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<\/figure>\nStill, Betts and the other council members voted unanimously to approve the designation, and to push forward on what multiple members called an \u201cambitious\u201d timeline <\/p>\n
\u201cPatrick and the team have put a tremendous amount of thought into researching this, and while it\u2019s not perfect, I would suggest that maybe we not let the pursuit of perfection be the enemy of the good,\u201d said Andrea Comer, council chair and interim deputy commissioner of the Department of Consumer Protection. <\/p>\n
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Julianne Avallone, legal director of the Department of Consumer Protection, also presented at the meeting, sharing details on the social equity licensure process. In the process, some council members raised concerns about restrictions on social equity applicants not being strong enough to prevent them being co-opted by corporate interests. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere could be a cannabis conglomerate that comes in and says, these are the four licenses that were granted, I\u2019m going to pay a lot of money for these licenses on day two and month two, and how do we think about that because it\u2019s not going to achieve what this group wants,\u201d said David Lehman, commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development. <\/p>\n
State Treasurer Shawn Wooden echoed Lehman\u2019s concerns. <\/p>\n
\u201cSome of us have seen this in the contracting space where contracts are secured under programs like this and not even one day of work is ever performed on it, they\u2019re sold off, and that is definitely not the intent of what we\u2019re doing here,\u201d Wooden said. <\/p>\n
Still, Avallone said that placing additional restrictions on social equity business owners could hamper their economic opportunities in the long run. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we didn\u2019t want to do was make it so that there was a social equity business that was established that then we\u2019re restricting someone from being able to sell their interest,\u201d said Julianne Avallone, legal director of the Department of Consumer Protection. \u201cThough we want the owner to maintain ownership from the time they apply to the time the business goes live, on an ongoing basis, we don\u2019t want to restrict them more than what another owner could do with their assets.\u201d <\/p>\n
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Connecticut\u2019s new recreational marijuana law established a social equity council tasked with ironing out the implementation of equity components of the legislation. The council held its inaugural meeting Thursday morning, where they passed a list of geographical areas deemed to be disproportionately affected by the war on drugs \u2014 and debated the speed of the process and fears that equity would be quickly co-opted by corporate interests. The state plans to prioritize applicants for marijuana licenses who hail from those communities. Gov. Ned Lamont\u2019s associate policy director, Patrick Hulin, presented a list of disproportionately impacted areas compiled by the governor\u2019s… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}