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Curaleaf

    GREEN ECONOMY

    Curaleaf Sues Town to Claw Back $372K in Fees

    The dispensary says new rules on community impact should apply retroactively

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The Massachusetts branch of Curaleaf, the world’s largest cannabis company by revenue, is suing the town over claims that it improperly collected community impact fees from the company’s dispensary on Commercial Street. The company seeks to recover $372,260 paid to Provincetown from 2020 to 2022.

    Curaleaf owns a retail cannabis dispensary at 170 Commercial St. in Provincetown. The company is suing the town to recoup over $372,000 in community impact fees paid from 2020 to 2022. (Photo by Tyler Jager)

    In a complaint filed in Barnstable County Superior Court on Nov. 5, 2024, Curaleaf argued that the town violated its contract with the dispensary by collecting the fees without showing how they were “reasonably related” to the business’s local impacts on the town, such as through increased spending on inspections, law enforcement, or other costs associated with the public health effects of marijuana.

    Provincetown denied those allegations in court filings on Jan. 17, arguing that Curaleaf had breached its contract, called a host community agreement, by failing to submit sales and financial records on an annual basis. Under its original agreement, Curaleaf was supposed to pay fees at the agreed-upon rate regardless of documented impact, the town said.

    Curaleaf disputed Provincetown’s claims in subsequent court filings in February and March.

    The Provincetown suit is one of a string of similar lawsuits across Massachusetts. In January, the town of Haverhill agreed to a settlement giving $612,500 to cannabis dispensary Stem, which had sued in 2021 because Haverhill had not provided a justification for its impact fees.

    A similar lawsuit in Uxbridge was settled in 2024, with the town paying $1.2 million to Caroline’s Cannabis — about 93 percent of what the dispensary had sought in its complaint.

    Curaleaf’s original host community agreement with Provincetown was signed in 2018 and did not specify whether impact fees had to be “reasonably related” to local costs. But the dispensary is citing a state law passed in July 2022 that overhauled and largely eliminated community impact fees. The bill, which passed unanimously in the state Senate and by a vote of 153 to 2 in the House, forbade towns from collecting impact fees as a percentage of sales and allowed licensees to sue towns for breach of contract. The bill left in place the 3-percent local option tax on marijuana sales that is levied by Provincetown and nearly every other town with a retail dispensary.

    After then-Gov. Charlie Baker signed the law, Provincetown stopped collecting impact fees and Curaleaf stopped reporting sales figures, according to court filings and the town’s public records of marijuana revenue. By that point, the dispensary had paid quarterly impact fees on all its sales from the time it opened in January 2020 until the end of March 2022. The money went to the town’s general fund and was used for operating expenses, including police, fire, and health dept. expenses, according to Town Manager Alex Morse.

     

    1,000 Contracts

    “I think what you’re seeing in this Provincetown case is one of these legacy contracts that got signed, probably on the earlier side,” said Jeffrey Moyer, a public policy professor at Northeastern who specializes in Massachusetts cannabis policy. Contracts signed soon after legal marijuana licensing was formalized in 2017 are often “out of sync with the current regulatory environment,” he added.

    As municipalities renegotiated their agreements with dispensaries after 2022, the new rules “created a lot of uncertainty for the towns,” said Elizabeth Lydon, a lawyer at Mead, Talerman, and Costa.

    Lydon has negotiated host community agreements on behalf of over 30 towns. “Municipalities were not documenting costs because their agreements said that they didn’t have to, that they understood that there were unforeseen costs,” she added.

    Both Curaleaf and Provincetown have requested a trial by jury. The latest court action was on April 24, when the parties filed a joint motion to consolidate the case with two other lawsuits filed by Curaleaf against the towns of Ware and Oxford, where its two other Massachusetts dispensaries are based.

    Provincetown is represented in the case by KP Law, which also represents Ware and Oxford.

    Neither Curaleaf nor its attorneys responded to requests for comment, while Morse said he could not comment at length. “We believe the Town’s response to Curaleaf’s claims speaks for itself,” he wrote in an email.

    Moyer said that the legislature “didn’t necessarily intend for dispensaries to be able to claw back those funds” when they passed the 2022 reform.

