I think it's, you already discussed it largely in the prior piece. Yeah. You can discuss it in the prior. I mean, even compared to other licensed professions this is way more permissive. The vast majority of professions that are licensed by OPR don't allow felony convictions period. So I think this one, I think this one's sufficient. And it is very much narrowly tailored to achieve the purposes that were set out by the legislature around present threats to the market. So I agree. The final comment here is just a drafting issue. Make sure the ID card is referenced using the same terminology in each instance. I agree with that drafting. I mean, we'll try to do that. So that's the end of rule one. How do people feel? I mean, we got a couple of options here. One, we could carry on with rule two. I'm going as long as we can. Maybe it's a four. We could pause for a public comment period and then go to rule two. We could go into executive session on the social equity criteria or we could put that off to our next meeting because there might be other issues for the negative session. Okay, come on. So how do you all feel? David, why don't I start with you? I'm fine with whatever you say. All to set. I'm ready to keep going or... I mean, you compiled the document for us. It seems to me, honestly, like rule two, there's actually more comments and more substance to get through than rule one. So I'm a little worried that we're going to be in the same predicament on Thursday. If we don't do some more right now. Do you have a stop time? Four is in 45 minutes. I don't have a hard stop today, but I know that we have other people that are helping us right now. I'm trying to keep going as long as you want to keep going. How are the skills? I have a hard stop before, but that's okay. I'm just going to keep going about it. Okay, how about we keep going in at four o'clock? We'll do our public comment and then we'll adjourn. Okay. So moving on to rule two. Once again, starting with some general comments, we begin work from our colleagues at Department of Agriculture Food and Markets. One of these might have been a repeat, but I will just read it out here. Repeat being my fault, not their fault, I said it in two places. Reporting to the board or requiring giving information to the board should generally only be required when it may trigger some action by the board. Otherwise, reporting is burdensome both for board and licensee without serving a purpose. Again, just a general thing the commenter wants us to keep in mind as we go through. If a cannabis establishment is required to report or take some action to alert the CCB of some occurrence, the CCB should be clear about what it will do with that information. If the CCB is not going to take an action or have a standard for enforcement for a breach, vehicle accident, diversion, theft or loss at the point of the report, then it wouldn't be necessary to report. If at the end of the year, a report is provided of a breach vehicle accident, et cetera, and if it occurs three times in a year, you could outline consequences or that it weighs in on the CCB decisions in some way. So this is just saying. These reports could be held by the establishment as opposed to the CCB. Also, the CCB may want to make the cannabis establishment responsible for maintaining records rather than reporting incidents to the CCB unless warranted. This is very similar to the prior comment and notes that the CCB will be responsible for managing those records reports in accordance with public records as well. Oh, what do you think about this? Just general comments, Julie and Kyle. I mean, what I started to do when I read this was started to go through and just highlight in rule one and two anytime we require a report to us. Most of them are around issues like I picked up a criminal charge or I have a health and safety violation or, you know, but I take this to heart where it's kind of like what are we going to do with this? And if the answer is we don't know, we'll wait and see then that's fine, but I do, you know, Stephanie just went through all this with him. And I know it's not as detailed and it's not federally illegal, but it is good advice. Yeah, no, I mean, Stephanie was on the, and I know that there's some data collection stuff with respect to energy usage and water usage. And I think Stephanie and I wrestled over whether or not that was appropriate here to include and ask for. I want to track our climate impacts. And so we can get to that conversation when we get to. I mean, there's a argument to be made. We have such small operators. I mean, unless you look at things in aggregate, how's it really, it's harder to track specifically those specific impacts, but we've also contemplated exempting 20 to 30% of market actors from those reporting requirements. So I'm like, how useful is the data? I think a certain percentage of it at the beginning. So that's kind of like a internal struggle. We need to figure out. I don't necessarily understand the perspective of if somebody, if there is a theft or a breach or diversion, how can we expect folks not to report that to us? So I don't understand her comment or the purpose of her comment there. Yeah, I think that's an important one for us to know with a federally illegal inventory tract. Yeah, I mean, a vehicle accident, see that? Like there's, you know, I don't know if we need to get prescriptive on specific instances where we need to know as soon as possible considering things, you