 Okay, my name is James Pepper. I'm the chair of the Vermont Cannabis Control Board. Today is November 19th, 2021, and it's 11 a.m. So I will kick this meeting off. I have a few administrative issues to cover before we get started, but before I do that, just need to make a quick adjustment to our agenda for today. We need to add a discussion about co-location and review some proposed language from David around this. And so I suggest that we do that following our discussion of the 903 criteria, but before we turn to buffer zones. So, you should do a motion for that. Okay, so I move that we adjust the agenda to include a discussion of co-location. All in favor? Aye. So a few administrative details. The board, Brent and I and our consultants addressed the Ways and Means Committee earlier. We presented our market analysis and fee structure as well as our social equity criteria all contained in our October 15th report. There was, it was a very kind of overview style meeting. No decisions were made. However, there were some interesting discussions around the fee structure, local fees and social equity. So I would encourage everyone to check out the video of that. It's available on the Ways and Means YouTube channel. Last night, we held the first of two social equity town hall meetings in Manuski. There is good attendance. We heard our consultants led the conversation. They're gonna be trying to condense what they heard into a report back to the board. So the next one is tomorrow. It's at the Waterbury State Office Complex at 11 a.m. So we encourage folks to attend those. Again, the point of these really is the board has made some initial recommendations around who should qualify as a social equity applicant, what those benefits should be for a social equity licensee and then also how we can embed social equity into the kind of foundation, the DNA of the entire cannabis industry. However, we really wanna hear from people of the public and people that have been impacted by the war on drugs is how we can do that more effectively. And so our consultants are leading those conversations in these town hall meetings, but they're really trying to rely on the attendees and members of the public to help them understand how we can do this specific to Vermont. Just a note that however we land on social equity, this is an area that we're gonna continue to revisit and we're gonna continue to expand upon as at every angle, at every turn, every time we make decisions. Later today, I think at one o'clock, we're gonna have a meeting of our full advisory committee two o'clock and David and Bryn are gonna run through the proposed rules, try and get some input and discussion going on those with our advisory committee members. And then the plan is for the board to meet next Tuesday and to hopefully vote on those rules so that we can then submit them, pre-file them with ICAR. So that will kind of start the rulemaking process. And if everything goes our way, which it often does not, then we will be on track for the kind of original set of timelines that are in Act 164 and Act 62. So has everyone here had a chance to review our minutes from November 12th? Yeah. And I take a motion to approve those minutes. Seconded. All in favor? All right. Okay. So why don't we turn to the agenda? I think we're starting with Kyle with some slides and recommendations around lab standards, operating procedures, and there are testing requirements. Can you reach? Yes. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Okay. So I wanna start by briefly mentioning laboratories, laboratory SOPs. These will really be, well, first of all, these will not be in our rulemaking process. These will be procedures set out through Title II that the board will kind of keep and offer the kind of foundational element on how private labs, third-party labs set their standard operating procedures. And just so folks understand what these protocols will look like, what these protocols will look like, Oregon's protocols, and mixed in with how our hemp program typically looks at SOPs, Oregon, the way that they do things they have labs do the sampling. And I think in this state, from the hemp perspective, we're used to a different system where inspectors might be sampling a producer's product and bringing it to the state lab or having folks do a quality check with private labs and bringing that sample and dropping off. And I don't think one, we've got the lab capacity to have labs sending inspectors into the field. And that's just not what we're used to. So we're gonna be making some adjustments. These will include things on how to take a representative sample, how to preserve your chain of custody to make sure that things don't get mixed and matched, so on and so forth. It'll have, these are just an example, this list is not exhaustive on procedures that will be included. We're fortunate enough to have Kim Watson on our subcommittee who helped write the Oregon SOPs and they're fantastic. So if folks do wanna preview, you can go look at protocols for Oregon and look at protocols for our hemp program and we're working to find a way to align those two. But again, they will not be making their way into the laboratory section of our role. This will occur through procedure and be kept with the board. This will, it's suggested by the subcommittee to this do and myself that with this do make it into role and this is kind of the testing requirements. And there's a lot on this page and there's a chart here with some notes that helps explain certain things. And there are some accommodations that the subcommittee suggests that we make to help folks understanding that certain components of the 66 buckets can be cost-prohibitive in certain situations. And have Carrie Jigare here from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture to help me walk through some things if there are questions that I don't feel comfortable answering. But one thing that I think is a good suggestion because we do hear sometimes how pesticide testing can be one of the most cost-prohibitive components of lab testing. If a producer is certified by a third party to be pesticide free, we would have the potential ability to waive the pesticide lab testing requirement and make those types of small accommodations. But this really from the harvest lab perspective, plant material perspective, concentrate perspective and infused product perspective across all six of these buckets kind of gives an understanding about how and what needs to be tested or what special accommodations could potentially be made in lieu of testing. Can you say that again about the pesticide? So if they're certified to be pesticide free, they've already gone through a process, right? Right. So if there's assuming no need for an additional. Correct. And we would still have that kind of inspection authority to where if there are issues, we could come in and of course correct there. Anything to add Carrie? All right, I'm feeling good. There's other, you know, some situations here. For instance, if we look at no five testing for heavy metals is required whenever the cannabis crop land was used for orchard crops or any land use other than farming as defined in the RAPs unless a recent soil test demonstrates that heavy metals are within the authorized action limits for soils. You know, note seven, testing for other contaminants is necessary when the agency of natural resources has approved biosolid applications to crop land. So there's some special unique depending on if you're the land you're growing on from an outdoor perspective was previously agricultural land or zone, something else you might need to do certain things depending on where you're growing. And those, that's unique to specific grow sites. So it'll be important that folks familiarize themselves with this and labs understand where the product may be coming from. So we kind of understand how accommodations can be made for certain folks. So from a parameter perspective, what I think