    The Mass. Municipal Association had vigorously opposed those reforms and responded to inquiries from the Independent with a statement from its executive director, Adam Chapdelaine.

    “Municipalities across the Commonwealth entered into more than 1,000 mutually agreeable contracts with businesses as part of the establishment of cannabis commerce in Massachusetts,” wrote Chapdelaine. “Challenges to duly executed contracts will have a chilling effect on the industry, as municipalities will not have the trust needed to engage with cannabis businesses.”

     

    Not Every Dispensary

    Curaleaf is the oldest of Provincetown’s four active dispensaries and the only one that has sued to recoup its impact fees thus far. Being the first dispensary on Cape Cod helped it register a banner first year of sales: its impact fee payments to the town indicate that the store had $7.3 million in sales in 2020.

    As other stores opened in Provincetown, Wellfleet, and Eastham, however, Curaleaf’s payments to the town decreased dramatically before ending in 2022.

    Statewide, the growth of cannabis sales has slowed, according to CCC data. “I wouldn’t necessarily call it a full recession, but there’s definitely a flattening out,” Moyer said.

    The amount that some companies paid in 3-percent impact fees is significant and potentially worth fighting for, Moyer said. “That’s not chump change for one of these dispensaries — that’s a significant amount.”

    While the scale of the recent settlements in Uxbridge and Haverhill have “emboldened” some establishments to litigate, Lydon said, there have been other lawsuits in which cities have collected money from dispensaries instead of the other way around. In another Haverhill case, the dispensary Full Harvest Moonz paid the town $250,000 in a settlement last September.

    Moyer said that smaller businesses or those “with close connections to the local community” are often less inclined to seek costly litigation against the town.

    Lydon agreed. Many cannabis businesses “don’t want to get tied up in litigation,” she said. “They just want to continue doing business.”

    SEEING GREEN

    Pot Sales of $10 Million Net $610,000 for Provincetown

    Next: spending the money to address pot’s social costs

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — With three recreational marijuana shops now open, at least two more on the way, and an edibles production facility in the works on Court Street, Provincetown’s adult-use marijuana sector has blossomed since the first two retail outlets opened here in 2020. Now, local tax receipts show the harvest: $10 million in total sales has produced $610,000 in new revenue for the town.

    The numbers reflect a strong start across the last four quarters, split between Curaleaf’s Provincetown location, which opened in February 2020, and B/well, which opened in September 2020. The third pot shop to open, Hennep, appeared too late in the fiscal year to have much effect on the town’s take.

    Provincetown receives 3 percent of pot shop sales through a state-collected local-option tax, which brought in $310,000 over the four quarters of fiscal 2021. Another 3 percent of sales is paid directly to the town as host community fees negotiated with the stores, which netted another $300,000 over 12 months. (The two numbers differ slightly because host community fees and sales tax quarters don’t correspond to identical periods of time.)

    How to Spend It

    The 3-percent local-option marijuana tax is General Fund money that can be spent for any municipal purpose. Last week, Town Manager Alex Morse told the select board that the committees administering the town’s two existing housing funds, the Community Housing Council and the Year-Round Market-Rate Rental Housing Trust, want to talk about the new marijuana tax revenue as well as the new short-term rental tax revenue.

    The 3-percent host community fees, in contrast, are supposed to offset the costs to the town of hosting the pot shops.

    That’s why Provincetown is seeking to direct that revenue toward social programs, according to Assistant Town Manager David Gardner. Those would include, he said, “substance abuse programs, mental health programs, social and community programs, and public safety and crowd control programs.”

    How the host community money is used this year could affect the town’s standing to secure the same funding two years from now. Provincetown’s host community agreements will be up for renegotiation in 2023.

    Meanwhile, community impact fees are being contested elsewhere in the state, including in a lawsuit brought by a dispensary owner in Haverhill. And the Cannabis Control Commission has asked the legislature for the power to regulate the host community agreements between towns and dispensaries.

    Health Director Morgan Clark outlined a mental health program to the select board last spring that would cost half a million per year if fully funded. The largest line item is $250,000 per year for two full-time mental health clinicians who could act as crisis counselors in the community, seeing people immediately and regardless of ability to pay.