know, but. We may need to be more specific about like what kind of, do we say in here what kind of vehicle accident? So if I am a driver and I back into a curb and it damages the car, do I need to report to the CCB or if it's damaged to the vehicle such that the cannabis is exposed to the outside or is on the ground or whatever, is that something that needs to be reported? Car is towed to a line. Right, or there's an injury or something like that. Like it's, we may need to be specific about at what level we need the information. Well, I guess just in order to accommodate this comments, we should just look at any time it's, you know, even do like a search and find like report to the CCB or whatever and just let's look at them in the aggregate and see, and just see if we are being overly burdensome without much need for it. I don't think we can do anything right here right now. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know until we know specifically more our enforcement team, wherever it's gonna be is gonna look, you know what I mean? And, you know, if you have a breach or a diversion, you reported to somebody and we outlined steps internally on how to handle certain things, right? But, you know, still think just at the end of the year of somebody stole pounds and pounds of weed from me and understand how that's, if that's the point she's trying to make, I don't get that. We would be comfortable making that, you would need to. So for the special meeting on, I believe we said Thursday, right? Would you wanna just, you as individual board members just setting aside, I think you're clear on the safety and that stuff is I'm setting that aside. Do some listing of the reporting and make some individual decisions about what you think is really needed and then we can go through that as one of our. Yeah. Yeah. Good that way. Yeah, I mean, it's weird being at the beginning of a program because I don't want people to give me data that we're not gonna do anything with, but same time, we need to be able to track the progress of our programs. Again, I've said it before, the last thing I want is in five years, all the crosshairs to be on this industry as the big environmentally not conscious program within state government. So we have to think about what it is we need and want to measure. Right. All right. All right. So jumping now to the more specific stuff going to the definition section, 2.1.3. First comment is really, I'd say just a technical comment. We need to add the definitions of indoor and outdoor cultivation from rule one because this rule relies on them too, understanding that those definitions are changing slightly. Second comment is, we had a couple of comments actually about defining harvest a lot with more specificity. Well, one comment said that specifically, the other comment said should be a single cultivar. Oh, that's, I think that's my mistake, but a single canvas cultivar produced from a single season and then that the 0.9 testing requirements would be that you just test the harvest loss lots, which is already true. I think the only difference with this commenter is saying that they would change the contiguous or they would eliminate the contiguous area, piece of the harvest loss. Oh, I can't say that word. It's a three letter word. Harvest lot definition. And just as an FYI from the lawyer standpoint, this definition was taken directly from the current hemp rules that exist right now that the Department of Ag is using right now because I think we anticipate Ag being a cooperative partner on this testing piece in particular, it made, we thought it made sense to just use what they're already doing, especially because the lab certified use that already too. That's why it is what it is. But obviously those are the comments and you all should discuss what makes sense. I just have to assume that Ag went through rulemaking on this, probably as a reason why they chose this exact definition. And it's certainly, I don't have any real desire or even the expertise, honestly, to change it based upon this comment. I think, you know. Folks are growing only one variety on a continuous piece of land. I don't think it's necessary to test how certain things happen in hemp. I'm happy with, I'm fine with this definition unless we hear through more comments or in conversations that we missed the mark. But, you know, whether it's one plan or 20,000 square feet, if it's the same variety or, you know, you're growing on the same land, and you can't, it has to be a representative sample regardless of what they think. I think, you know, that situation's not gonna happen all too often. So the next comment is about greenhouse definition. Why 180 days? Is there an agricultural basis for this? Should it be shorter? The answer is yes, there's an agricultural basis for it. I don't think it needs to be shortened or adjusted. I mean, this is trying to folks that are growing outdoors, but in the context of a greenhouse erected specifically for cannabis production, I mean, it's gonna take six months to grow and harvest your crop. And that was the, how we drew the line between greenhouses and hoop houses that are exempt from, you know, specific energy requirements. And you got this definition, you just added a little bit to it, right? It said, yeah, it said initially like, and it's taking from other commercial energy use standards across the country, it said erected. And we didn't want folks to think that it said erected for, you