Pot meeting is Thursday

PALMER — Mat-Su Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss wants your ideas for how yet-to-be-written state laws should address legalized marijuana.

To solicit those ideas, the mayor and the mayors of the borough’s three cities — Virgie Thompson in Houston, Bert Cottle in Wasilla and DeLena Johnson in Palmer — are holding a meeting from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday in the Mat-Su Borough Assembly Chambers.

“This is going to be a fact-finding and -gathering effort,” the mayor told the borough assembly on Thursday. “My intention in holding the meeting is to bring back a resolution to you that incorporates what we want brought down to Juneau.”

Assemblyman Steve Colligan said he wouldn’t make it to the meeting but did have a list of concerns.

“What does it mean for edibles?” he asked. “Is there or isn’t there an agricultural opportunity?”

By “agricultural opportunity” he didn’t necessarily mean growing pot of the smoke-able variety.

“It’s legal to grow hemp in Canada, is there a commercial market there or not? If there isn’t then why not?” Colligan asked.

DeVilbiss, a farmer by trade and a former director of the state’s Department of Agriculture, offered some insight.

“In my travels in South America I was actually involved in some hemp production down there so I know about it. I looked into it personally up here both as a farmer and as the director of the Department of Agriculture,” he said. “Unless there is a biofuel value, which I seriously doubt in the tonnages you would get up here, I doubt that it is viable.”

He said he’d also studied the Canadian hemp industry and found “it has not taken off there.”

Assemblyman Jim Sykes said he intends to propose the borough create a more formal body to study the issue even deeper.

“On Thursday I will be filing an ordinance to create a marijuana advisory board,” he said.

Sykes wants to invite interested parties into the discussions.

“I think that we deserve to invite people who are involved or interested to talk about the upsides and downsides of those many issues and it is quite complex but we don’t know if the legislature is actually going to pass anything,” he said. “I believe that we need to be prepared for any eventuality that comes in.”

Sykes also said that a problem that has hamstrung marijuana retailers in other states that have legalized recreational use might be nearing a solution in Washington.

Federally insured banks are barred from handling money generated from the sale of marijuana, which has left a lot of retailers dealing solely in cash for everything from payroll to vendor payments to property taxes.

“In Washington there’s actually two state-chartered credit unions that do not do business outside of Washington that have figured out how to do transactions,” Sykes said. “We have at least one state-chartered credit union in the state of Alaska but there may be more.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.