    “There are very long waitlists for almost all of our mental health clinicians here,” Clark said.

    “This is not looking to supplant the behavioral health wing of Outer Cape Health Services,” she added, but “we all see this need.”

    The plan also includes funding for up to five mental health and substance use disorder support groups, and a grant program to expand the pool of mental health clinicians here. That program could support outreach, recruitment, and even relocation assistance programs to help bring mental health practitioners to Provincetown.

    The Pot Economy in Context

    The $610,000 in pot revenues is good news in an otherwise tough year — the quarters in question include significant parts of last year’s Covid spring and summer and were some of Provincetown’s worst quarters ever.

    Meals tax revenue, which is collected in all the town’s restaurants and bars, was down one-third in that same period, compared to fiscal 2019, the last fully pre-pandemic year.

    The state’s rooms tax recently began to apply to short-term rentals, which complicates comparisons across years. But the state supplied the Independent with a breakdown of rooms tax into revenue from short-term rentals versus revenue from traditional lodgings that had been taxed previously. Those numbers show that tax revenue from traditional lodgings was down 35 percent in those four quarters, compared to fiscal 2019.

    Ten million dollars in sales is a strong opening for new businesses in a new sector in town. For comparison, tax figures show that the entire hotel sector in Provincetown, excluding short-term rentals, had about $24 million in sales in the fiscal year that just ended (that figure is down from $37 million in pre-pandemic fiscal 2019).

    The entire restaurant and bar sector had about $58 million in sales in fiscal 2021 (down from $87 million before the pandemic).

    The last year for which Provincetown’s tourism director Tony Fuccillo has general sales tax data is 2017. In that year, the entire retail sector, excluding clothing articles not taxed, had $38 million in sales.

    The pot sector is changing fast, with new shops opening in Wellfleet and Eastham and almost every retailer on the Outer Cape diversifying into cultivation, edibles production, or both. The fortunes of individual operators will surely vary greatly, but it seems clear entrepreneurs think Provincetown’s pot industry has room to grow.

    CANNABUSINESS

    And Then There Were Three: Another P’town Pot Shop Opens

    A growing industry could mean a local medical outlet by winter

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Hennep opened its doors at 246 Commercial St. on Monday, May 3, becoming the third retail marijuana shop in Provincetown.

    Owner Andrew Koudijs decided to go into the cannabis business when he was a freshman at Boston University after he and his friend Colin Noel attended a panel on the subject. While getting their undergraduate degrees, they worked on business plans, studied regulations, and waded through a complex process that has bedeviled the entire state industry. Now graduated, Koudijs and Noel moved to Provincetown over the winter.

    “My connection to Provincetown is Family Week,” said Koudijs, who grew up in New York State. “My parents split when I was young. My mom is gay, and there weren’t many families like mine where we were. My brother and I came to Family Week in Provincetown at least five times.

    “When I started thinking about joining this industry, the first place where I wanted to do it was Provincetown,” he continued. “I love the people, the energy — I just thought there was no better place to do this.”

    Andrew Koudijs (right) and Colin Noel at Hennep. The two college friends co-founded the recreational marijuana dispensary, Provincetown’s third. (Photo Paul Benson)

    Koudijs is also opening a cultivation and production facility in Franklin, right off Interstate 495. Almost every retail operation on the Outer Cape is also working on a cultivation facility or a manufacturing facility for edibles — or both. In most cases, it’s the retail shop that opens first, before the other facilities are fully licensed, which is why there’s been a scramble among dispensaries for high-quality merchandise.

    “There’s not a super-wide variety of products on the market right now,” said Koudijs. “So, it’s difficult to differentiate yourself from a product standpoint. The menus will come out from the cultivators that are operating, and everything will get snatched up in 30 seconds — you’re left picking up the scraps.”

    The state’s demand for rigorous product testing is another bottleneck, since there are few licensed labs. “Massachusetts just licensed their third lab, just in the last 12 months,” said Koudijs. At that original panel discussion he attended, one panelist recommended going into the lab business. “I remember Andrew looked at me and said, ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ ” Noel said.