know, vegetative use or something like that. I think we were nervous that the term erected might mean folks need to take fundamentally take this down every season and some hoop houses you drive around. I mean, they're still standing. You know, mine isn't my backyard. You know, so we just put in continuous cannabis production, I think is what it says. So I think the definition is exactly where it needs to be. Right. Skipping ahead to 2.2, which is the regulations applicable to all cannabis establishments. We had a couple of comments that were all in the nature of saying that, hey, actually not all of these are applicable to all cannabis establishments. In particular, folks pointed out that not all of these are gonna be applicable to labs and one commenter had a number of sections. I won't read out that whole list, but they had a number of sections saying that these specifically aren't really applicable to labs. Somebody else noted that a chunk of a section actually seems to focus on retail. I think to some degree, those are fair comments. I would, I mean, I'd leave it up to the board. I think one drafting possibility is to just note that it really just changed the beginning here and note that these could be applicable to most cannabis establishments. And I don't know, again, I'm thinking out loud to my detriment, but I think there could be a way of just saying, look, these are generally applicable. They may not be applicable to every cannabis establishment, but they're generally applicable. Applications, my worry about trying to sift them more precisely is that anytime you say, all right, well, this is applicable to three out of the five, are we now gonna drop those into three different places elsewhere? And I think it just becomes much longer in this year. So I'd rather finesse this by changing essentially what we call the section. And then operate to operationalize that once people get into their application, it's only gonna ask them for the things that they, or once we, sorry, we've moved on from rule one. But once we, they will only need to keep track of the things that they know that they need to keep track of. Like we'll have guidance on the types of things that they need to keep track of and the records that they need to have. I think that's right. I think as we get sort of more and more mature in how we're operating, there can be guidance that is specific to each type of establishment that will be very clear about what they need to pay attention to. And I think that'll help. But yeah, I think the, I'd recommend that the solution be that we sort of change how we describe the section instead of real work. Yeah, that's fine with me. I mean, for instance, and notice in the comment also, just like, are we really gonna require a visitor log for a retail establishment? I don't think that that's really required in any other jurisdiction. Just writing down everyone who comes in and out and every customer. I don't think people want that. No. I mean, we've said specifically, I think, you know, they can check your name and birthday on your license, but they can't ask for anything else, like email and stuff unless you expressly give it to them for purposes of emailing you, say, you know. Educational material. Sure, there you go. So you have to opt into that, you know what I mean? It's like any other business. It sounds like David, you know how to kind of, hopefully make sure we're collecting the right stuff and the right people and not collecting stuff we don't need. Yeah, if it looks like this is gonna be a mess and we need to delineate it further, I'll come back to you on Thursday. Okay. So moving on to some more specific stuff here. Oh yeah, one more on this sort of generally. This is, you've already dealt with this, but put all the comments, different substantive comments in here. The comment that potency for cannabis products should be leaded to 15%. We can just refer to our January 15th report or November 1st report. That's right. You issued a statement. Okay. I think we've spent enough time on that issue at this point. Yeah, ready. We went to 2.2.1 business records. There is a couple of comments on here. So let me, there's, the section requires that voluminous business records be maintained on site by a licensee potentially creating and taking advantage of storage issues. This is my subpart F, where I was making seed sale tracking records, which may be unnecessary, given the board is likely to require a centralized system, or in such records would be maintained centrally and subpart M requires maintenance of application records, copies of which the board will necessarily already have. Recommendations from the commenters state that it'll allow the onsite requirements to be satisfied by maintaining records, such records digitally, including on a cloud based storage platform. So long as the records can be readily made available for inspection by the board. Similar adjustment should be made to 2.6.6 sub A and 2.8.5, any other? Certainly. Where do we say that? Where do we say anything about paperwork storage? Yeah, we don't. Maybe it just thinks that sounds good. I will. The license is not going to be a paper application. So. I want our five accordingly, but digital, including cloud basis. Really just needs to be accessible. Yeah. So this thing is just like readily accessible. Yeah, that's a good, I'll say do something along the lines of readily accessible from the location of the. Must be maintained in a readily accessible