By Brandon T. Bisceglia
Orange will allow retail cannabis establishments to come to town via a special permit application.
That was the decision made by the Town Planning & Zoning Commission at its Sept. 20 meeting, which overrides a moratorium that had been in place since shortly after the state legalized recreational sales in 2021.
The TPZC’s decision came in response to a request earlier in the month by representatives of Southern Connecticut Wellness & Healing and parent company Green Thumb Industries, who would like to move their existing operation from Milford to the location of a former bank at 175 Boston Post Rd. in Orange.
Though the regulation change gives Green Thumb an entryway to the town, the company will still need to go through the special permit process that it helped create.
Green Thumb would likely be the only game in town, too, as the language of the text amendment would effectively restrict the number of cannabis establishments to just one.
Between the time of their first appearance on Sept. 6 before the TPZC and the Sept. 20 meeting, attorney Marjorie Shansky, who represented the applicant, said that they had gotten approvals for the text amendment from the Traffic Commission and Chief of Police Robert Gagne. Gagne had also reviewed the company’s security plans and given them the go-ahead.
Shansky noted that the approval was really a standard that didn’t need to be satisfied until the special permit application stage. “But we’re delighted to have gotten this far, to have that acquiescence and approval from the chief of police,” she said.
Though the TPZC had kept the public hearing open to allow for input from the public, no one attended the meeting to speak for or against it. Selectman Mitch Goldblatt, the only member of the public to weigh in at the prior meeting, had spoken in favor of allowing a dispensary.
When the TPZC turned to its own deliberations, commissioner Chris Cornell said that the state had allowed the towns discretion to decide whether they wanted to be “giving our basic tacit approval” to cannabis sales.
“I don’t feel a compelling need to make it any easier to get the recreational use in our particular town,” he said.
Commissioner Paul Kaplan said that his thinking was on the opposite side of Cornell’s.
“I think it’s actually not that big a deal right now,” he said. “I don’t see why we would not participate in that in the town of Orange.”
Chair Oscar Parente said that he had initially been against the proposal, but that he had been convinced otherwise.
“The one thing I was worried about was would the chief go along – Chief Gagne. I was concerned that he might be averse to the whole concept in Orange. But that doesn’t appear to be the case,” he said.
Kaplan and Parente voted to approve the text amendment, along with Thomas Torrenti. Cornell voted against it. Judy Smith, who had mentioned she felt ambivalent about the whole thing, abstained.