As Northeast Kingdom towns let voters decide if they want retail marijuana shops in their communities, advocates and entrepreneurs see an opportunity for the region.
“If we at least get our feet in the door, we could be first in something for a change,” said Andrew Swett. He and his wife, Kelly, own Evansville Trading Post and he hopes to sell cannabis in the Brownington general store.
Last October, Gov. Phill Scott allowed Act 164 to become law without his signature. The statute legalizes the sale of recreational marijuana, provided municipalities decide to opt in before stores can open within their borders.
Several towns around the Kingdom have decided to place the question on their March 2 Town Meeting Day ballots.
City councilors in Newport, the second-largest community in the region, voted Dec. 21 to lift the petition requirement for putting the marijuana sales proposal on the ballot. In St. Johnsbury, the largest town in the Kingdom, selectboard members are expected to place the question on the town meeting ballot, too, said Town Manager Chad Whitehead.
Behind successful efforts in Newport and Brownington were Liz Vickers and David Templeman. Vickers owns a Main Street building in Newport, while her partner, Templeman, runs a sheep farm in Brownington. The two are weighing whether to jump into the cannabis market.
Templeman has a tempered outlook on the potential for retail weed in the region.
“What I’ve identified in the Kingdom is, this is not going to be the epicenter of sales in Vermont,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty tight and competitive.”
He based that prediction on the area’s sparsely populated nature, and he thinks local over-the-counter marijuana sales may mirror seasonal businesses in the region, such as skiing and snowmobiling.
“It’s going to have to be one of those things that’s ‘in addition,’” he said. “We see that a lot up here in the Kingdom, people wearing multiple hats. The real estate agent in the winter plows roads and is also a farmer.”
Still, he sees marijuana shops as possibly another arrow in the quiver for local economies in the Kingdom.
“There’s not a lot going on out here, so one more market is what we’re looking for,” he said. “And that is something that all of the town municipalities I’ve spoken to see the value of.”
Barton resident Karen Devereux fits the multiple-hat mold Templeman described.
She’s a teacher in Brownington and also runs Northeast Kingdom Hemp, an organic hemp farm, with her husband, Cam. She and her husband collected enough signatures in Barton to get the cannabis question on the town meeting agenda.
“We just figured that since Barton was our town … we should at least take that step so that people have the opportunity to vote,” Devereux said.
People believe that, because the couple are hemp farmers, they will also want to expand into the marijuana market, she said. But the two aren’t sure yet what their plans are.
“Right now, we’re so involved in just trying to keep our heads above water in the hemp business — between the market itself, the competition, the changes in growing hemp and the flood of products that are out there,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of time to think about what our next venture is.”
But, she added, “Legal cannabis might be the only way some hemp farmers can survive.”
Devereux is skeptical that weed stores would attract throngs of tourists to the Kingdom, since legal marijuana is already available in nearby states like Massachusetts. To make money in the market, she believes, producers will need to fall back on a Vermont staple: “a high-quality brand or reputation.”
Tim Fair, a Burlington attorney whose firm focuses on cannabis, has an optimistic outlook for efforts in the Kingdom.
“We’ve had a great deal of interest in the Kingdom,” Fair said. “There are quite a few people who really see the cannabis industry and cannabis retail as a real economic motivator.”
He said he represents about a dozen clients statewide who are viable candidates for retail licenses, and four or five of those are in the Kingdom.
Among his clients, he said, “there’s more interest in the Kingdom than there is in Chittenden County.”
He said the region’s foundation as an agricultural hub gives people the sense that it could be ripe for business. That includes people experienced with cultivating similar plants. In October 2019, Caledonia and Orleans counties had among the highest registered acreage of hemp in the state.
Locals who already grow marijuana, or get it from their own sources, are unlikely to pay for taxed weed at a store, Fair said. But he wagers that tourists will, and that cannabis shops could augment the Kingdom’s existing tourist economy.
“The towns that have put it on (the ballot) are going to see a real benefit from this,” the attorney said. The application for retail licenses will be open for 30 days starting on or before Sept. 1, 2022, according to Act 164. And entrepreneurs will look first to communities that have already opted in, Fair said.
That’s the way Swett, the general store owner in Brownington, sees it.
“I figured the other towns are going to do it, so we might as well jump on it too,” he said. “See if we can get ahead of it for a change. That’d be nice.”