is most important for us to include into rules is parameters. Action limits should stay with the board and under title two. And this will be a theme throughout the rest of this slide deck. Action limits should be set through procedure and stay with the board. There's a number of different reasons why we do so. I think as we move along to some of these other buckets, it'll be a more prevalent than this one necessarily. But total THC, obviously we need to understand potency. Some states ask for total THC or THCA, CBV, all the other kind of cannabinoids that you would expect to see on a COA. I think what we should focus on is potency as a requirement. I think producers or manufacturers and labs can work together to provide all of that additional information if a producer wants it or a retailer wants it to better market their products. Cause some folks want to understand exactly the cannabinoidal content within their product. Other folks might not necessarily do so. And I view that as more of a business decision than something that we need to require. And I think- What action limits mean? Action limits. So action limits are the, so for in this instance, the action limit would be 30% flower potency. So it can't be over 30% per statute and 60% per concentrate. I mean, an example that's based on some of the recent recommendations we're making to the legislature of why this action limit shouldn't be necessarily in rule is cause we're suggesting that some of the 60% concentrate limit go away. So if that's in rule and in statute and we're trying to remove it from the statutory perspective, it's easier for us to procedure to do that in house versus also have to unwind it through a rule. Thank you. This is more of a compliance question, but is there any wiggle room on the 30% like in the hemp world, I think if you're like, if someone's 30% 0.1%, 30.1% THC. I mean, are we requiring, well, I don't have to ask you, but I'm just saying is there, is there a wiggle room in the hemp world? And he carries the right person to ask if something is close, but maybe a little bit over a little bit under. There's a lot of, a lot of wiggle room. There's a statute for only to find that measure of uncertainty. Yeah. And for any hard line limit, there's an error and ineligible error that's built into that 30%. And 10% is not on the question. Really? Okay. So for all the other cannabinoids, that could be guaranteed on a car from the hemp world. Okay. Less or not? Okay. And so that's within 10%. Right. Okay. All right. That's what I thought that was there for. So moisture I think is the one exception to the proposal that only parameters live in rule and action limits live through procedure because this will kind of stay the same. That 13% is pretty, pretty across the board for how we view on a dry weight basis versus on a wet basis. So I think that that's not necessarily, you know, a public health concern, plus the wetter it is, the more opportunity for bacterial growth and other holds and so on and so forth to happen. So if the water content, so that equates to shelf stability. Yes. And so is there like a set time where something can stay on a shelf at 13% of its flower? I'll defer to Kerry, but I think it depends on a variety of factors, how it's stored, what humidity level it's at, what temperature it's at, what product it's in, is it air sealed? But I think it can be stored and preserved that CBD or THC content for up to a year under the right conditions, but not necessarily. Yeah. Okay. The product is stable as that. Okay. Your level of cold water. Yeah. And after that, consumer product. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So on the label, when it was cultivated or when it was packaged. So we'll make that determination on our own. So microbiological parameters and limits. Again, parameters here, these six parameters, bacteria and fungi, fungi will live in our role. The action limits are non-detected. And we've got it, we'll make procedures through method, through understanding methodology on how labs would seek to achieve this non-detected level. And a lot of this came from a microbiologist that we have heard a lot from as suggestions for the subcommittee to include. I found that, and I think the subcommittee members would agree that there's six buckets here all under this umbrella, but, and we've understood this by talking with the Vale Lab and stuff like that. People are very specific to their area of expertise. So we've really tried to utilize that and understand that and utilize some experts. But again, all of this will still be put out for public comment. The metal parameters and limits. Again, these parameters, what would be tested for will live in our role. The action limits again, and this gets back to certain cultivation sites and what would be necessary to test. And this kind of gets back to public health and how costly some things can be to test for. And that's why action limits, I think, should live through procedure because we've got a balance what's a healthy level to be at versus, okay, this is really prescriptive. It's hard for any producer to meet a certain level. Where can we make accommodations? And that'll allow us to kind of slide the scale a little bit if we feel like we need to because none of the product is making it out consistently from lab testing. Pesticide parameters and limits. This is coming straight from the agency of agriculture and their hemp program. Carry any comments? I think what we'll do is we'll likely put in some language either through procedure or into our rules on we should meet with the agency of agriculture, at least on an annual basis to understand which pesticide products are being registered, what's being used, what's being sold so we can understand in theory what products are being used for this specific market and how we can look to make sure that we know what's being utilized. And there's other measures we've talked about through cultivation plans and reporting requirements to understand what actually will be used. So residual solvent parameters and limits. This is the one exception where I think the parameters and the action limits need to live both through procedure with the board. I think in talking with a lot of folks, these parameters, kind of if I'm thinking back to our Delta A, Delta 9, Delta 10, chasing our own tail, if we try and prescribe certain, of those kind of limits or parameters here, there's always new methodologies popping up. We'd be chasing our own tail and constantly having to update this list. So this is the list and the action limits that should reside with the board and we can kind of add or subtract or change action limits as appropriate moving forward. And I think what we can do through our rulemaking process is set which solvent or how solvents are treated from the tier one tier two manufacturing perspective, what methods are you aware from a danger to public health, but also from a public safety perspective. And then just keep this with us so we can kind of update because I expect this to kind of be the one area where folks get creative and find new ways to, you know, to manufacture. Kerry, any suggestions there? Not most of the questions. No, Sherman, I do see your hand. I think what we'll do just because you were involved in the production of these slides, I think we'll give you a chance and not as part of a public comment. Okay, so Sherman, do you want to kind of, because you were involved in making these slides, you maybe make a comment. Oh, no, I just wanted to just mention that this list of analytes, these are pesticides, not solvents. Okay, yeah. My bad. Thank you, Sherman. That's my fault. If we go, if you give me a second to kind of update while you do your slides, I'll pull it back up. Okay. Thanks for catching that Sherman. Thank you. I'm copying and pasting too much. Sorry, I'm not getting to your point. Okay. I apologize to everybody on the call too. While you're keeping quiet, the reason for keeping those in rule is California