Sharon to vote on retail cannabis

Sean Trombly looks over his plants when cutting clones at his cannabis farm in Chelsea, Vt., on Saturday, Nov. 25, 2023. (Valley News - Jennifer Hauck) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com.

Sean Trombly looks over his plants when cutting clones at his cannabis farm in Chelsea, Vt., on Saturday, Nov. 25, 2023. (Valley News - Jennifer Hauck) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com. Jennifer Hauck

By CHRISTINA DOLAN

Valley News Staff Writer

Published: 10-06-2024 6:01 PM

SHARON — Voters will take to the polls on Oct. 15 to decide whether to allow retail cannabis establishments in town, less than two weeks before the state stops issuing new retail licenses.

In August, Sharon received a petition from Sean Trombly, a Chelsea resident who hopes to open a retail dispensary in town, asking for a public vote on the question. The petition was signed by 5% of Sharon’s registered voters, which is the threshold for requiring a vote.

Trombly, who operates a cannabis cultivation operation in Chelsea called Trombly’s House of Cannabis, has purchased Sandy’s, a roadside diner on Route 14, which closed after a fire in 2022. He hopes to turn the building into a retail cannabis dispensary that also sells food and ice cream.

“I definitely think there’s enough market here to support it,” Trombly said of his proposed business in Sharon. The nearest retailers to Sharon are in Bethel, White River Junction and Randolph.

The requirement that Vermont towns “opt in” to retail sales by public vote has created an uneven geographic distribution of the state’s 86 licensed recreational dispensaries. Burlington has 13 retail cannabis shops, while Morrisville, Rutland, Brandon and Montpelier each have four.

“People are gambling on areas with a greater population base instead of places with smaller population centers,” Cannabis Control Board Chairman James Pepper said by phone last week. This retail clustering has state legislators and the Control Board worried about the risks retailers face in these oversaturated markets.

Retail cannabis “is a very challenging market to operate in,” Pepper said. “There are no lines of credit, no financing, and when people fail out of this industry, it is a lot more personally devastating than any other industry,” he said. Because the sale of marijuana is still illegal at the federal level, retail cannabis businesses lack access to bankruptcy protections, can have difficulty finding insurance and must deal in cash because most banks will not work with them.

But the Control Board cannot selectively halt licenses in areas of retail saturation, Pepper said. “We don’t have the authority to do localized shutdowns; it has to be for the whole state,” he said.

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So beginning on Oct. 25, the state will begin a temporary pause on new retail cannabis licenses. The move comes two years after the first recreational retail licenses were granted in 2022.

Though the licensing pause was a surprise, Trombly said that he is confident that if Sharon voters allow retail sales, he will be able to meet the Oct. 25 deadline. He said that if everything goes as hoped, he expects to open the dispensary in early 2025.

“Being a cultivator already in the system helps,” he said.

Sharon Selectboard Chairman Kevin Gish said by phone last week that he didn’t have much of sense of how residents felt about retail sales. Towns can bring the question before voters instead of waiting to receive a petition, but Gish and the Sharon Selectboard “wanted it to be an initiative of the voters, not something we did,” he said.

His only worry should a cannabis retailer set up shop in town is the potential for increased traffic coming off I-89. “My concern at the moment,” he said, is that “all those cars coming off the interstate would have to come through the village.”

If Sharon’s voters decide to allow retail cannabis, Trombly’s next step will be to apply for a license from the Control Board.

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An information session for Sharon voters will be held on Monday, Oct. 7 at 6 p.m. in the Sharon Congregational Church, located at 40 Route 132 in Sharon, and on Zoom. See the town website for the Zoom link.

Polls will be open at the Sharon town offices on Tuesday, Oct. 15 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. For information on absentee balloting, contact the Sharon Town Clerk at 802-863-8268, ext. 1, or clerk@sharonvt.net.

Christina Dolan can be reached at cdolan@vnews.com or 603-727-3208.