fashion, something like that. Well, PDF on your computer if we need it, you know. Pretty safe, readily accessible. Yeah, we'll just say readily, we can just delete on site and. Yeah. Records readily accessible. Anyway, don't need to do that now. Going to the next, I'm fine with, you know, I know we don't know what system we're using, but I kind of agree that seed to sale tracking records are probably duplicative. People have to kind of like download them and keep them as opposed to just kind of, and we already say kind of inventory records separately. So you're saying you're agreeing with the leading, the leading F, I don't know. I'm fine with that. I think we just need to make a note of when we, you know, I know that we have staff working on, you know, inventory tracking now and whether it's making sure we understand exactly how those records are kept. Right. From all the conversations we have through the RFP process, or we at least ask it and make sure it's good to go before we as a board, you know, move in a specific direction, you know. And then the other recommendation here is to delete subsection M about the license application records. All right, so then we have another comment here. The list could be divided into categories and there could be some internal references, the sections of the rule that further lay out expectations for required records, contents of the records, and, sorry, I just thought of a different issue. Well, essentially, sorry, go ahead, Pepper. Just that, this to me really comes down to what's best for our compliance and enforcement folks. So, I would say that either Bryn should weigh in on this or Kimberly or someone that is gonna have to deal kind of accessing these records. I tuned out. Sorry. Bryn. I was just going, Marco, are you? What is that? I'm where are we? I'm working on something else. So, I'm a little behind. So, the business records should be divided into categories based on their contents. All right. Signature pages. Is this just... Oh, sorry. Do you know how this is drafted? I don't understand the, I don't think I understand what this is really getting at. Yeah, I feel like to some degree this would be good direction for the licensees to follow. I'm not sure it's necessary for us to delineate this. What we care about is being able to make sure these are accessible. And as long as we can get them and accessible obviously means that they are in some sort of order that an inspector can read and understand. So, yeah, I don't know if we need to, if we need to do this so much as this is a good idea for licensees to... I agree with that. I think that is, I think it's important to keep them accessible and in a way that can easily be understood by our inspection staff. Other on that storm, I need to. And on the same section, 2.2.1, but specifically G, comment or note that this needs to card out retailers because this is not required retailers and they're talking about physical ones. So, you feel you can draft this in a way that 2.2 generally in a way that kind of makes those, I think so, although for this one, because there is a pretty direct conflict here, in other words, a lot of this stuff just doesn't apply. So, for that, you just say, look, where it's applicable, it applies. This one, there's more of a direct conflict saying you should do this in one place, you don't have to do it in another place. So, I think for this one, I will specifically, I would recommend that we specifically note that retailers are not required. I don't think we need to say that where visitors aren't permitted, it's just like, that's more of like a first guess. Yeah, okay. Perfect. Moving on to 2.2.2 and number, or no, one comment about the insurance issue. The coverage limits, one million for occurrence, two million, I agree, an alternative bond requirements are 50,000 or too high for smaller operations such as some tier two manufacturers, tiers one through three cultivators, seeds and clones retailers and unknown potential future license types. The recommendations that are within this comment are that we should replace the strict coverage limits to the requirements to maintain commercially reasonable levels of insurance commensurate with the licensees quantum of risk while maintaining the one million slash two million occurrence aggregate minimum for larger operations such as full retailers, wholesalers, tier one manufacturers, high tier cultivators and then reduce the alternative bond amount for smaller operations to 50,000. I'm fine with that, honestly. I've never liked that we just picked a number here. I know I was the one that suggested these numbers but I do just kind of like commercially appropriate amounts. But then a conversation between the insurance company or the business to determine what's appropriate. More tailored to your business. Yeah, I'm sure it's gonna know better than we know, right? Do we want to spell out the specifics for the larger operations or do we just wanna leave it at what's reasonable? I think we leave it at what's reasonable. Yeah, it's fine by me. Are there kind of fly-by-night insurance companies that will ensure someone unreasonably? Of course. I guess that's... They're always... But we don't have to worry about that because to some degree like you can't manage every aspect of what these folks are gonna face. They're gonna have to make some due diligence themselves. But we don't wanna just say like leave the one to two million in aggregate or the tiers that are being suggested