WHATELY — Even in the town where some of the county’s most detailed marijuana zoning bylaws were drawn up, the process is still a tedious one.
The day after hosting a community outreach meeting at the Whately Town Offices, University of Massachusetts Amherst professor of nearly 40 years Stephen Herbert went before the Whately Selectboard this week to discuss a host agreement.
By the end of the discussion — in a long night Wednesday, which included a conversation on a retail pot shop and a potential new owner for the Castaway strip club — the Selectboard decided it needs to form an ad-hoc committee focused on drawing up host agreements on marijuana over the next few weeks.
The Selectboard said the panel will include at least Selectwoman Joyce Palmer-Fortune, Town Administrator Brian Domina and Police Chief James Sevigne Jr. Understanding businesses are trying to move forward with the state’s licensing board, with a limited amount of licenses expected to be given, Palmer-Fortune said they hope they can wrap up host agreement language relatively soon, possibly within the month.
Before a business, whether for cultivation or for retail, can formally request a license from the state, it needs to have a host agreement.
It’s been difficult to give the right specific guidance or provide any boilerplate language for prospective marijuana businesses in town, Domina said, because of the lack of precedent in the region.
“This is new to us as it to everybody else,” Domina said. “We haven’t discussed what the board wants in a host agreement.”
In the particular case of Herbert’s proposal of a cultivation site in the greenhouses of the Scott Hutkoski’s Long Plain Farm, Domina sees a real lack of precedent because any host agreements in the area that have already been written, involve cultivation in a more industrial setting.
Palmer-Fortune said she wants “this to be a successful business. We need successful business in town.”
The selectwoman did object to one major point in Herbert’s cultivation proposal — lighting.
She doesn’t want any light emanating at night from the greenhouse, even if it’s vertical. Palmer-Fortune referred to her profession as a physicist, having friends who are astronomers, and the desire to observe the stars, and that light going straight up into the sky, like Herbert said there might be, will create enough pollution to disturb the gazing.
Herbert had come to the board with a form of a host agreement, as guided by Domina in the lead up to the meeting, but it needed more work, especially with the input about greenhouse light.
“While we want to promote this, we want to be very cognizant of impact on neighbors,” Selectman Jonathan Edwards said.