With several Juneau marijuana businesses at various stages of the permitting process, the local marijuana retail industry could get underway fairly soon.
“We’re at a point where we’re getting very, very close to seeing marijuana on retail shelves in the capital city,” Juneau Assemblyman Jesse Kiehl said during Thursday’s Juneau Chamber of Commerce luncheon.
Kiehl, who chairs the city’s marijuana committee, spoke to a crowd of about 25 people on what it takes to open a marijuana business in Juneau.
In order to start a marijuana cultivation, product manufacturing, testing or a retail outfit, you need a City and Borough of Juneau conditional use permit, a state license from the state marijuana control board, a CBJ license, and state- and city-required signage.
[Historic moment: State awards first commercial marijuana licenses]
Getting a CBJ conditional user permit for a marijuana business requires a site plan, security plan, waste disposal plan, screening plan, ventilation and air filtration, growing and processing methods, materials and mold control. Most of these things are required for a state license as well. These conditional user permits will be reviewed every five years.
Kiehl said the process of getting a conditional use permit and a state license should be able to run in parallel.
“The ideal is that a business can go to the state with their license application, come to CBJ with their conditional use permit application and, to the maximum extent possible, those things are going to look alike and those processes are going to run at the same time so that you can shorten up and streamline the permitting,” he said.
Once you have both those things, you need a city license, which Kiehl said is meant to serve as an effective enforcement tool not in place for other local businesses, like the alcohol industry.
“When it comes to the nascent retail marijuana industry, the majority view was that we didn’t want to go to the state and say, ‘Mother may I? Would you please?’ but that we needed a card that the city could pull,” Kiehl said. “There are obviously steps before just revoking it. There’s something between, ‘Do what you will,’ and the death penalty for your business, but that’s the tool we have on the local level to do that kind of enforcement.”
The Juneau business furthest along in the licensing process is Rainforest Farms run by brothers James and Giono Barrett. Rainforest Farms already has CBJ conditional use permits for cultivation and retail, and a state license for cultivation.
[Without much ado, city OKs first retail pot shop permit]
According to the state marijuana control board website, there are nine other state license applications either initiated or complete as of July 6 — two for testing, three for product manufacture and four for cultivation. Some business have more than one application in.
On the city level, Kiehl said the city has approved three conditional use permits for cultivation, with three more pending; one conditional use permit for product manufacture, with one pending; one conditional user permit for retail, with six more in some stage of the process.
“There’s reason to be optimistic that if we have seven or more retailers out there, the legal market hopefully will do what I think initiative sponsors wanted it to do in terms of replacing the vast majority of black market marijuana sales,” Kiehl said.
The city hasn’t approved any conditional use permits for a testing facility, but Kiehl said there are three parties who have either begun the process or talked to the city about it.
“I’ll be surprised if we can support three testing labs here in Juneau, but we can’t support the industry if we don’t have at least one running. You cannot bring marijuana products to retail in the state of Alaska if they have not been laboratory tested. You have to label how much of the active ingredient THC is in them. They have to be tested for mold, fungus, pesticides,” he said.
The city has built into the Fiscal Year 17 budget a little under $150,000 of sales tax revenue from marijuana and marijuana product sales, which Kiehl said could be a low estimate.
He added there are still issues at the state and local level surrounding the legal marijuana industry that need to be dealt with, like onsite consumption, marijuana tourism and further taxation.
[State of Alaska Marijuana Control Board’s Map of marijuana license applications]
The city is considering taxing marijuana sales at 8 percent, 3 percent above the base 5 percent sales tax rate. This is how the city taxes alcohol, but it would take voter approval.
During its next regular meeting on Monday, the Juneau Assembly is scheduled to take up a pending ordinance that would put that question on the ballot. It’s the ordinance’s second reading and the Assembly will take public comment.
• Contact reporter Lisa Phu at 523-2246 or lisa.phu@juneauempire.com.