here. Well, and there are other pieces, right? But so I would imagine that the finances are gonna wanna see what level of business insurance there is, right? So those conversations happen in a different market. So we'll just say commercially reasonable levels of insurance. And I think reasonable does give you some hook if you see somebody buying a thousand dollars worth of insurance to ensure their whole operation. That's enough for you to say that's just not reasonable, you never know what to say. Then the other part of this comment though is about the bond, which is separate. Yeah. We did 10,000 for tier one cultivators. Yep. Is that recall? Yep. So 50,000 for others, does that seem right? For everybody else? No, I think we would wanna... If we're gonna... I think we would wanna graduate it more than that. Okay. So we'll take in numbers out of that. I know. Doesn't feel right. I mean, you could just do the same delineation that's in the recommendation, which is, yeah. So the high folks, the full retailers, full sellers, tier one, tier four to six cultivators, all do the 250. Everybody else does 50, except the people who do 10 already come about. I realize that's also picking numbers but yeah, here we are. Okay. Why don't we do it that way for now? And then we can revisit this on Thursday if we feel like we need to. Do we know if banks will open escrow accounts for cannabis establishment? Yeah, it's on my list to ask. Again, I assume that they do but you never really want to assume. So jumping up to rule 2.2.4, health safety and sanitation requirements. Somebody notes that the final sentence is overly burdensome if rent to require the CCB to enforce other agency's rules. I would just say from the lawyer perspective, I don't think that that is what that sentence does. It's, the purpose of that sentence is to be, is to send a signal to other agencies needed that they are not responsible for enforcing our recommendations. In other words, not saying that we're going to enforce theirs but that they don't have to enforce ours. And other agencies are eager to have language like that because other agencies depend on federal dollars that could be in jeopardy if they are seen to be dealing with cannabis. 100% agreed. I think it's important for folks to understand that there might be more state agencies at play depending on your situation than us, you know. Right, and it's not to say that they won't, but they probably will in a number of cases, but just leaving, giving them that sort of protection. And then here we are again, this is the report issue, which I think I'm going to leave for now because we already decided that you're going to go through and make your own individual assessments about reports and we'll come back on that. So let's set that aside and come back to that next time. Going to 2.2.5A, the recommendation notes that this provision provides that all agents of those who control a licensee complete an enforcement seminar every three years which seems to encompass investors with no operational involvement business. The recommendation of the commentator is to limit the scope of this to those controlled persons of significant operational roles within the licensee, including any members of the licensee's board of directors or similar governing body. And just to note, this is in part a statutory requirement that the commentator is correct that agents of those who control I don't believe the statutory language, let me just hold that up. So in other words, you do have the flexibility to do what is being recommended here. The statute says a licensee shall complete and because a licensee could be so many different, what is the licensee? What are we talking about? Let me say licensee, it has to be a real human being in order to make this a real requirement. And that was the attempt to do that. But I think the commentator is correct in terms of broad statement that could be narrowed to make it more effective. So we like that recommendation. All right, I think it makes sense. And then another commentator noted that subsection A says training requirements are every three years, but D says training requirements annual and then the commentator says everything should be annual. Again, subsection A was following to some degree on entirely as we discovered, but was following statute section 865A, which does require a three year enforcement seminar, or I should say an enforcement seminar every three years. Obviously, you know, the board could go above that if you wanted, that would be still within the statute to do so, but it's up to you if you want to do that. You don't have to do that. I really feel like every three years, that's probably enough. Yeah, I mean, this isn't, this is just the enforcement section. But I mean, the problem of course is that rules are going to change every year. So, but you know what, I'm fine with it. It was every three years. Why are we second guessing the wisdom of the word? Moving to 2.2.5, Employment and Training. Commenter says several of the training topics seem irrelevant to employees of licensees other than retailers, as well as non-customer facing employees of retail licensees. So the commenter recommends a few things there. And they are one, limit subdivision two. We're talking about section B of 2.2.5 here. Limit subdivision two, to customer facing employees of retailer. Oh, sorry, not just two, my apologies. Two, seven, eight, and eight, to customer facing employees of retailers. Allow a waiver