is sort of the EPA registered pesticides for use on cannabis, high-pagetic cannabis in general. But in California, they can do it on themselves and do the inlation process studies. So those numbers will change as those California studies come out. You don't have to go through a rule making in order to change the action levels. You can just change your procedure. Yeah. As those, as I said, that would help. Okay. All right, so this portion of the agenda is again related to the seven VSA 903. This is not a new conversation for the board, but it is one that opens up a certain can of worms. So I think the more discussion we can have, the better. So this is just a reminder of what seven VSA 903 asks the board to consider. So the board shall issue licenses pursuant to this chapter as determined according to a system of priorities adopted by rule by the board. And the priority shall require consideration of criteria and then it lists six criteria. So the way that I see it is that we're already giving priority to existing medical cannabis dispensary license holders in good standing. So I kind of eliminate that for the purpose of this conversation. We're also giving priority to criteria number two, whether applicants would foster social justice and equity by being a minority or women owned business. So we already have our social equity program which covers minorities and we have our DEI program that covers women owned businesses and other minorities that might not be captured under our social equity. So for the purposes of this conversation, I think those two buckets are already being given priority. So I would just hold up comment on those. We've decided that number six is going to be an inherent authority of the board that we need to continuously look at the needs of the market. And we decided that that's one way that we can kind of shift people in the queue. If we've licensed 60 small cultivators and no retail operations, we might need to shift focus or no testing facilities. We need to be able to look at the entire supply chain and make sure we have a well functioning industry. So I think we have an inherent authority to do six. So I'm not gonna talk about number six either. So that really leaves three, four and five. And we have minimum application requirements already on some of these issues. So the way that I kind of see this working is we create some standards over and above what we've created already. And we hold our larger companies that are applying either for certain license types. And kind of like we did with outdoor security, we have kind of a list of things that they can do, those license applicants, where they can kind of go over and above our minimum standards. And that their application will be deemed incomplete if they don't do some of those additional steps. And what an application deemed incomplete will mean is that their place is held in the queue, but we send an RFI or a question more information to those applicants which says, we find that you have not satisfied the minimum criteria under these, for these reasons. And we ask that you respond to this with how you're going to actually achieve some of these criteria will hold your place in line, but we're going to continue to review other applications. So it kind of, it is a priority system. And I think it achieves the purpose of 903. So I'm looking first at the criteria around whether the applicant proposes specific plans to recruit higher and implement and development ladders for minorities, women or individuals who have been historically disproportionately impacted by cannabis prohibition. So I haven't quite decided at what level you need to choose one or more of these or we're going to require one or more of these. But I thought these would be some things that we could further define in policy, but essentially would be the types of things that I think would create development ladders for minorities, women or individuals who've been historically disproportionately impacted. So inclusive hiring and contracting practices. This is how we make the kind of entire industry beyond just applicants, social equity applicants, you know, equitable. So, you know, there's lots of research out there. There's lots of suggestions on how kind of your HR processes can be more inclusive and your contracting processes can be more inclusive. You know, we don't have to get too specific, I think in rule, but we could just, and we could have a kind of supplemental document about ways to achieve this. Paying a livable wage. If you remember, this is actually criteria four. So I just included it here because if you're having an inclusive hiring process and you're paying a livable wage, I think you achieve kind of the goal of this criteria. We could include, you know, paid leave, other sorts of kind of employee benefit programs into this as well. So it doesn't just have to be livable wage. Having an incubator or an accelerator program that provides assistance to social equity or our DEI businesses. And, you know, this, I gave some examples of what this could look like. But, you know, I would really, you know, we could, again, have some more clarification in a policy document or guidance, but some ideas would be, you know, we know that access to land, access to capital is the biggest barrier to small businesses from for entering this. So, you know, you could have, you know, a bigger licensee, you know, large cultivator that is providing grants or access to capital to social equity or DEI businesses or offering space. And this ties into our co-location. This is kind of what, you know, jogged my memory about we needed to talk about co-location. So you could have kind of a cultivator, large cultivator that sets aside a portion of his or her cultivation space for and rent them out or give them out to social equity applicants. You could have management, training, or other forms of kind of technical assistance that these larger cultivators could provide for social equity, DEI businesses, mentorship programs. This actually wasn't supposed to be part of the incubator, but it could, I mean, it just kind of falls into it. But just what Massachusetts has is they require their larger licensees to do their own community reinvestment. So kind of bypass the like legislative aspect of this, but just have their larger folks need to invest in, you know, communities that have been disproportionately impacted, nonprofits that kind of help, you know, disproportionately impacted folks or we could just have kind of a minimum contribution to the community development fund. I know we talked about ongoing commitments from our integrated license holders. I think it should really apply to any of the larger players. And that's the community development fund as we all know is the kind of revolving loan fund that's designed to help provide financial support to social equity applicants. And then, you know, I don't know whether this should come just like the certified B Corp to me is an interesting idea. I think that that covers a lot of both the environmental and social aspects, you know. So I'm trying to determine in my mind whether that's sufficient in and of itself to kind of cover some of these other things. Because you have to reach a minimum score on that kind of B Corp assessment, your impact assessment. And it includes all of these other things, you know, your inclusive hiring practices, what benefits you offer your employees. And so, and your environmental impact. Yeah, the B Corp really looks at your triple bottom line. Right. And there's other Vermont companies that we all know like Cabot and Ben and Jerry's that are B Corp. Yes, and there's some recruitment research that says that people who are entering the workforce now are looking for B Corps to work for. So it could be that if you're a certified B Corp, you don't have to, you know, if we say, for instance, you know, you're a tier six cultivator, you need to have, you need to do four of these criteria, three of these criteria. It