    Koudijs is the sole owner of Hennep’s retail operation, according to documents posted by the Cannabis Control Commission (CCC). The cultivation business is co-owned with his brother Alec. “It’s a family business, and family-run,” said Koudijs. “This is the only retail operation we’re doing.”

    Koudijs says he was able to find housing for himself last winter, but staff housing has been a challenge. One recent location he looked at was meant for eight people, with one bathroom. “How are they supposed to get ready for work?” Koudijs asked.

    The Heal Deal & Medical

    Curaleaf, b/well, and Hennep may soon be joined by a fourth pot shop in Provincetown. Trish Faass, manager of Heal Provincetown, Inc. at 48 Shank Painter Road, expects her recreational pot shop to open in July and a cultivation operation in Sturbridge to be fully licensed by the fall. That could mean medical-grade marijuana will have an Outer Cape dispensary by winter.

    Medical marijuana was authorized in Massachusetts in 2012, four years before recreational, or “adult-use,” marijuana. Yet the nearest source of medical-grade marijuana products is the Triple M dispensary in Mashpee.

    There are several reasons for this, people in the industry say, but the primary one is that medical marijuana dispensaries are required to grow and process 55 percent of what they sell. This has led to higher costs and delays.

    “It’s quite expensive to build out a cultivation and a manufacturing facility,” said Faass.

    Medical-grade marijuana is significantly different from the strains found in recreational stores. For cancer patients and people with chronic pain, there are dozens of compounds in cannabis that are thought to be bioactive and medicinal.

    “You’re looking for the entourage effect — the benefits of the whole plant, without stripping out the terpenes and leaving just THC to get high,” said Faass. Terpenes are aromatic compounds found in plants such as lavender, rosemary, and lemon peel that are especially concentrated in high-quality cannabis. Medical patients will seek out the strain that works best for their condition, according to Faass.

    Another likely reason the Outer Cape has been slow to get medical marijuana is the size of the tourist market, making recreational a priority. Large operators, such as Curaleaf, are capped at three recreational outlets and three medical outlets statewide; the medical ones tend to be located closer to metropolitan centers.

    “We think there are a lot of people who come out here more than just one week a year,” said Faass. “We’ll make a push to convert some of those medical users to our location.”

    CANNABIS CASH

    Pot Produces $480K in New Tax Revenue

    Receipts indicate nearly $9 million in sales from two stores in 2020

    By

    curaleaf
    Curaleaf delivered a $10,000 check to the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod late last year. (Photo courtesy Curaleaf)

    PROVINCETOWN — A long-anticipated source of new tax revenue was confirmed last week when Provincetown reported fourth-quarter payments from Curaleaf and b/well, the two cannabis dispensaries that opened here in 2020. The town took in $480,000 in taxes and fees for the year.

    That corresponds to about $8.7 million in total sales, despite the pandemic and decreased tourist traffic.

    Curaleaf opened its doors on Jan. 29, 2020, closed again in late March for the lockdown, and reopened on May 25. B/well opened for business on Sept. 4.

    Even though there were no pot shops open for three months of the year, tax payments indicate that Curaleaf had gross sales of $7.3 million, and b/well sold about $1.5 million.

    More cannabis stores are expected soon in Provincetown, Wellfleet, Eastham, and in the mid-Cape. Too many variables make forecasting future revenue difficult, but significant growth is likely.

    Three Plus Three Equals Six

    Retail cannabis shops send money to town coffers in two parallel tracks. Three percent of sales revenue is collected by the state and forwarded to town governments as a “local option tax.” Separately, towns negotiate a host community agreement (HCA) with each retail outlet, and most HCAs include a “community impact fee” of 3 percent of sales.

    Both streams of money go into a town’s general fund. Local option tax revenue can be used for any municipal purpose, but not “community impact fees,” which are meant to offset the negative consequences of having pot shops.

    In guidance published on Jan. 16, 2020, the Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) specified that impact fees should “bear some reasonable relation to the costs” that towns experience as a result of the cannabis industry. Costs cited by the CCC included traffic studies, public safety personnel, inspections, and substance abuse programming.