of four for any licensee which does not intend to allow customers or visitors to access the license premises. Limit six to employees of retailers. And limit 10 to employees with management responsibilities. You can take those one at a time or wherever you want to. Okay, with the first recommendation. Okay, with the second. I was on okay with the third. And I don't know about the last one. So the third, I guess I don't know enough about how like a cultivator or a manufacturer will do business and whether or not they'll be cash. Or a wholesaler. Or a wholesaler. It's gonna be managing a lot of product and money. We don't know how much of a cash business this is gonna be through every part of the supply chain. So that's my only hesitation there. And then the last one, I mean, I really don't think it's that overly burdensome to do diversity equity inclusion training. Yeah, I'm cool with the first two. First two being retail specific. The last two being everybody specific. We are feeling at least somewhat that we will be providing those trainings to some extent as in like a video that people can watch. Sure. Yeah. Can I sign it up for it? No, I just, the reason I ask is, again, I think on a lot of this stuff, if we don't provide it in some ways, it's an additional burden on the employees. Again, the establishment is not gonna be paying for it because these people are not tied to an establishment or they won't be, hopefully. So, having them sign up for 12 different trainings. No, I think you could do it in one afternoon. Okay. One day, or whatever. Yep. Okay. All right, we got 10 minutes left, David. All right, let's see what we can do. 2.2.6, tracking of cannabis and cannabis products. The first comment asks, is there a difference between C2Cell tracking and inventory tracking? The answer is in the defined terms of this statute, the inventory tracking system is, or I should say inventory tracking system is a defined term. And it is. Is it? I don't know if it was. There it is. Inventory tracking system means a method implemented by the board for tracing all cannabis and cannabis products grown, manufactured, and sold in Vermont. So, we'll say that speaking broadly, yes, it's the same thing, but it's defined in a way that could accommodate a variety of different sort of specific programs that the board may contract with, which as I think folks know is undecided at the moment. So, I don't know if you wanna do anything with that, but that's just a sort of explanation for the question. Is there a difference between that and C2Cell? Should we just call it inventory tracking throughout? I believe, is C2Cell in there? We did just eliminate it as one of the business records. C2Cell tracking. Yeah, you're right. So, that is a drafting error, and thank you for catching. It should be that everything is noted as inventory tracking instead of C2Cell. I'll do a search to make sure that we do get rid of all the differences. It should all be inventory tracking system, but yeah, speaking broadly, without getting too technical, it's the same thing. What does it mean to have, another commenter asks, what does it mean to have the inventory tracking system readily available to the public? This is a reference to the end of subsection A, and it says the inventory tracking system policy shall be readily available to the public. What that means is that there will be further details spelled out about exactly what's being tracked, where it's being tracked and so forth, that's gonna be in policy. We're saying in rule, you have to have it, and the policy will have more detail. So, the policy will be readily available to the public who already knows what we're doing with that. So, it's not saying that the exact information is readily available. It's just that the information about the system itself will be readily available. And it's the board's policy. It's not the establishment policy. Yeah, and yeah, to be clear, certainly the inventory tracking data will be something that will be confidential under those statutory requirements. In some section F, should cannabis, the commenter says, should cannabis establishments be responsible for training employees to ensure the accuracy of the information entered into the tracking system? The commenter says, I'm not sure that individuals should be held accountable. It sounds like a personnel issue rather than a regulatory issue. And that's a reference to the fact that that provision says, cannabis establishments and the individuals using the inventory tracking system are responsible for the accuracy of all information entered into it. Any misstatements or omissions may be considered a license violation affecting public safety. I mean, I can see the ambiguity there. And I think we are generally enforcing against establishments, but we could make that clearer. Doesn't this also kind of say that if you're an individual that's actively misusing it, your employee ID card might be suspended or revoked also? Yeah, I think that's fair, yeah. I remember us having a conversation where there's other jurisdictions, I think where only the owner operator could enter the switch mat, that person had to be in this establishment every single day in practice, right? So I think we allowed some employees to take on this responsibility as part of their job. But yeah, I mean, your employee ID card, if you're intentionally misrepresenting sales and diverting, like I still think it is a regulatory issue, not just a personnel issue, because