could be that if you certify as a B Corp, that you only have to do that, you know, something along those lines. And that's something that on my procedure train that I've been talking about through the different context, we could set something like that through that as well. So let's have a discussion about this now. I mean, I could go to the next slide, which is more about the environmental and sustainability, but the questions that I haven't worked out in my head yet are do we apply this to all license types? Are we gonna require this, for instance, of testing facilities, product manufacturers? You know, do we apply it to all businesses once they hit a certain revenue? Do we apply it just to cultivation, just to retail? That's a question, open question that I have. And then also, do we waive this entirely for small cultivators? The folks that were really trying to encourage, you know, we could require plans for some of this stuff for small cultivators, but not penalize them if they don't actually achieve those plans. And by penalizing them, it really is that your application is incomplete unless you have plans for some of these things. And then the secondary question, which is related is, do we require one? You get to choose kind of which one you want, do we require multiple, and is that dependent upon the type of license and the size of license? So the reason that, I mean, not the sole reason, but one of the reasons that an organization would do this is to get sort of expedited priority in the process, right? So it makes sense to me that we might, if we don't apply this to small cultivators, that we'd have to, somewhere else, we would have to prioritize them so that they're not, if we're gonna waive this for them, we don't wanna put them behind people who do organizations that do provide all of this. But it makes sense to me not to include the small cultivators because they might be one person or two people or generally, you know, that's what we're taking. So the small cultivators do get to go first by law. So they will have that advantage built in, but I also would say that this doesn't actually move people around in the queue. All it does is, if you're applying for a 25,000 square foot indoor cultivation site and you haven't filled out how you're gonna have an inclusive hiring plan, you haven't filled out what your plan for paying a livable wage, you haven't made any commitments under the incubator program, you haven't certified it as a B Corp. We would pause your application and send it back and say, you haven't satisfied any of these criteria, you have, you know, if you respond to us, keep your place in line and your application will be complete once you've responded. And then you'll keep, you know, we'll review your application, you know, in the chronological order where we received it, noting that we're gonna move on, but I don't really anticipate us moving anyone in the queue based upon, oh, this person has a better, you know, incubator program than this small cultivator. And when you say pause in their place in line, we would still continue to consider that just when they come back with that information. Right. So I really like this because I think it touches on some of the things that the social equity subcommittee talked about, like we've already talked about providing guidance on the hiring and contracting plans. And then what you talked about with cultivation was very much like what they talked about for a cooperative. But their recommendation was that we set it up. We talked about all the reasons that that might be challenging. This would allow that to sort of be set up through the market. Yeah, I'd like to explore how we, again, recognizing that we still need to make some procedural determinations on how we'd utilize these concepts. And I see why we need to talk about the retail qualification because we do apply it to all the licenses that it could be a local general store that provides that space. So moving on to the next slide, this is around whether the product incorporates principles of environmental resiliency or sustainability, including energy efficiency. So I think Kyle, you've done a really excellent job in our last, I think there are the last two meetings in October, setting our kind of minimum standards for how, what we're gonna require on the cultivation side, both from a waste management and from a growing practice and efficiency standards. And I know that just looking at this first bullet, there is no USDA organic certification for cannabis. So, I'm really thinking about just what those, we have kind of minimum agricultural requirements from your slides, Kyle. And I'm thinking, if you wanna go above this, if you wanna get this kind of third party certification, I know we've all heard Clean Green mentioned a few times, I don't know which other ones exist, but I was thinking if you move it ahead of the cannabis world, like the NOFA organic certification, like the CAHPS program, if you go above kind of our bare minimum requirements, using organic principles or regenerative principles, that could be one criteria that you could choose for a lot of your larger tier cultivator, you could choose from this list and that could be one choice. Same with the efficiency and waste standards. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. I think I like where your head's at and where you're going. I wanna be clear to folks listening or viewing this slide that I think you're referring to specific practices as outlined in the national organic program as what you need to do to become certified through USDA to be organic. That doesn't necessarily, even if you're applying those practices or standards to your operation for cannabis here in Vermont, that does not mean that we're de facto certifying your operation organic. And we need to be very clear that folks do not try and label their product as organic. It's just utilizing some of those requirements or parameters that are used to measure your products, the same that they do on the federal level. We can't allow folks to claim their product as organic at this point in time. So I just wanna make sure folks are clear on that. But they're using different classes of pesticides or fun decides they're not doing any of the sort would be found on that list amongst many other growing practices, crop rotation, planning stuff when you're not planning cannabis, so on and so forth. There's a lot of concepts there that I think would be important for us to know and would certainly fit in here. It's just what that word organic means is something found in federal law. I wanna make sure we're not running out of that. Right. And then we are gonna have minimum efficiency requirements and waste standards. I think everything that efficiency Vermont told us is you really wanna incentivize people to go above those to the extent you can. So to the extent that we can encourage that through the application process, I think we should be doing that, including sourcing from renewables. We've heard a lot about just the plastic waste, consumer waste that's involved. And so really, and I guess this would be mostly on the product manufacturing side and maybe from a retail side as well, but really encouraging recyclable, composable, reusable materials, recyclable lights for the cultivation side. Yeah, well, even on the waste perspective, there are a lot of the traditional child-proof containers are patrol and based plastic. There is bioplastic and hemp plastic, which would be bioplastic, but alternatives to controlling based plastic is just at a much higher cost per unit. So if you're making that business decision to move away from the traditional product, that's something that I think would make perfect sense for us to consider and help expedite if you're balancing your own social progress versus your financial burden to do so. That's something that we would want to know. Having just like we, in the last slide, we'd have contributions to the Community Development Fund. On