OLIVETTE — Residents spent weeks railing against plans for a new medical marijuana farm here. They got what they wanted Tuesday night.
Proper Cannabis CEO John Pennington said his firm had withdrawn its plans to set up in an old warehouse and would seek facilities elsewhere.
“These are projects that we don’t want to force,” Pennington told the Post-Dispatch. “We feel like we could have built a great project here, but we’ve got to consider voices and opinion.”
Proper Cannabis had hoped to transform the old Southern Comfort warehouse at 1220 North Price Road into its second cultivation facility in the region, adding to its first in Rock Hill. The finished product would have had more than 30,000 square feet dedicated to growing, harvesting and packaging bud for dispensaries across the state. Proper Cannabis expected to hire around 100 people to work there.
But the company ran into a buzzsaw at a City Council meeting two weeks ago. Dozens of residents showed up to pillory the project, saying it would unleash noxious odors on nearby homes, threaten residents’ health and tank their property values.
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Council members responded by postponing a vote to approve a permit for the facility. Then last week, they began looking at rewriting zoning rules in a way that would have allowed them to block it.
The development marks the second time this year that medical marijuana firms have run into trouble in the St. Louis suburbs. Business owners in Des Peres spent weeks unsuccessfully trying to fight a new dispensary set to go in there.