we don't know where that product's going. Does that statement capture it though? Any misstatements or omissions may be considered a license violation affecting public safety. Does that capture the employee ID card issue? I think so, let me check the rule 1.16, okay, to make sure that we've captured that as we need to in terms of why a license could be, I think in rule four, it's probably covered anyway, but I think both places. I'll just check to make sure we have something there. And then the next comment is really about the drafting issue, which I don't feel strongly about it. Saying that C and G kind of are similar could either be combined or could go one right after the other. I'm finding it a way. I can see the point. I mean, I guess they are similar. They could be put in the same spot. To he-check, but yeah, I'm not super worried about this. I say just move them to like sequentially. Okay. So don't move them closer to one another. I hope people will read and understand it, I guess. Sure. Oh, wait, I've got a couple more on this too. On 2.2.6C, the commenter asked, do cultivators need to track all plants with seed to sale, even those that never make it to market? Can plants that die be tracked another way, or will they be tracked in the seed to sale system? And this is kind of an operational question, I think, as much as it is a legal or a rule question, but my understanding had been that everything is tracked, if something doesn't make it, that is noted in the tracking. I think we actually talked about this last time, didn't we? We talked about disposal. But no, I think there will be an opportunity to, depending on the system that we use, enter in some way a plant that hasn't made it to market. Hopefully, it's accounted for. I'll just try to do, I think we can do one more, maybe two more. 2.2.6E, somebody notes that asks, what will the audit add to the seed to sale tracking that is already required? If an audit is needed, what does comprehensive annual audit mean? So this is language that came directly out of Massachusetts, possibly New Jersey as well. So I'll just take a second look and see if that's defined anywhere. And then maybe I can talk to Jen Blanigan about what they do with these annual audits. And we did waive this, right, for tier one cultivators. I don't have that document in front of me at the moment. I don't think so. Maybe we did. It was on my list to waive, but maybe we decided not to. I don't have it, but I'll talk to Jen before Thursday. Ask her about this, the burdens of this. What a compromise, it's different, doesn't seem to seem to track that. I think we can sneak in one more here real quick. This is sort of talking about both 2.2.6 and 2.2.7 and like the commercial realities of how products are gonna go back and forth. And it's more of a, as much of a question, is anything I think. As a processor of products for other Vermont companies, I'd like to see peer rules on tracking and transferring of distillate. Some of these Vermont brands use their oil in our products and they return to the company for distribution. I know they want this to happen in the rec market as well. I'd like to see more clarification on this process and understanding from the board members about the chain of, and I think I might mean custody, and custody of oil slash distillate and transferring the finished product that is intended to be packaged and distributed by them. Will we need to package in the processing facility? Does it matter if there are documentation and manifests if we could clarify this? And I think the speaking from my understanding of what we've constructed here, but you should weigh in after that. All the product is gonna have to be tracked going back and forth, but it doesn't prevent this exact type of commercial activity from happening. You certainly can go back and forth in terms of handling the same stuff. If that makes sense commercially for what you're doing, but yes, it does have to be tracked and documented. That's my understanding, but fill me in if I'm missing something here. No, I mean, my understanding is, it's not gonna be a linear supply chain. Things are gonna be moving forwards and backwards and downwards, you know? So she'll Silverstein style, but, you know, yeah, I mean. Yeah. That's real dull actually. I tried. Yeah, I think that's right. Okay, I think our rules are pretty clear about chain and custody, right, transportation manifests, et cetera. This is essentially could be white labeling, right? Right. Which is a question that's in here later. And again, I think once people, you know, we don't know what tracking system we're gonna go with, but I think once people have that more of a tangible product that they can kind of see and interact with, those questions will be answered in due time, you know? I think it makes sense to stop there because the next, we're almost at four and the next one is really all about the next set of comments is all about transportation. So it makes sense just do that as a chunk when we get back together. That sounds great. Well, thank you, David and Brim. Longa is a whirlwind. All right, well, the only thing left on our schedule today is public comment. So thank you to the folks that stuck with us. We'll start with the people that joined via the link. If you have a comment, please raise your virtual hands and we'll start with David Silliman. I just want to say you guys are beasts. It's quite a slog today and I really appreciate it. That's all, thanks. Well, thanks