Page 41 - BusinessWest July 24, 2023

“With the cannabis industry, it was kind
of predatory; everyone looked at it like it was the golden
goose. If you had a building, you asked for four times what it
was worth, and if you had space to lease, you asked the tenant to spend millions of dollars to fix up your run-down building.”
has been absorbed and the jobs created, the arrival of this industry has given the city a tremendous amount of exposure locally, regionally, and even nationally and internationally, he said, adding that many people in business who didn’t know about the city’s assets and benefits, from avail- able real estate to green, comparatively inexpensive energy, now do. And this bodes well moving forward.
For the immediate future, though, the relative strength and resilience of the local cannabis industry is the primary topic of conversation in this year of reckoning. At the very least, there are now real ques- tions about whether this sector has already peaked, and if not, how much more it can grow.
To quantify and qualify the changes that have taken place, Vega talked about phone- call volume — as in calls from cannabis companies calling with questions about the city and opportunities to land there — and
his overall workload when it comes to han- dling license applications and related matters.
“When I started in this job two and a half years ago, we were talking to companies once a week, and we had that peak of having 70 host agreements,” he noted. “Working with the City Council, we got 38 special permits approved; that’s a lot of work on a lot of people’s part.
“But now, I think we had two host-community agreements in the last three months, and two projects in front of the City Council and other departments for review,” he went on. “In two years, it’s changed quite a bit.”
Elaborating, he said many of the major players and ‘funders’ in this industry have already moved on to the next emerging markets in this industry, such as Connecticut and New York, with their atten-
Tom Cusano says the property at 1 Cabot St. will become an incubator of sorts for several small, cannabis-related businesses, a model he believes has a great deal of promise.
tion also focused on federal legislation to legalize cannabis.
All of this is reflected in the commercial real-estate market, he said, referencing the large question marks now hanging over sev-
eral of the properties acquired or leased — at high prices — with cannabis businesses in mind.
Cusano, who purchased his property not long after cannabis was legalized in this state, summed up the market frenzy, if that’s the right term, this way:
“With the cannabis industry, it was kind of predatory; everyone
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