Just when things appeared to be settling down, drama set in from the State House to the court house
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An actual agency budget crisis
The Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission doesn’t necessarily surrender one step for every two it advances, but the agency’s estimated time of arrival at stability isn’t getting any sooner either.
Back in April, I spent the afternoon on Beacon Hill with several CCC staff members and leaders. The occasion was the annual State of Cannabis in Massachusetts presentation, basically a field trip for the Worcester office to petition lawmakers in Boston during budget season. And while it was essentially a routine dog-and-pony show, the tone of several speakers—including CCC Executive Director Travis Ahern—was extraordinarily desperate. The new ED said if the agency is not allotted more funds from the state, it will “force [the commission] to continue to punt on priorities.”
Mercedes Erickson, the CCC’s investigations and enforcement project manager, went even further. She said her staff of 68 people spanning the licensing and testing departments to enforcement counsel faces multiple hurdles, including tackling a “growing [number of] complex projects” using management software that’s been out of date since the agency’s launch. “Without proper funding,” Erickson said, “our agency is at risk.”
While relations seemed somewhat cordial between members of the Joint Committee on Cannabis Policy and the CCC during that late-April presentation, sentiments that the commission is correcting course do not apparently extend throughout the State House. As Bhaamati Borkhetaria of CommonWealth Beacon reported earlier this month, lawmakers are reluctant to give them more money. It’s a tough love kind of situation, with one representative even saying the agency doesn’t deserve any additional funding since industry revenue growth appears to be leveling off.
Nevermind that the CCC is processing more and more applications, facing scrutiny to increase oversight of testing regulations in some regards, and taking on new challenges like social consumption. For the legislature, the most dysfunctional and least transparent body in the state, nothing less than full efficiency is required for consideration of sufficient funding. Meanwhile, the agency announced a hiring freeze on May 22.
All the stuff they have to do and then some
Critics of the CCC often point to the painstaking process of changing the so-called “two-driver rule” for delivery companies as proof of how hard it is to tweak regulations in ways to lift up licensees and help companies earn more revenue. That milestone only came after several years of advocacy by business owners decrying the costly and unnecessary burden of having to dispatch two employees on every delivery, followed by months of agency research, rewriting, and redlining.
In light of that punishing haul, it’s hard to imagine how even a perfectly functioning commission could accomplish all of the things that members have eyes on—from increasing public outreach to implementing countless other small-ish changes similar to the “two-driver rule” bend which could help struggling licensees turn things around—all while holding down basic tasks, such as screening applicants and performing inspections. With nothing extra coming from the state, these are all daunting considerations.
In some areas, the answers to problems may be in the legislature. In two hearings over the past month, stakeholders asked members of the joint cannabis committee to push bills addressing issues such as advertising restrictions, purchasing limits, and the eroding medical marijuana program. While some of those measures could fast-track changes to some degree, however, their passage is neither guaranteed to happen quickly or at all. And furthermore, state regulators would be the ones tasked with putting those reforms in place. Which would be ironic since lawmakers don’t want to provide the commission with additional funding.
And did I mention that the CCC is toiling away on its draft of social consumption regulations? There’s been less fervor among canna people and pot investors around the idea of launching weed-friendly establishments with so much uncertainty in the existing retail market, but commissioners and their supporting staffers are nevertheless finally making progress, and it’s worth noting that this theater of responsibility will increasingly consume their limited time and resources.
Is the CCC really to blame for this mess?
Though I’m sure that I’ll catch hell for this suggestion, there is certainly a way of thinking about this whole situation that absolves the CCC. Because as anybody who has ever paid attention to a state agency knows, it’s unlike any other government entity in terms of what the commission has been tasked with doing, as well as in how it must perform under intense media and public scrutiny.
Bureaucracy is by and large built to be tedious and painful, and to extract as much time, money, and blood as possible from the people and businesses being regulated and served. Whether that’s the MBTA or the Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission, it’s not like outsiders can make suggestions to leaders or lawmakers about how they should run and see a response. If that were the case, we’d have happy hour in the Bay State, plus trains and buses to get home safely after much later closing times.
The CCC may have screwed up a million things so far, and its priorities are out of whack with agency investigators terrorizing business owners who already face outrageous competition and external challenges, but that is how things always go in government. What’s different in this case is that regulators are actually trying to make some improvements, all while there is an unusual amount of attention on the impacted industry, which is still too young to have finessed the system so compliance and penalties cost less than acting to the letter of the law, which appears to be impossible with the commission’s moving goal posts.
It’s no wonder that ED Ahern told CommonWealth Beacon: “I would love the CCC to get to a position where we’re a boring regulatory agency, and people don’t really think about us. … We don’t want to be in the news cycle unless it’s an interesting story on the cannabis industry. That’s where we want to be. We want to be a non-news story.”
The actual scandals
With all of that background in mind, it would be foolish to suggest the CCC has played no part in fostering the current Massachusetts cannabis disaster. It’s been a rocky road on many fronts up to this point, and part of that has clearly been the result of poor management. Or to be more specific, the worst problems seemed to emerge from a moment when no one at the agency understood who was actually supposed to be managing. Prior to jurisdictions being drawn up in the process of searching for the current executive director, appointed commissioners fancied themselves to be running the show, while from several angles it appeared that the former ED and other high-ranking managers were steering things.
A lot of dirt from those pandemic times will likely be kicked up in upcoming weeks and months, as the neverending lawsuit between former CCC Chair Shannon O’Brien and state Treasurer Deb Goldberg advances. Muckraking nuisance and requisite industry blog menace Grant Smith Ellis has his excavator out already. As he reported, some of that is likely to involve Commissioner Nurys Camargo, who in late March filed a “motion to intervene by interested third-party data subject” in Suffolk Superior Court requesting that her “personal identifying information” be redacted or impounded from certain data and documents in the Goldberg-O’Brien suit.
Confusing matters even more during these unstable times, Commissioner Camargo announced (and Eric Casey of Worcester Business Journal first reported) plans to step down from her post on May 22, about four months before her term expires. She spearheaded the writing of social consumption rules with Commissioner Stebbins, and as the member serving in the social justice seat, Camargo has also led on issues that affect some of the most vulnerable operators. Time will tell how those initiatives will fare under her replacement—and also under either O’Brien or whoever else ends up filling the fifth seat left vacant in 2023 by the fired ex chair—but right now, it all seems pretty damn suboptimal in the midst of what appears to be positive momentum at the agency compared to a year ago.
