Page 32 - BusinessWest February 6, 2023

“We are not anti-business,” Councilor Marianne LaBarge said before the vote, as reported by the Shoestring. “We have a job, and we have heard from so many people to place a cap.”
Some residents at a hearing days before the vote expressed concerns about the impact of so many cannabis shops on the city’s youth, while coun- cilors like LaBarge said they want to protect existing businesses from being crowded out.
Council President Jim Nash, one of the dissenters, said he favored a cap when recreational cannabis first became legal, but now believes the maturing marketplace is providing a natural cap, as evidenced by the Source’s closing and declining sales at other shops. He argues as much in a recent column in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, co-written with for-
mer City Councilor Dennis Bidwell.
“Since when does local government step in to protect the bot-
tom line of existing businesses by excluding the entry of com- petition?” they wrote. “We don’t do that for beauty salons or pharmacies or anything else. It’s one thing to put a cap in place in the early stages of an industry’s development, before anyone
has opened their doors. It’s another thing entirely to enact a cap that would freeze the market where it is, prohibiting further competition.”
What isn’t up for debate is that it’s getting tougher to turn a profit in an industry that’s already taxed about 70% and can’t claim many normal deductions. That reality, plus an ever-more-competi- tive marketplace, both inside Massachusetts and from surrounding states, is creating an environment that’s not unexpected for those who have followed the industry’s maturation in other states.
People like Meg Sanders, CEO of Canna Provisions in Holyoke and Lee, who was in Colorado when that state, one of two, along
“So many people think, ‘if I get
a license, I’m going to be a kajillionaire.’ Sorry, that’s not the case. If you’re in it because of the money, it’s going to be a tough road for you.”
Michael Kusek says the cannabis industry’s tightening profits are a natural evolution that has occurred in other states.
ating themselves in an increasingly crowded marketplace. And the situation already has municipalities revisiting old concerns about a saturated market.
Northampton, where one of the city’s 12 dispensaries, the Source on Pleasant Street, recently closed, is the most notable case, as its City Council voted 6-3 last month to cap the number of retail cannabis shops at 12 going forward.
At press time, Northampton Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra said she would not sign off on the cap, but with a two-thirds vote of the City Council needed to overcome any veto, the measure will likely still become law.
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32 FEBRUARY 6, 2023
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