this slide, we could have contributions to anti-pollution or carbon offsets. And then once again, certifies a B Corp. And I'm not sure actually did I think about it if B Corp actually allows cannabis companies to certify, but we could use the same kind of impact assessment. Just it wouldn't be able to call themselves a B Corp. Some of those same impact assessments could be part of our guidance document here. Yeah, I know a lot more about the organic standard than B Corp's, but I'm sure it would be hard for us to find out if they do or willing to do that. But again, we can make that clear to folks. Yeah, so conceptually, I think we're all kind of in agreement. I think the specifics of each of these criteria need to be worked out a little bit more in policy. And I think the specifics around what we require and of whom we require it still need to be worked out. I think we could probably do that before Tuesday though. And we can just have, we can circle back to this on Tuesday. That sound right? Yeah. Anyone wanna add anything to any of these bullet points that come to mind? I know it's kind of... I got more granular when I first proposed some stuff for purposes of this slide way back, even which were cool in concept and theory, maybe not appropriate for the priority perspective, but I think a lot of this can spill over to other programs we hope to stand up within our jurisdiction that helps let folks who want to go above and beyond the call of environmental duty to kind of rise above and get some type of, I keep saying gold star or some equivalent from us. Doesn't carry the same weight as an organic label, but it might need something if it's crafted the right way. And I ran these by Andrew Livingston at BS and he didn't have any major concerns. He did really want these to be somewhat objective and somewhat kind of achievable. The last thing we wanna do is kind of be suspending or revoking people's licenses in a year because they're trying to compare what they wrote in their application to what they did in practice, but he thinks all of these are kind of objective and achievable enough that the enforcement of them would be relatively straightforward. Okay, let me put back up this slide really quick. Yeah, sure. Kerry, is there anything you wanted to add on any of this? I mean, you've lived through this licensing in the hemp world and in the agricultural world. No, I think you guys are on the retract. Yeah. I think you're closer looking at this slide. I still believe so. Those are all solvents. Yeah, apologies, I'm embarrassed. You know, it's funny through the legal education process, a lot of friends and family tell me that legal words and legal terms of art look very similar and I think by mind not being the scientist that I have not overlooked that these are different words than the previous slide. So my apologies to everybody. So yes, these are the residual solvent parameters and limits and again, you know, action limits kind of help determine what's safe for public health and public consumption, but these wouldn't necessarily live in rule. These would live through procedure with us because these are the ones where folks can get creative and you know, constantly find a new way to manufacture and we don't want to continually have to add or subtract from this list. The other ones are a little bit more, not as fluid. If I get up, keep going. I think I've sucked in a hair. Oh. Yeah, okay. And these slides will be up later today for folks or sometimes for folks to review. Great. Do we want to have a conversation about co-location? I think co-location can take many different forms. I mean, we've talked about the limited retail license as a form of co-location where you have a kind of store within a larger general store, a cannabis outlet kind of portion. We've talked about, of course, there's the integrated licenses of the vertically integrated companies that have their cultivation, product manufacturing co-located. There are various license types all in one physical location. There's the kind of idea of co-location where maybe one license owner owns a warehouse and has multiple cultivation stalls that they're renting out to various other licensees. There's the various types of kind of producer co-op models that are kind of, the cultivators are distributed, but there's general ownership or common ownership of certain of the means of production and maybe some space, physical space. So I think for the purposes of this conversation, I think that the co-location that I'm really wanting to discuss is when one license holder owns a location and maybe rents out certain aspects of that facility to other license holders. This is allowed in other states, notably Michigan. Some states do prohibit it and some states have other kind of ways of allowing it but controlling it. There's obviously the main benefit of this really is is that there are a lot of barriers to entry. A lot of farmers out there that maybe have federal mortgages, federally backed mortgages that maybe thought that they were gonna be able to cultivate on their land but maybe won't be able to access the land, access the capital. It's really, this is a way to have a low barrier to entry for folks that couldn't otherwise before to participate. There are some cons to this, some possible problematic areas of kind of predatory relationships of the kind of, oh, this is for lack of a better word, licensee landlord and the kind of lessy license holders. You know, there's a certain amount of dependency on how much rent is being charged. There's kind of the ability to have what I would consider indirect control of the kind of primary landlord over the tenants. There's some potential public health risks depending on kind of air ventilation and people coming and going. There's potential risk of cross contamination. Someone's using an illegal pesticide and one kind of stall and it gets filtered over to another stall and that person very much unintentionally may have contaminated his or her flower. And then, you know, another just consideration we should think about is how big could these co-located places be? You know, should there be caps on that? You know, we want them to be capped at, if we go down this path, do we want them to be capped at kind of our largest license type? Do we want them to be smaller? Do we want them to be bigger? I mean, because, you know, the truth is is, you know, the one tenant, the kind of landlord isn't controlling directly these other people. So maybe there's an argument being made that it could be bigger. That's a question really quick to interrupt you. So are you thinking that like, let's say it's an outdoor grow or outdoor space and, you know, maybe it's, they have two acres of land and would somebody own that land and then each respective license holder claim a thousand square foot plot on that land? Or are you saying that the land owner would seek those licenses themselves and then rent those? The first. The first, okay. Yeah. Because that makes a lot of sense to me. And also a pro here is shared labor, shared use of agricultural equipment and machinery because it's not cheap. So I just wanted to. Right. So those. Do you imagine this as being all the same license type like I was example, those would all be up to the same license type like the other cultivation, but could you have a large space that's like a cultivation, partly manufacturing and different types of licenses? So the kind of potential for this, and I don't want to say predatory, but the kind of potential for greater control over your tenants increases the more you own the means of production. Like if you have a testing facility on location and you get to charge a fee to your tenants to use that, well, then you're charging rent that you can adjust and you're charging fees that you can adjust that you're kind of at your discretion. And so the potential for that kind of control increases, of course, I don't see why we wouldn't, I just don't see why we wouldn't allow it, but