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Where did all the money go? Another scandal is brewing at the state’s troubled pot watchdog as millions in licensing fees go missing
Riven by chronic infighting and allegations of mismanagement, the Cannabis Control Commission has earned a reputation as a dumpster fire of a dysfunctional state authority.
Now the Bay State’s troubled pot regulator has another big mess on its hands to clean up.
CCC officials have launched an internal review aimed at getting to the bottom of what happened with over $2 million in licensing fees that officials at the state pot regulator apparently have no easy answer for.
The issue at hand is the money owed by cannabis businesses to the commission for licensing fees - fees that have either not been collected or, alternatively, were collected but are now unaccounted for, Contrarian Boston has learned.
Cannabis businesses are required to pay annual licensing fees.
And while there has been apparent bottleneck on the part of the CCC in reviewing license applications in a timely fashion, pot dispensaries and shops are required to pony up their fees anyway.
The commission’s licensing chief, Kyle Potvin, has been out on leave since early June, when whispers of the missing fees were first heard.
The commission’s accounting woes - or something more nefarious - have attracted the attention of the state Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro, according to Frank Phillips, the former Globe State House bureau chief and the dean of local political reporting, who tweeted on X over the weekend.
In a sternly worded letter last month, the IG called upon legislative leaders on Beacon Hill to appoint a receiver to manage the cannabis commission’s daily affairs, calling the authority “rudderless,” with “no one clearly responsible for running its day to day operations.”
Dogged reporter/blogger Grant Smith Ellis was the first to report on the missing licensing fees.
“It is very concerning the fact that they can’t confirm right now whether the money has been collected or if it hasn’t,” state Sen. Michael Moore, a prominent critic of the commission, told Contrarian Boston. “If the organization is being run efficiently, it really shouldn’t be a confusing thing.”
Meanwhile, amid all the turmoil, the fate of the commission’s top leader, Shannon O’Brien, remains in limbo nearly a year after she was suspended from her job.
O’Brien, the Democratic nominee for governor and former CEO of the Boston-area Girl Scouts, was brought in to try and reform a dysfunctional agency with a reputation for backbiting and mismanagement.
Instead, O’Brien found herself relieved of her duties last September over, among other things, flimsy allegations that she had made a racist remark.
State Treasurer Deborah Goldberg, who appointed O’Brien in 2022, has since racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees in an Ahab-like quest to fire her long-time colleague in state Democratic politics, state records show.
However, the allegations against O’Brien are part of a “playbook” used by recalcitrant CCC staff to drive out top leaders they didn’t like or were too demanding, featuring the use of baseless complaints to trigger lengthy internal investigations, lawyers for the currently suspended CCC chair contend.
A similar strategy was used to oust O’Brien’s predecessor. The pot commission’s first chair, Steven Hoffman, abruptly resigned in 2022 under mysterious circumstances, with the CCC even failing to publicly announce his departure.
Weekend snapshot: A roundup of stories that caught our eye
Rocks for brains? NIMBY group rallies to stop apartment building in order to save a rocky outcropping
We have no beef with the Roxbury puddingstone, a type of rock common to Roxbury and surrounding neighborhoods like Jamaica Plain as well.
The state rock - yes, Massachusetts has a state rock - it is so common in Roxbury that it is believed to have given the Boston neighborhood its first name - Rocksbury.
But does it make sense, in the middle of a housing crisis, to oppose plans for a 28-unit apartment building in Jamaica Plain in order to save part of an outcrop of a distinctive, but hardly rare local rock?
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