    Host community agreements must be renegotiated every five years, and community impact fees are not guaranteed. In renegotiating them, towns need to document the costs they face and how the money will be used.

    Plus One: Charity, Service

    Separate from taxes and fees, Provincetown’s HCAs require cannabis retailers to donate 1 percent of their gross revenue to local nonprofits, and to perform 100 hours of community service per year.

    This is a common arrangement — according to an investigation by WGBH in Boston, about two-thirds of the almost 500 HCAs they examined require charitable giving and/or community service from dispensaries.

    These provisions have been called into question by retailers and the CCC, however, and last February, the state House of Representatives passed a bill that would strike them from the agreements. It never reached a vote in the state Senate.

    Though Provincetown had planned for dispensary contributions to go into a town-administered grant fund, the town counsel has not yet advised whether that’s appropriate, Assistant Town Manager David Gardner said.

    “There has been considerable pushback from the dispensary association about extraction of fees above and beyond the 3 percent allowed by the law,” said Gardner. “There was also the criminal complaint against the mayor of Fall River [for extortion of cannabis retailers], as well as the subsequent investigation by the FBI into how towns implemented the host agreements. We feel it is prudent to wait to see the issue play out.”

    Instead, Curaleaf and b/well have both agreed to donate 1 percent of their gross revenue to various charities on their own, Gardner said. “Curaleaf is at their one-year anniversary, and they’re willing to complete their 1 percent requirement,” he said. “Nobody is kicking and screaming for them to comply — they’re doing it eagerly.”

    According to Casey Sherman, a publicist for Curaleaf, it recently donated $10,000 each to the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod and Provincetown LGBTQ Welcome Center, and $5,000 to the Provincetown Scholarship Fund. Donations were also made to the Soup Kitchen in Provincetown, Carrie A. Seaman Animal Shelter, and Marcey Oil’s hardship fund. Curaleaf employees have already done more than 300 hours of community service, Sherman said.

    Gardner noted that employees of Curaleaf were the primary volunteer support for three different town elections in 2020. “They were at least two-thirds of the people in the auditorium running the national election, both the early voting and for election day,” he said. “At the outdoor town meeting, they had six or eight people there — the whole perimeter security was Curaleaf.”

    The principal owners of Curaleaf, whose headquarters are in Wakefield, are Russian oligarchs.

    B/well has committed to community service as well, said owner Karen Nash of Provincetown. “When we hire people,” she said, “we tell them part of what we’re doing is giving back to the community — people really like that. Around Christmas, we delivered meals to elderly people. They want to do beach cleanup when it’s a little warmer. And I’ve already committed us to the dog park.”

    Though b/well hasn’t started its donation program yet, “I’m glad we have the whole summer before my anniversary date comes up,” Nash said, adding that she likes being able to choose where the money goes. “I’d much rather build a direct relationship with charities than just surrender it to the town.”

    Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to note that $480,000 is the annual, not the quarterly, town revenue from marijuana sales.

     

    CANNABIZ

    The Pot Profit Puzzle, Part One

    Why local ownership is rare, growers may still get in the game, and the tax promise is enticing

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — When b\well opened here on Friday, Sept. 4, it became the second recreational (or “adult-use”) marijuana dispensary on Cape Cod. Nine more dispensaries are on a path to opening on the Outer Cape. They could be a boon to town finances, but it is still unclear whether the industry — so far dominated by larger players — will benefit local entrepreneurs.

    Local ownership is rare, so far, because of the difficulty of obtaining capital for marijuana businesses. Because marijuana has not been legalized at the federal level, borrowing from federally insured banks for any kind of pot business is not an option. It’s not even possible to get a mortgage for the property involved. Having to buy everything with cash up front is a bigger barrier to entry than any regulatory hurdle, said Karen Nash, an owner of b\well.

    bwell
    B\well has opened at 220 Commercial St. in Provincetown. (Photo Paul Benson)

    Nash said her business is being financed by “90 percent Provincetown investors, meaning they live here year-round, are business owners here, or have second homes here.”

    Nash lives in Provincetown. Only one of her investors, Judy Mencher, is listed on b\well’s provisional license. Mencher has a home in Provincetown.

