GRAND RAPIDS, MI — Grand Rapids’ first approved medical marijuana dispensary may be open for business within months.
“We would like to open by the end of summer — less than 120 days,” said Tonja Stapleton, majority owner of Greenstone Michigan LLC. “To do this in my hometown is really exciting.”
Stapleton is a Grand Rapids native now based in metro Detroit.
Her application for a dispensary at 3510 E Mall Drive SE was unanimously approved by the Grand Rapids Planning Commission at their Thursday, May 23, meeting.
The location is just off the East Beltline across from Woodland Mall.
At their meeting, the planning commission heard the first two of 80 applications for a medical marijuana facility in the city.
The commission unanimously rejected the other application, which was for a dispensary at 3452 Plainfield NE. Commissioners voiced concerns about traffic congestion and lack of windows and proposed parking spaces at the site.
There were further concerns that the applicant, Green Skies-Healing Tree LLC, made lackluster and last-minute attempts to engage the area’s neighborhood association and that they weren’t prepared to go before the planning commission.
According to senior city planner Landon Bartley, Green Skies turned in about 245 pages of additional material for their application past the planning commission’s May 17 deadline.
At 8 p.m. the night before the Thursday meeting, they sent planners a revised site plan.
“Do you feel like you were well prepared, the group was well prepared, to make this presentation today?” Grand Rapids Planning Commissioner Kyle Van Strien asked before a vote on the application.
“Yes. The documents that were provided yesterday is everything that would’ve been necessary for you to make a wise decision,” replied Andrea Hendrick, community engagement specialist with Green Skies.
The company has 16 other applications for dispensaries up for consideration by the planning commission, including one just south of the denied application at 3423 Plainfield Ave. NE. They also have other medical marijuana dispensaries elsewhere in the state, including in Detroit.
Some members of the Creston Neighborhood Association attended the hearing and asked the commission to postpone a vote until they could properly vet the Plainfield Avenue application.
The city requires all medical marijuana facility applicants to make “good faith” efforts to reach out to the area’s neighborhood association and hold a public meeting on their plans.
In their initial application, Green Skies reached out for the first time to the association via email March 12 letting them know there was a public hearing at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in four hours. No one attended.
Megan Kruis, the association president, said Green Skies didn’t reach out to them until late April. Because of conflicting schedules, they weren’t able to have a proper hearing until May 16 and May 17, she said.
In a letter to the planning commission, the president of the association wrote of the meeting that Greenskies had a “disturbing… lack of transparency and inability to answer questions.”
Unlike Green Skies, Greenstone had no nearby residents attend the meeting in opposition to their application. However, the owner of a nearby car wash claimed Greenstone never reached out to them about their plans.
The owner said he doesn’t think the area is right for a medical marijuana dispensary and voiced concerns about the volume of kids who utilize the area and would pass by the dispensary.
Greenstone has five more dispensary applications slated to go before the planning commission.
The planning commission, which meets twice a month, aims to tackle two medical marijuana facility applications at each of its meetings.
The commission is tasked with viewing each application on its individual merits. They also are asked to consider the applications as businesses that potentially, at some point, could also sell recreational marijuana.
The order in which applicants go before the commission was determined by a random-draw lottery weighted by an application scorecard.
Grand Rapids’ marijuana business locations prioritized during lottery draw
A Plainfield Avenue address will likely get the first chance to secure a permit to open a medical marijuana facility.
Going before the commission early is important because once a facility is granted a special use permit, it could void another applicant for being too close, city officials previously said.
Special use permits are granted after an appeals period of 16 days from the commission’s approval.
Once a permit is in hand, companies then must obtain a medical marijuana facility operating license from the state before they can open up shop. The process could take a while because the state must, among other things, conduct an inspection of the facility after it is remodeled to final specification.
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