I also just recognize these kind of problem that they oughta do. But does that go away? That control go away if it's actually, if they're all in one location but they have a cooperative agreement? Like then wouldn't they discuss those businesses, those individual licenses, wouldn't they discuss how they're gonna handle those things at the end? Yes, yeah. Yeah, I think the pros outweigh the cons in trying to figure out a path forward. And I think we can set up, inability for folks to come and even anonymously let us know if they think that they're being a victim to some of these predatory type practices that will help us understand and induce our own kind of sleuthing to see what's going on. But with respect to recognizing not everybody's fortunate to have access to land and want to be part of this, I think figuring out a path forward is important. As far as the cap goes, there's another, that's a different question. Did we allow it to our largest square footage that's open for business? Are we violating statute if we go above that? I don't think there's nothing really about that statute. You guys can set the tier limits. Well, do you want to bring up what we've been discussing? Yeah, I got it. You can see where we land and we're gonna continue the discussion. I just saw David's bringing it up right away. I think do we want to have further discussion about whether one entity that owns a cultivation license and a product manufacturing license and a retail license should or should not be allowed to co-locate in a single facility? I think they should. Yeah, all right, just to figure out. That's like a business decision. Right. And there's probably local issues that we're not thinking about, but they can work that out with the town. Yeah, just their zoning doesn't allow that. And they would just... It's really small, hang on. So you want to help us kind of understand? Yeah, sure. So basically just trying to balance a bunch of the issues that you were just talking about, allowing people to co-locate but not trying to make sure that people are still behaving as individual licensees with their own individual businesses and not allowing sort of one landlord type of entity to extract a lot of the profit from people who are trying to get into this but don't have the means of paying for some of the startup costs and try to get into these situations but then ultimately a landlord type operator ends up extracting most of the profit from them, trying to avoid that type of situation. So a bit of a balance here. And this tries to meet that balance. And so we have the piece at the beginning just about making sure these larger operations still meet local regulations. And then some of the more specific issues around how it should operate in those places. So cannabis establishments operating at the same location will do all of the following. Have distinct and identifiable spaces, areas or plots of each license operating in its own separate space area or plot. Post notice of the licenses. So the board or board designees can lock in and know what's going on, maintain all the business operations compliance requirements and record keeping that an establishment would maintain if we're operating in its own location and then otherwise comply with the statutes and rules. And then this is the piece about cultivation that you were talking about. C, cultivation cannabis establishments must also comply with the limitations in sections 2.7 and 2.5.7. I know folks on the team's meeting watching this, I don't have those references up here by apologies, but those are basically sections that say that co-located cultivators can only have the whole of a co-located operation can't exceed the largest outdoor cultivation or indoor cultivation tier that the board has opened. So it does put that limit. That's the cap. You guys haven't decided on that, but that's just a placeholder for now, basically saying we're referring to the Southern cap that's been proposed and not decided on yet. And the cap would be that the largest opened tier would be the limit for cultivation plant canopy for co-located cultivators. And then the final piece is sort of a catch-all provision making sure that people aren't using this type of co-location to get around the one license per entity rule that the legislature put in statute, which as folks here obviously remember, entities can vertically integrate. So you can be a wholesaler, cultivator, retailer and so forth if you wanted to do those three things, but you can't start accumulating multiple retailer licenses or multiple wholesaler licenses or manufacturing licenses. And one of the concerns around allowing co-location is that people could effectively horizontally integrate because they're sort of in one location, they're combining business operations and they start really appearing to be an entity that has multiple of the same license types as the legislature did not allow. So the final piece is just a catch-all saying, hey, we put all these other protections in there to try to avoid that. But if it appears that there is an effect of getting around that anyway, the board can step in and regulate as needed. For cultivation, like we went above our largest tier, how would that affect the security rules that we've discussed? Like if there was no limit, you could have a sizable field, right? I still think I would want to view it with respect to each individual plot. It might look interesting if let's say it's a bunch of thousand square foot growers and they all pick different security measures on their plot, it would look like a science project where everybody has their own interpretation or something I guess, but I would like to view it not on aggregate from that perspective, but to respect to each individual plot. I think that's the only way to do it, right? And you can still share, like if there's one security camera and you can put it at a certain distance that captures multiple, there's more pulling resources there for more expensive security measures, so on and so forth. I think what we would have to do, and I'm all for doing this, is put out some guidance, recognizing that not every co-location might have like that cooperative model, like there might be different inputs or agricultural practices used between, I'm worried about drift and stuff like that. Like you mentioned as a con, like what if so and so is using such and such pesticide and it leeches or there's drift from product to product and there's cross-contamination. I think I'm hopeful we can figure out guidance for helping folks not run into the testing issues, but on the flip side of that, if your product is third party certified and pesticide free and you're all pesticide free and you can pull resources to help achieve that accreditation and you're helping everybody save money from a testing perspective eventually. So I think the pros outweigh the cons and I think we can deal with the cons as they arise and provide guidance on how to avoid some of the pitfalls that we're anxious about. We wanna follow the recommendations in subsea there about just limiting these to our tiering structure. Not go above that. I think I'm conscious of potential active 50 implications for outdoor cultivation there and how much more complicated it could get if we're allowing them to grow above our 37.5. That being said, I'd be comfortable moving in this direction now. We'll have public comment periods and people can come and tell us if they think that we're being a little bit too cautious. All right, but again, getting back to being able to pull resources even if you have to get a 250 determination, multiple folks going in doing that is more cost effective from the same land use perspective than each individual land owner or land renter having to make get that determination. Yeah. I think it speaks to the character of how we like to operate at least in the agriculture context and we want to. Yeah. So I don't know if you wanna vote or anything like that, but I'm for. Yeah. Well, if