MONTPELIER, Vt. — In June 2022, three months before retail recreational marijuana sales were about to start, the state’s legislative fiscal office predicted Vermont would have a fledgling cannabis industry doing $86 million in sales within two years.
But when June rolled around this year, the numbers were even better than expected: Eighty retail shops registered $128 million in sales, kicking back some $25 million in taxes into public coffers — more tax revenue than from alcohol sales.
By most measures, the rollout of the legal cannabis industry in Vermont has been a success. But it’s been uneven, with a concentration of dispensaries in a handful of communities, while most of the state has so far refused to host any. So Vermont regulators are taking a breath, this month halting applications for new retail licenses and cultivation areas larger than 1,000 square feet while they review how licenses are distributed around the state.
The Legislature, meanwhile, has instructed the state’s Cannabis Control Board to tweak the way it awards licenses, taking population and density into consideration, with a view to more evenly distribute them across the state — a task made more difficult by the fact that only about one-third of the state’s cities and towns have voted to approve retail sales within their communities. [Read More @ The Boston Globe]
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