    Curaleaf is the other adult-use dispensary on the Cape, and it stands a few blocks away from b\well. The Curaleaf chain has 90 dispensaries and operates in 23 states. The cash to develop that business has not come from local investors. According to the New York Times, Curaleaf “is led by one of Russia’s most influential financiers, and backed by another.”

    Almost every business that is pursuing a retail license to sell pot on the Outer Cape is also pursuing either a cultivation license or a production license, or both.

    There are two reasons to vertically integrate like this, said Nash: the margins in retail are thin, and the supply is still unsteady.

    “The supply side has been coming online more slowly than the retail side,” said Nash. “Prices have fluctuated — the wholesale price is up to $4,100 a pound right now in Massachusetts. In Oregon, there’s an oversupply, and the price has crashed to $900 a pound.”

    Pot can’t be sold across state lines, so each state is essentially setting up a separate industry with separate supply chains.

    “Even in a mature market, it’s going to be more like a restaurant — the sales numbers are large, but the profit margins are relatively small,” Nash said. Almost every operator is trying to be vertically integrated in order to build a better profit structure.

    Going Vertical

    Cultivation licenses allow for up to 100,000 square feet of marijuana plants, either outdoors or indoors; production licenses allow for the conversion of raw marijuana flower into edible foods and concentrates. Developing a retail operation and one or both of these other businesses at the same time magnifies the complexity, the time involved, and the up-front costs of getting underway.

    Curaleaf has retail, cultivation, and production operations in Massachusetts. B\well has a retail license and is pursuing a production license. Almost all of the other retail applicants on the Outer Cape are also pursuing cultivation licenses, although in nearly every case that cultivation would take place off Cape. Salty Farmers of Eastham is the exception; if approved, its cultivation operation would be in Eastham.

    The High Dune Craft Cooperative in Truro recently submitted applications to the Cannabis Control Commission for a specialty cultivation license. David DeWitt, a farmer in the co-op, said what they’re pursuing is a “social equity license.” DeWitt, who also works for b\well and has worked for Curaleaf, said such licenses “are meant to create a way into the business for people who might not have millions and millions in cash.

    “My old business partner Tim McCarthy worked with Sheila Lyons and [state Sen.] Julian Cyr to figure out how outdoor farmers could get back in this,” said DeWitt. He credited both Cyr and state Rep. Sarah Peake with helping pass the legislation to create these new kinds of licenses. (Lyons was a county commissioner, and is running for the office again.)

    A craft marijuana cooperative can include multiple outdoor farms, indoor farms, and production operations. The High Dune Co-op currently consists of four farmers in Truro: DeWitt, Peter Staaterman, Deb McCullough, and Stephanie Rein, who is a member of the Truro Select Board.

    When it comes to cultivation, “All there is right now is the big guys,” said DeWitt. “It has to do with the transition from the medical-use rules into the new adult-use rules. Early on, they only let people who had already applied for medical licenses apply for adult-use. They gave them a six-month head start. And in order to do medical, you had to be fully vertically integrated: grow, process, manufacture, package, sell, all under one roof. It favored huge players at the outset. You had to have a half-million in the bank or they wouldn’t even look at your application.”

    The Cannabis Control Commission and the state government are trying to reshape that market now. Nash said she believes the CCC wants the market to be more diverse.

    Tax Revenue

    Regardless of the composition of the businesses, tax dollars are expected to benefit towns where they are located. First, all marijuana license holders are obligated to negotiate host community agreements with the towns they are in. In the case of retail licenses, towns are allowed to ask for 3 percent of revenues as a community impact fee, to be used to mitigate any problems arising from the industry (examples include traffic, congestion, policing, fire, or other needs). This is in addition to the 3 percent of revenue that is collected by the state and returned to towns through the local option tax.

    Six percent of retail revenue could wind up being a lot of money.

    Curaleaf opened on Feb. 6, 2020, and had to close on March 24 as part of the statewide coronavirus shutdown. It opened again on May 25. That means Curaleaf was open for seven weeks in the first quarter of 2020, and for five weeks in the second quarter.