this is in our rules, we would vote next week. We don't know if we need more than one vote. I think that's fine. Yeah. Unless you feel different. I don't, cause you also didn't vote on the lab standards and that's gonna be. Okay. Right. Tuesday of the month. Yeah, there'll be a few different final votes on Tuesday anyway. So I think that makes sense. We could vote just for fun. Yeah. Great. So then the recommendation from us to incorporate the lab standards, 70903 criteria and the co-location into the rules for a final vote on Tuesday. You do have some final decisions to make on the 903. Yeah. Okay. The agenda, let's see. Buffer zone discussion. Yeah. So I didn't create any slides. I could pull up the slides from the 22nd if you desire, but I think we've sort of remember this conversation. Yeah. I'd propose buffer zones of 500 feet, but that a town could reduce that if they wanted to do so through ordinance or bylaw or increase it, but no more than 1,000 feet. So as we've been going through the things that we proposed, I've continued to speak with people and get feedback. And the prevention community, I have ongoing conversations with folks in the prevention community who planned out that there is already statute that says that you can't go less than 500 feet. So the reduction by ordinance and bylaw probably can't be part of our rules. But the other side of that, the increase, the intent of that recommendation was so that towns could not overrule a vote of their townspeople by creating an ordinance or a bylaw that made a buffer zone that was essentially the size of the town, right? But I'm not sure that that was the impact. So I think that we probably need to have discussion that provides us with advice. So we may need to move into effective session if you want to call a motion for that. Right, yeah. That's for a motion if you can. Yeah. You have to ask him when I just say. All right. Well, I would entertain a motion to move into executive session. I move that the cannabis control board go into executive session to consider confidential attorney-client communications made for the purposes of providing professional legal services to the body and that the executive session is required because premature general public knowledge regarding such communications would clearly place the board as substantial disadvantage. It's like I've done that before. Okay, is there a second? I'm sorry, one other thing I forgot. Can you just name if you would like any staff to remain with the board? Yes, the executive director and the general counsel. And okay, and do we have a rough estimate of how long we'll be in executive session for? No more than 10 minutes, maybe five minutes. Five to 10 minutes. Okay, so then we'll pause the, well, is there a second? Second. All in favor? Aye. So before we move, just to be clear, we're going to pause the recording. We're going to ask Orca to turn off the camera and we'll be back in five to 10 minutes. Okay, we're recording. Great, okay. So it's 1220, we are now outside of executive session back in our cannabis board meeting. We had a discussion about buffer zones and I think the decision prior that the board and made was to set a buffer zone from K through 12 schools of 500 feet and let towns have the authority to either decrease that or increase that. We really, in our executive session, discussed that it might be more legally defensible and just a simpler process to follow our current drug-free school zone laws and more predictable and more clarity for potential licensees. So I think that I would entertain a motion to change our prior recommendation on this. So I move to amend the cannabis control board recommendation on buffer zones to reflect 18 VSA 3237. Second. Is that the motion we need? That's a sufficient note to understand what you're saying. Okay, all right, all in favor? Aye. Okay, so that brings us to our public comment period. We have some people in the room, but any public comments from the people in the room? No. Anyone who would like to make a public comment that's joined by the link, please raise your hand and we'll go in the order that you raise your hand. Dave, do you wanna join us, Dave Silverman? Thanks, I guess on the buffer zones, I'll go and do some research on what it is you just approved, but on with respect to co-location. So first, let me make a disclosure that I do represent a client that has an interest in this decision, although my comments today are not on behalf of that client. I think that your inclination to impose the license size cap on co-located growth facilities in the aggregate may have the unintended consequence of making it economically unviable to provide that kind of facility. If we're talking about 10 or 15 or 20,000 square feet, if only 10,000 square foot is available to start or something small to start, that means that if you're doing 1,000 square foot microplots, you're limited to 10 of those or 15 or 20 or whatever the case may be with your ultimate decision there on tiers. And that would, if you allocate 10 such plots and a 10,000 square foot universe would leave no space for that person to also have their own facility. And I, from the folks that I've talked to, that just doesn't fit a business model that makes sense. If the benefit that you see is to have somebody other than the small cultivator take up the large expense of getting a facility, bringing that facility up to state of the art, security, HVAC, et cetera, and all of the racking and lighting and water filtration and so forth, they may need more than just a small number of those tenants to make that investment worthwhile. The point of having preference for small growers was to make it easy for them to get into the market. And I think that the idea of co-locating small growers has been kicking around the advocacy community in the legislature as well since 2015, when the Vermont Cannabis Collaborative started proposing an intervail style grow. And Chair Pepper, you, I know you were around doing cannabis stuff at the time. So you'll recall Bill Lofi's group there with Alan Newman and all those folks. And that was just one of the things that they were talking about all the way back then. And I think that was really something that we intended to have all along. I agree with you that control, including indirect control is a important factor to consider and that we should not allow people to control multiple licenses, but just say that they are landlords when in fact they really control their tenants. But I don't think that the limit on the number of co-located tenants will really help anything if we can properly regulate around that control concern. And I think that I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thanks, Dave. Next is Tito Byrne. Tito? Hi there. So I'd like to just comment on co-location when it's pertaining to retail. I do think it should be okay for a cannabis retail company to share a space with another company as long as that space meets all the security and structural requirements that the cannabis retail would have to meet. That's all today. