05.27.2022

One last humiliation in store for Baker? | $1 million for a pot shop license?| MIT to look at energy efficiency and housing affordability | Ticket giveaways long gone at Celtics games| About Contrarian Boston

Missing the high times: Thwarted cannabis investors battle over who lost Newbury Street gold mine

Rooted in Roxbury is poised to open a recreational cannabis shop on Newbury Street in August, a breath of fresh air in an industry too often dominated by big cannabis companies and their overwhelmingly white investors and executives.

However, behind the scenes, the original team of investors who tried and failed to open a pot shop on the Gold Coast of Boston’s retail scene are still battling over who is to blame for messing up the opportunity of a lifetime.

And in typical Boston fashion, the case revolves around claims of political connections – and the ability to maneuver through a complicated city and state permitting process - that may not have been all they were cracked up to be, according to lawsuits filed in state court.

Geoffrey Reilinger, who first proposed building a cannabis dispensary at 331 Newbury St.  back in 2017, is suing his former partners, namely publicly-traded Canadian pot giant GTI, the company’s CEO and CFO, and a subsidiary, for potentially millions in damages.

Reilinger, whose mother chaired the Boston School Committee under Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, began smoking pot in the early 2000s as a way to deal with MS flareups. Impressed with the results, he went on to launch his own marijuana startup, Compassionate Organics and began moving ahead with plans to open a medical marijuana dispensary on Newbury Street.

But after Reilinger sold his firm in 2018 to GTI and came on board as consultant, his new partners stopped using the politically savvy consultants he had hired, including one of Boston’s top PR mavens, Dot Joyce, who served as Menino’s press secretary.

“The Defendants believed they were sophisticated enough of operators to open in the City of Boston without using local 13 professionals. This was untrue, and further contributed to the delay in opening the Newbury Street Location,” Reilinger’s attorney writes in a complaint filed in Suffolk County Superior Court.

Compounding matters, GTI decided to redesign the planned Newbury Street cannabis dispensary against his advice, using a London firm with no experience in the murky world of Boston politics and trigging a new round of reviews by city officials, Reilinger’s lawsuit contends.

GTI eventually decided to pull the plug on the venture, cutting a deal to lease the pot shop to Rooted in Roxbury in exchange for a 9 percent stake.

But Reilinger has it all wrong, contend lawyers for GTI, who have filed a counterclaim. When it came to all his big talk about Boston political connections, GTI contends the firm’s former partner was all hat and no cattle.

“Mr. Reilinger’s representations about himself and his connections and influence were knowingly false,” states the counterclaim filed by GTI and the other defendants.

File under: Only in Boston.

Coming soon: $1 million pot shop licenses?

Move over outrageously priced liquor licenses, there’s a new kid in town.

The cannabis market in Massachusetts is still in its infancy. But the ultimately ill-fated deal, detailed above, among investors interested in building a Newbury Street medical cannabis dispensary suggests a seven-figure value for pot licenses when they get re-traded someday, as liquor licenses are now.

That’s well above the $400,000 liquor licenses typically fetch now, said Elliott Laffer, chair of the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, whose group has been involved in discussions over the years on the Newbury Street site. 

Geoffrey Reilinger sold his services to GTI, a major cannabis industry player, as a local political operator who could line up all the necessary permits, including the necessary licenses from the state’s Cannabis Control Commission, and permits from Boston City Hall, to open a marijuana business on the famed Back Bay retail boulevard.

The original plan called for GTI to first open a medical marijuana business, followed later by a recreational cannabis business, effectively requiring two different licenses.

Under the terms of the deal, Reilinger was to have collected $1 million within thirty days after the initial medical marijuana dispensary opened, followed later by another $1 million payment after a planned recreational pot shop opened at the same site.

Oh, yah, and Reilinger contends he was also in line to receive a cut of the revenue – adding up to millions of dollars more - after the opening of the so-called adult use cannabis emporium.

“That sounds like an awful lot of money,” Laffer said.

You can say that again.

Brace yourself: Trump weighing Bay State campaign stop, fundraiser for Diehl

That anyway is what Trump, after some prodding from Howie Carr, told the Boston Herald columnist on his WRKO radio show on Wednesday.

