Williamstown Select Board OKs Cannabis, Cable Deals
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Select Board on Monday voted to update its host community agreement with the one cannabis dealer in town and signed on to a new 10-year agreement with Spectrum to provide cable television service to residents.
The three-year HCA with Silver Therapeutics, which opened its doors in the Williamstown Shopping Plaza in 2019, lapsed some time ago, Town Manager Robert Menicocci told the board, but the town and the retailer were waiting for new guidance from the state's Cannabis Control Commission.
"We were a little concerned with putting together host agreements kind of mid-air while [the CCC was] telegraphing changes they were going to make in terms of impact fees and the nature of what our host agreement needs to be like," Menicocci said. "We have been waiting and waiting on them for some time to draft what was promised to us of a model host agreement.
"And we wanted to give ourselves a little more time to digest that model host agreement, because there were some concerns municipalities had raised in general around what the commission had put forward."
Menicocci said that when early adopters, like Williamstown, formed the first HCAs in the wake of 2016's state referendum decriminalizing pot, there was more autonomy for municipalities. Now the CCC is attempting to create a structured regulatory environment similar to that in place for alcohol licenses.
Silver Therapeutics needs to renew its state license in December, prompting the town to renew the local agreement that retailers need to have in place, Menicocci said.
"We feel it's reasonable to move ahead with the host agreement at this point — continue to work with [Josh Silver], continue to work with our Legislature around the refinements that will come out of the control commission," Menicocci said.
The agreement the board saw on Monday included some modifications suggested by town counsel that deviate from the current state model HCA. But those modifications were acceptable to Silver, the proprietor, who attended Monday's meeting via Zoom.
"We feel like we want to get a little something out of this," Menicocci said. "There is still some risk the commission might say no. If they do, we will come back and present a new version that is more in line with the exact elements of the model agreement.
"We feel it's important to not hold Josh up but also to express to the commission that there are some subtleties that we care about."
Silver told the Select Board that the deviations from the state model were acceptable to him as a business owner.
"They're not what I consider really strong business points," Silver said of the modification. "They have to do with reporting to the town. They have to do with notifying with respect to the change of managers. All things I have no problem doing."
That said, Silver said the CCC has been rejecting those types of changes in other host community agreements he has worked on around the state — forcing them to come back to their respective municipalities for approval.
Uncertainty at the CCC was noted in Monday's meeting, which came just before news broke that the chair of the commission had been fired.
"As Josh said, there is a lot of churn," Menicocci said of the state body. "We don't know what to expect there. This [agreement] is a reasonable place to begin the conversation."
The Select Board voted 4-0-1 to approve the HCA with Jeffrey Johnson abstaining.
The board voted 5-0 to OK the new cable agreement, which includes a small concession to the town.
Menicocci said that although most of the complaints his office receives about the cable service relate to ever increasing prices, that is not part of the license that allows Spectrum to operate in town.
The one thing the town could negotiate was how the cable operator funds the local "Public, Educational and Governmental Access Channel," known locally as Willinet.
Spectrum had initially offered to fund Willinet at a rate of 5 percent of the company's gross revenue in town plus a $70,000 capital allotment, to allow the local station to acquire equipment.
"Then they came back and said we're not doing capital anymore," Menicocci said. "They were OK doing a percentage but not the capital piece."
After "a lot of back and forth," the town and cable company reached the accord the board approved on Monday. In it, Spectrum will give the one-time $70,000 capital allotment, and Willinet will be funded at a rate of 4.5 percent of the cable revenue for the first three years, 4.75 percent in years four, five and six and 5 percent in the final four years of the contract.
Menicocci said change may yield roughly the same net contribution to the local station, but the structure of the deal does give the town a little protection against an industry-wide trend of cable customers "cutting the cord" and switching to less costly streaming services.
"To the extent you get money today — with falling subscribership, it's better to get that money up front," he said. "Subscribership could fall off a cliff."
In other business on Monday, the Select Board:
• Authorized Menicocci to draw up regulations for the board's approval that would create an unfenced area for off-leash dogs in the Spruces Park on Main Street, possibly bringing some resolution to an issue on the board's plate for months. After hearing from Andrew Hogeland that the town had definitive guidance about the difficulty of creating a park in areas of the park designated as priority habitats by MassWildlife's Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program, the board opted to allow off-leash activity in an area Hogeland identified that mostly uses the road network of the former mobile home park.
• Heard concerns from Conservation Commission Chair Philip McKnight about a draft regulation for memorial donations (trees, benches, plaques, etc.) on town property. The Select Board's most recent draft limited donations to gifts honoring individuals, specifically excluding organizations in an attempt to avoid having to consider gifts honoring groups that might be controversial. McKnight said he wants to have organizations included as possible honorees and would suggest the same when the Con Comm meets on Thursday. McKnight emphasized in his comments that the commission has absolute authority over the lands under its care, custody and control (Margaret Lindley Park, for example). That prompted Select Board members to assure him that the process of developing regulations was meant to be cooperative, with both the Select Board and Con Comm agreeing to regulations that would apply to public land under their respective control.
• Appointed Barbara Halligan, a resident of nearly 30 years and an elementary school teacher, to the Community Preservation Committee.
• And learned that Hugh Daley, Alexander Davis and Matthew Neely are the only three people to submit government engagement forms to serve the remainder of Hogeland's term on the board. Hogeland announced this summer his intention to step down from the Select Board to move to Connecticut. The board can appoint a replacement to serve on an interim basis until the last year of his three-year term is decided by voters in the town election in May. The board will invite all three applicants to attend its meeting on Sept. 24, when one could be selected to serve until May.
Tags: cannabis,