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Tito. Next is Ben Mervis. Hi, everybody. Happy Friday. Thank you for all this work. I have a few items, so I'll try to keep them quick. With lab limits, I just want to get this one out of the way. Kyle, great job. There are people who are much better prepared to speak to us than I am, but just anecdotally, I want to share from the Massachusetts experience the limits were set in a way that was very restrictive for outdoor and living soil and regenerative soil cultivators. It's something that I follow along peripherally. I can't dive too far into cultivation, but like I said, there's people who definitely do know things about that, so I would make sure that you're speaking with them about those limits. With buffer zones, I don't know if it's been discussed, I'm sorry if it has been, but some clarification about whether or not this applies to all licensed operations or if it is just particular licensed operations. And then most importantly, we're concerned with when the buffer zones will be basically enforced. So if an applicant applies for their provisional license and is granted a provisional, but then a school moves a daycare, sorry daycare isn't included, if a kindergarten, if any school moves closer, is that applicant, is that licensee in danger of losing their location if they've already gotten their provisional license? Regarding co-location, I do think that it's incredibly important something that Craig and I have absolutely been discussing with our business plans. We do think it would be important and we're planning on this ourselves, but maybe a requirement for an SOP that accounts for things like contamination and with the number of people in the building, number of people per square foot, there's a lot of different ways to work that so that you can make sure the quality and that the space remains safe of quality. Also in the subsection B of the general counsel's language, I think it is important to point out that, and this was mentioned, that a lot of co-located businesses, particularly in an incubation setting, might be sharing machinery or any types of surfaces. So the distinct and identifiable spaces are great for things like finished goods or even for raw materials, but for active production and processing space, it's important for these co-located businesses to be able to share that space. So again, an SOP that requires proper cleaning and sanitation between use would maybe be a great way to address that. With the B corporation, that's where I'll leave it, I do just wanna share anecdotally, I've heard there are many, many months, if not years of delays in that certification process right now. I've led the charge of getting businesses B corp certified before, I can tell you, it is mostly marketing. So I think the requirements that are in place that your board is putting in place really set a higher standard from what I've seen from B corps. And so any business that's following these standards are going above the minimum as you're requesting, they should be able to apply for B corp and handle that in their own time, but not have it factor into their application. And that's it, thank you so much. Thanks Ben. Next is Jeffrey Pizzatullo. Thank you. I've got two quick points. Going back to the testing requirements discussion, I'm looking at a slide that Kyle had presented. I first wanna thank Carrie, Kyle and others that had worked on these recommendations. I think in their totality, they are on point and we would agree with much of them except for the total use in mode count. And thank you, Ben, for raising this. You guys had, it looks like it sounds like considered Oregon's rules around testing and sampling and integrated a lot of that. We appreciate that. In speaking with friends out in Oregon and other states, please know that small farms and businesses have been advocating to remove the total use in mode that is in Oregon statute. And they're actually just about to get it successfully removed. So we would hope that we would not adopt that in our state. We do recommend testing cannabis for water activity and specific pathogenic organisms. That's like by species basically rather than general activity, which is what we're at least seem to be suggesting in this slide and maybe I'm reading it wrong. So that would have an impact on our small farms and our small businesses in the state, notably outdoor production, mixed light and even some indoor production. If we were to keep that in statute, that would mean that we would not see the farming practices that are mostly considered higher quality product reaching our marketplace. And that would set us back. And that would also really not satisfy the intent of the enabling statute which is to transition the illicit market actors. So it's critical that we do not adopt total use in mode count for our regulatory when it comes to testing requirements as Oregon and others are about to move past that. So thank you. And really briefly in one of the slides you had testing for THC and concentrates is all concentrates being tested at limited to 60% or is it just solid? You guys might want to specify that one of your slides. And I would just like to take this opportunity very briefly to point out and remind everybody that THC in cannabis, the plant varies per plant. It's not a precisely manufactured product like concentrate. So on a cannabis plant you can get say 30% THC up top and it can be 20% down below on that same exact plant. This is why other states like Oregon are moving towards THC ranges. They're finding that specific numbers are for the actor. Things to consider and thanks for your work. Thanks, Jeffrey. Next is THC analytics. Hello guys, thank you for your time. Just quickly I want to back up what everyone has said so far. I do want to also add that what happens, oh geez, what just happened? Okay, what happens if a school moves in while we're already in business? Not only that, but like others said, oh geez, so I'm trying to deal with this signing now. I apologize, I'll just speak. What happens if school moves in while we're already in business and near to, to our licenses, do we have to worry about that or does a school have to worry about us being that close to them? The other thing that I wanted to touch base on and I escaped my frame of thought because of this again. Oh yes, these limits, the 500 foot limit gonna be for every license like myself we're planning to open up an analytical lab laboratory for THC products and we are worried about that 500 foot limit because it will impact where we sit. But that's all I have. I'm trying to mute myself and but I can't do it. I'm still blank on my end. We can mute you, thank you. Thank you, thank you very much. Next, Erica French. Hello. Hi, we can hear you. Oh good, thank you. This is my first time calling in. I just wanna thank you so much for the way that you're looking out for women and minorities and all of this and for Vermonters. I really appreciate you for that. And I'm calling in. I did hear a little bit earlier in the call that you guys were thinking about having the larger licensees provide some training and support to cultivators or provide jobs. And I wanted to talk about the possibility of supporting the smaller licensees, the women and people of color. I think that inside of now I'm not the best at legalese, but I think that Act 164 Section 903 talks about providing training. And so I think that basic training would help people to pass tests and it would help them avoid the need to circumvent the standards that you guys set if they had just basic cultivation understanding. And some of them may wanna hop into this business and they may not have that. That would also obviously have macroeconomic benefits. And obviously you guys will be setting the standards for cultivation, soil, biology, pH, what types of nutrients are used to feed the plants, harvest, practices. I wanted to offer myself my services if you need any help figuring out how to do that. I don't assume that you do, but if you did, I'd love to help. I'd love to help these women and people of color get up to speed so they can be really successful. And my business is Kind Green Insight. LLC, you can find me at www.kindgreeninsight.com. And once again, thank you for the moment. I just think it would be really great to have a non-inspecting best practices officer who could help Vermonters. Thank you so much. Thank you, Erica. Anyone else? Did anyone join by phone? They did, but they're gone. Okay, all right. Well, before we adjourn, just want to remind folks about the town hall tomorrow. It's at the Waterbury State Office Complex. If you want to attend in person and then if you'd like to attend virtually, the link to join by video is on our website. So really hope that the folks on this call and anyone watching can join us. And with that, I will adjourn this meeting. Thank you. Thank you.