Company gets out-of-county growing permit
Butler County will not be home to a medical marijuana growing and processing facility, after two permits available in the region went to companies that plan to build facilities in Allegheny and Greene counties.
On Tuesday state officials awarded one grower-processor permit in the southwest region to AGRiMED Industries of PA, for a facility in Carmichaels, Greene County, and another to PurePenn, for a facility in McKeesport, Allegheny County.
The company trying to bring the state's fledgling medical marijuana industry to Butler, Cresco Yeltrah, did win a grower-processor permit Tuesday — but for a facility planned for Brookville, Jefferson County.
The state's decision to bypass the Butler-based project won't stop construction already under way on a facility at Pullman Center Business Park on Hollywood Drive, said Trent Hartley, one of the co-founders of Cresco Yeltrah. But it will dramatically change the future of the 28,500-square-foot facility that's being constructed on a 6-acre parcel at the business park.
Hartley, who along with his brother, Kent, partnered with Chicago-based Cresco Labs and Colorado-based Denver Relief Consulting to create Cresco Yeltrah, said the building would be completed, but the group had yet to determine whether it would be sold or leased to a tenant. The parcel is currently zoned for agricultural manufacturing uses, Hartley said.
He said the state's decision to pass over Cresco Yeltrah in Butler was disappointing.
“Obviously we really wanted to be in the southwest territory and be in Butler, But the numbers didn't work out that way,” Hartley said, referring to the composite score assigned to each application by a team of state officials.
Cresco Yeltrah's application for its Butler facility was given a score of 734.13 out of a possible 1,000, while it's Brookville facility application scored higher with 758.77.
The scores put Cresco Yeltrah's submissions among the most highly-rated applications in the state, but in the southwest region that wasn't good enough to compete with AGRiMED, which posted a 790.44 — the second-highest score of any application — and PurePenn, which received a score of 756.07.
The state received 177 grower-processor applications in all, said John Collins, the director of the state Office of Medical Marijuana. He said the scores awarded to different applications are meant to be used to compare the strengths and weaknesses of each project, and called the state's process fair.
“This has been an objective process,” Collins said.
Those companies who were passed over for permits will have a 10-day window to appeal the state's decision, Collins said. Hartley said Cresco Yeltrah was not planning on exercising that option.
Those companies among the 12 awarded permits Tuesday will have six months to prepare before state officials evaluate their facilities. They will all have to be declared “operational” before being allowed to begin growing marijuana, Collins said.
Meanwhile, state officials are still working to process 280 applications by companies seeking approval to become medical marijuana dispensaries. The state's legislation caps the number of dispensary permits at 50, which each permit-holder allowed to operate three separate facilities. Collins said he expects to announce 27 dispensary permits by the end of June, and expects to have other aspects of the state's medical marijuana infrastructure, like a patient registry and a seed-to-sale tracking system, up and running by September and November, respectively.
Collins said the state is on track to have medical marijuana available next year, but declined to be any more specific about the timing.