The interview also confirmed suspicions, as we wrote about here previously, that Trump’s decision to endorse Geoffrey Diehl last fall was motivated more out of spite – and a grudge against moderate Republican Gov. Charlie Baker – than anything else.

If you missed it, Diehl, a die-hard Trumpie who has hired Corey Lewandowski as a senior campaign advisor, won more than 70 percent of the vote at last week’s MassGOP convention in Springfield.

“The good thing is we got Charlie Baker out,” Trump told Carr. “Charlie Baker is bad news.”

As far as Diehl goes, Trump called him a “good looking guy” who “can win the whole thing.”

“I might do that,” Trump said of a potential fundraiser for Diehl. “We will do something for him. All this stuff is rigged. People don’t realize we have a lot of support up there.”

File under: Dumb and Dumber

Study to weigh impact of net-zero standards on housing affordability

Massachusetts is one of the most expensive places in the world to buy a house or rent an apartment. By some estimates, we are now No. 2 in the housing unaffordability sweepstakes, behind only California.

Developers and builders have been warning for a while now that tough new state and local building emissions standards could make housing here even more expensive.

The idea isn’t that there shouldn’t be stringent standards, but rather that the cost of implementing the new regulations on home buyers and renters should also be understood.

To that end, the Joe Landers, executive officer of the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Massachusetts, said the group is paying for a two-part study. Wentworth University will examine the impact the new standards will have on the cost of building new homes and apartments, and then will turn that information over to MIT, which will take a broader look.

Along with the impact of the new standards on housing affordability, researchers at MIT will probe whether there might be ways to offset the increase in costs through public policy, and, in particular, things like tax credits or density bonuses.

Stay tuned.

They’ve come a long way, these Celtics

Not long after Wyc Grousbeck, Stephen Pagliuca and the Abbey Group bought the Celtics for a then stunning $360 million in 2003, I wrote a story a front-page story, or “splash” in tabloid parlance, for the Herald: “Hapless Celts Give Away Tix.”

The team was so bad, that yes, they had to give away tickets to fill the stands, though the Green Team’s front office was trying to be discreet about it, doing giveaways to youth nonprofits and the like.

Not a happy camper, Grousbeck refused to talk to me for a year, but there were a lot of doubters back then, with Mayor Thomas M. Menino reportedly remarking the new ownership group had paid hundreds of millions of dollars for ‘bunch of sneakers,’ or something to that effect.

Fast forward to 2022, and the Celtics are poised to go to the NBA finals again, provided they win tonight at the Garden. It will be the third trip under the current ownership group, which survived a lot of early skepticism to go on and thrive,

And the freebies are long gone. The price of courtside seats is now a whopping $18,000, the Boston Herald reports.

Quick hits:

A way forward amid the grief and tragedy? “‘We all have the same enemy — gun violence’: David Hogg believes common ground can be found to change gun policies”     Boston Globe

Receivership in the cards? High-stakes showdown over BPS: “Boston submits school improvement proposal to state  CommonWealth Magazine

House speaker eyeing potential tax on services, ‘gig economy:’ Mariano Says Gig Economy Getting “Free Pass” State House News Service

Will Biden finally give the green light? “Latest White House plan would forgive $10,000 in student debt per borrower”    Washington Post

Time to put up or shut up time for Manchin, Sinema: “The GOP’s two favorite Dems try to turn their cred into a guns deal” Politico

What is Contrarian Boston?

I have fielded emails over the past couple weeks asking what Contrarian Boston is about.

Here’s a link to our mission statement – you can find it in the “about” section.

For a more prosaic, nuts-and-bolts description, read on.

An online newsletter, Contrarian Boston publishes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In Contrarian Boston you’ll find analysis of the day’s news, and original reporting as well.

Our focus is:

·      Politics and all levels of governance, good and bad, with an emphasis on state and local, with some national mixed in;

·      Economic growth and business, especially real estate, housing and new development projects;

·      The media and why it does what it does;

·      Education, from school board spats to the doings of multibillion-dollar university endowments;

·      And whatever else catches our fancy.