Did Pennington County make a deal with a dealer?

By Joseph Budd

Native Sun News Today Staff Writer

As the state has been slowly working towards the legalization of marijuana, the forms, rules and grades, the state has had a time in making sure certain policies are in place. The city of Rapid City, for example, set down they would only offer out 15 licenses to dispense the drug, and you had to submit a bit of paperwork to make sure everything was good. Apparently, this is where the first oops, on the side of the city bungled their own procedures. One of the folks seeking to make money off the drug business, is a fellow named Kittrick Jefferies. Now, Jefferies, owner of a group aptly named Dakota Cannabis Consulting, had already been involved in the legal side of the business, working directly with the Pennington County Commissioners. The irony, was during a meeting with the Commissioners, preparations were already underway to make sure everyone got a fair shake. Jefferies himself was quoted as saying “You don’t want to tax it out of existence to where it’s cheaper to purchase it off the black market than it is to purchase it from a licensed dispensary. You don’t want to zone it out of existence where you create pockets of where this cannabis businesses are going to go to increase evaluation of certain properties and certain zoning districts.” This was from a meeting that happened in July of last year.

Now, when the state held it’s lottery on who would win a license to sell, there was the premise that the provisional location would be the final location, so a license would be tied to a physical address. And when the lottery concluded, an LLC, called Puffy’s, won 7 out of the 15 bids.

Interestingly enough, Puffy’s is owned by the same Jefferies. However, this isn’t Jefferies first foray into the marijuana business. According to Jefferies, “we’re looking forward to bringing which once was an unregulated market that the South Dakota voters passed with a majority to a regulated industry. My background in compliance in all things cannabis is going to be looking forward to working with the state and local officials to make sure we have the most compliant dispensaries in the state.” He also tried to note that he had named it Puffy’s named after his mother, who is a breast cancer survivor. Further research, on the licenses showed a meeting addressing the multiple licenses won, for example the West Main Suites that Jefferies won, being debated out by the Rapid City Planning commission. When the meeting took place on November 24^th, several parties involved in the decision-making, showed that the Commission was aware of the effort to “stack the deck” with applications to increase their odds on winning a license. It was mentioned as well, that while 4 licenses were won for the address at 2120 West Main was it was originally broached that one would be won, and the other three denied. But Justin Williams, the Assistant City Attorney, made the clarification that license holders would be able to have more than one license, and would be able to transfer, but must be operable within a year or it is revoked.

About the only major sticking point that will exist, will be when Jefferies needs to go establish these licenses in another location, to avoid saturation, and item that also came up in the meeting. It was what primarily stopped Jefferies from being able to put four dispensaries in 2120 West Main. Given that there will be 15, spread around the city, he’ll need to make sure his new locations don’t encroach on another dispensary.

The post Did Pennington County make a deal with a dealer? first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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