    The tax revenue to Provincetown from those seven weeks of sales in the first quarter was $53,500, according to Assistant Town Manager David Gardner. That reflects about $127,000 a week in gross sales for those seven weeks.

    Early returns show that the tax revenue from the five weeks of the second quarter that Curaleaf was open will be about $54,000. At 6 percent of gross revenue, that means Curaleaf was selling about $180,000 of product a week in those five weeks.

    Based on the earlier, lower sales figures, a full 13-week quarter could represent $100,000 in revenue to the town. At the higher sales number, it could be $140,000 per quarter.

    Editor’s note: The print version of this article erroneously stated that b\well was pursuing a cultivation license; in fact, it is pursuing a production, not cultivation, license.

     

    LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

    Letters, March 12, 2020

    From Butch Mullaney and Barbara Brennessel

    By

    Pot Profits Should Stay Here

    To the editor:

    After reading about Provincetown’s financial woes it dawned on me: why couldn’t this town and others run the marijuana distribution business instead of outsourcing it to Curaleaf and all of the other shell companies that the Russian oligarchs have set up in North America?

    How much of the billions of dollars goes to Putin? How much of it goes into interfering with our elections? Between the monetary windfall and Putin’s secret meetings with the Orange Cheeto in the White House, it makes me wonder: what else can we do to make the U.S.S.R. great again?

    Our budget deficit has nearly doubled and our trade deficit has exceeded expectations under the Trump administration’s reign of terror on our democracy. I won’t go on ad nauseam about Putin’s puppet.

    We need to put a stop to enemy countries coming here, taking out our money, and then using it against us. We must stop them from doing big business in the pot distribution and other drug opportunities that come down the road.

    These lucrative businesses and others should be run by local and state authorities, and the money put to use in education, help for the poor, public housing (a desperate need), etc. A little eminent domain, please!

    I, for one, will not be using Curaleaf or any of the other Russian-owned businesses. We need to get out of the quagmire our country is in right now.

    Butch Mullaney
    Provincetown

     

    Herring River Terrapins

    To the editor:

    Wellfleet’s Herring River estuary is the northernmost range for the northern diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin terrapin) in the United States. This salt marsh turtle is listed as “threatened” in Massachusetts by the Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program. The Herring River is an important nesting, foraging, and nursery habitat for terrapins. I have monitored the habitat utilization of diamondback terrapins in the Herring River estuary for the past nine years.

    My monitoring shows that the Chequessett Neck Road dike is a major impediment to the movement of terrapins in the estuary. The dike prevents terrapins from reaching potential nesting, foraging, and nursery habitats. In addition, as terrapins climb up to the road in attempts to reach the landward side of the dike, they are sometimes killed by autos.

    Based on my observations and monitoring data, I predict that restoration of tidal flow to the Herring River estuary and other aspects of the restoration will be a benefit to the species. This proposed project also aligns with the goals of the Regional Conservation Plan developed by the Diamondback Terrapin Working Group, which calls for habitat restoration throughout the terrapin’s range.

    There are many reasons to support the Herring River Restoration Project. Protection of threatened populations of wildlife is yet another important goal for the project.

    Barbara Brennessel
    Wellfleet

    The writer is a board member of Friends of Herring River.

     

    DEPT. OF COMMERCE

    New Year, New Jobs

    By

    Job applicants wait at Curaleaf
    (Photo Nancy Bloom)

    Provincetown residents Patrick Lamerson, Curt Sharp, and Johnny Butero (left to right), wait for their turns to be interviewed for perhaps a dozen jobs at Curaleaf on Commercial Street, which will open at the end of the month if it receives final approval from the Cannabis Control Commission. It is expected to be the first retail marijuana shop on the Cape. The pot company, which claims to be the largest in terms of revenue in the world, and whose major shareholders are Russian oligarchs, held a job fair on Jan. 6 to hire its Provincetown staff. According to the company’s Massachusetts president, Patrik Jonsson, the shop in Provincetown will ultimately employ 30 people in a mix of part-time and full-time positions. For the winter, the company is looking for six dispensary and two to three inventory associates, three team leads, and an inventory manager. —K.C. Myers

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