for the comments, David. It's been helpful to kind of have you look through these with your, you know, details. All right, next is Dan. Thank you guys again. I know it's been a long day, so I'll be quick. I just wanted to go through some notes and from the conversation today, I think it's a great idea to allow hoop houses with minimal supplemental lighting to be considered outdoor. The suggestion to make it more official that it is outdoor is to make that lighting be seasonal only to prolong vegetative space in between crops if people are doing light deprivation. And you may want to include that the lights need to be either LEDs or compact fluorescence. And the six watts per square foot is ideal. In California, there's currently people pushing for that to be considered outdoor instead of mixed light. So thank you guys for that. Next, I would like to say as far as the plant count versus the canopy square footage, in regards to R&D, I just wanted to make a point that a lot of people doing research and development exploring through genetics may need to grow out larger plant populations and have larger plant density but with much smaller plants. And so that's just another example and a reason why I think that it makes sense to measure all cultivation based off of canopy square footage rather than plant count. I also want to say that your decision regarding getting rid of the nursery licensing and allowing cultivation to just have something in there that says cultivators can sell plants and seeds to other licensed cultivators and retails. I would like to say thank you. I think that is a great idea. It's gonna make a lot of people's lives easier and very thankful that you guys made that decision. And my very last comment is about the property span numbers. It's kind of a question. What happens if someone has two adjacent parcels or they bought one large parcel but it consists of multiple span numbers even though they're all considered one property or one mortgage? Would people be able to have a cultivation site on one garden or the other? Or what about adjacent properties under the same ownership with maybe one neighbor in between or something like that but with cultivation for the same license? Great, we will take that into consideration. And again, that was a request from the department to ask. Thank you. Yep, Amelia. Happy Monday, guys. You guys really are troopers. I get to do this from my couch and my pajamas and y'all have to dress up and go out in public to do this. So I definitely applaud you. To kind of bounce off what Dan said, I understand and appreciate the reasoning behind getting rid of the nursery license. I get it, but I would caution that by putting the burden of growing clones for sale or for breeding under the same license as cultivation, what's gonna end up happening is people who want to breed genetics for their cultivation license are going to have to sacrifice a piece of their canopy to do it or it's gonna force them to go into a higher tier than they initially wanted to as opposed to getting a nursery license on top of their cultivation license. And the only way I see that being a big threat is if somebody has a tier one cultivation license and they have to dedicate a portion of their canopy to breeding or growing clones for supplemental income in between harvest, it could push them up into tier two and they would lose a lot of their tier one exemptions. So that's just something to think about. I appreciate you guys. Have a good day. Thanks, Amelia. Carolyn P. Hi, thanks for taking my comments. Thanks for all your work as well. I just wanted to comment about the span number as well. I personally have a property that is divided by rivers and roads and it's all one property but three different span numbers. I'm not necessarily sure that I would grow on any, on all three different parcels even though they're one parcel. But just letting you know it could inhibit somebody. Thank you. Have a good day. Thank you. Anyone else who joined by the link, feel free to just raise your hand. Otherwise we have one person who joined by phone. I'll give that person who joined by phone just a quick opportunity. Tito, I did see your hand go up but just if the person who joined by phone wants to make a comment, go ahead. Okay, I saw you on mute but maybe that was just a coincidence. Tito? Hey everybody. So I just wanted to share the public service announcement through my journey of converting a building to my new grow to my two tiered cultivation enterprise that the commercial building energy standards turns out it actually only applies to new construction even if it's in an old building. So in other words, if you're opening up some walls or anything you're opening up then you would have to meet those 2020 building standards. But it turns out if you're not opening anything up that you don't. So that is a really big deal that I've been talking about for a while so I just wanted to say how that turns out it's not so bad. Thank you. That's good to hear. Great. So anyone else who'd like to make a public comment please raise your hand. I'll just give it a few seconds here. I don't see anyone. All right. Well, that's all that we have on our agenda. So again, we're gonna try I think our best to get through these the rest of these comments on Thursday. If it's anything like today we might need a little extra time. So maybe Friday but again, just before we leave we have our public comment meeting tomorrow, six to seven.