A medical marijuana processing company got the green light Tuesday night to proceed with plans to open a facility in Milledgeville when City Council approved a rezoning request.
Council members voted 4-0 to approve the rezoning of property at 3015 Heritage Place from Community Commercial to Light Industrial to allow a special use for a medical cannabis cultivation and processing facility. Council member Steve Chambers was absent, in Florida for a family event, and Mayor Mary Parham-Copelan attended via telephone.
Previously, the Milledgeville Planning and Zoning Commission voted unanimously April 1 (with only three members present), to recommend approving the rezoning request.
Cannabis Sanctuary General Manager Jim Frazier appeared briefly before the mayor and council for the third time Tuesday.
“I appreciate all the help and all the support that council has given us. It’s a long haul, but we are ready to go, pending the vote,” Frazier said.
There was no discussion among council members before the vote. Outside the meeting chambers afterward, Frazier said the company is ready to go to work.
“We’ve already been in there cleaning up and doing some things; we just had to wait on this vote,” he said. “We should be up and running in three months. And that’s quick.”
Frazier was not as specific in responses to questions as when the initial presentation was made to city council. He was asked about the anticipated number of employees for Cannabis Sanctuary.
“As we said, it’ll start out at one number and climb to some number larger than that,” Frazier responded. “I’m not going to give you that number right this minute because there are so many things still in the works.”
Previously, Frazier said there initially would be 10-15 on-site employees, with that number possibly growing to as many as 50.
He told the planning and zoning panel in April that the company planned to start with the seed and prepare the product at the Milledgeville facility for sale elsewhere.
“We grow the product, we harvest the product, we process the product, and we extract the product,” he explained then, pointing out that medical marijuana will not be sold at that location. Georgia law currently requires a separate license for a dispensary to market medical marijuana, Frazier pointed out.
Frazier had explained the plans call for the use of pods – containers 40 feet long by eight feet wide – “as grow rooms, dry rooms, kitchens, extraction labs,” as well as office space. He also explained the production system used by the company allows the marijuana seed to be tracked.
“We literally track everything from the time that plant, that seed goes in the dirt,” Frazier stated at the April 1 hearing. “We know we can take that plant, that seed, and track it all the way to the end-user. It has a unique identifier to it, from its birth, all the way to the end-user.”
Frazier said the growth time for the plant is eight to 10 weeks. Then it must dried, shucked, extracted, and packaged to move. If operations begin in three months, that will push the first production date into this fall.