In 1910, Toledo businessman William Bunting opened a cavernous brass factory on Spencer Street, just a short distance from the zoo.
Eighty years later, arson badly damaged the building. And today, the vacant warehouse is a neighborhood eyesore, its facade pockmarked with broken windows and crumbling bricks.
But soon this once-formidable, now-dilapidated industrial edifice could take on an unlikely new identity: a greenhouse for medical marijuana.
The old brass factory is one of eight locations in Toledo where businesses are seeking state approval to grow marijuana.
Across Ohio, 185 companies are competing for two dozen cultivation licenses, according to a list of applicants the state released this month.
The Ohio Department of Commerce is required to make the state’s medical marijuana program fully operational by September, 2018.
But for now, the proposed locations of most of the cultivation facilities remain unclear, because the state did not include those addresses on its list.
The Blade identified the proposed Toledo sites using zoning notices that the city issued last month.
One of the applicants for a Toledo site is AgriMed, a Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical company that already has secured a license to grow medical marijuana in Pennsylvania.
AgriMed wants to turn the Spencer site into a marijuana greenhouse with an attractive glass exterior and a sophisticated security system, said Eric Mitchell, AgriMed’s medical director.
The project would cost $5 million and generate dozens of long-term jobs.
“We’re talking about using state-of-the-art glass technology in order to use natural sunlight,” Mr. Mitchell said. “We want it to be beautiful. We want to do a facade that people will be proud of in their neighborhood.”
The warehouse sits on the edge of a residential neighborhood, across the street from a row of about a dozen houses. On a recent afternoon, neighbors expressed a range of feelings about AgriMed, from fear that a marijuana greenhouse could increase crime to excitement at the prospect of locally produced weed.
“The building’s been here since the beginning of time. It’s not attractive, it’s not bringing in any business,” said Mario Carter, 36, who added that marijuana should be grown and he should have a “free pass.”
In western Pennsylvania, many locals have hailed AgriMed as an engine of much-needed economic development. Mr. Mitchell said the company applied to plant marijuana in Toledo partly because it saw an opportunity to promote job growth in a struggling region.
But some neighbors are less than eager to have marijuana growing across the street. Kenneth Hunt, a 62-year-old supermarket butcher who lives on Spencer, said marijuana will bring crime rather than jobs to the neighborhood.
“I’m not against people smoking pot. I just don’t think that’s something we need,” said Mr. Hunt, who said he dabbled in marijuana in his 20s. “The building will get broken into all the time.”
Such concerns are reasonable, but neighbors can expect that companies applying to plant medical marijuana near residential areas will provide tight security, said Thomas Haren, a lawyer who writes the blog Ohio Marijuana Law.
“All of these facilities will be incredibly secure. Many of them will have 24-hour security staff,” Mr. Haren said. “This isn’t something where a high school student will just be able to walk in the front door and in minutes find him or herself in a room of marijuana plants.”
Last year, the Ohio legislature legalized medical marijuana, which can be used to treat a range of illnesses, from opioid addiction to cancer. Later this summer, Toledo City Council will review regulations mandating, among other requirements, that medical marijuana facilities operate far away from schools and churches. State law still prohibits recreational use of the drug.
Residential rarity
AgriMed is not the only company seeking a license to grow marijuana in Toledo, but none of the other local applicants are planning to operate near a residential area. HMS Health, which recently received a license to grow marijuana in Maryland, is looking to open a facility at 4500 Detroit Ave., in a building that used to house a strip club. And the multistate cannabis producer Green Thumb Industries has applied to cultivate a field that runs along a vacant stretch of Jason Street.
GTI Director Pete Kadens, who grew up in nearby Ottawa Hills and has family in Toledo, said his company plans to build a 50,000-square-foot facility on the Jason Street property, at a cost of about $10 million. GTI already has cultivation facilities and retail operations in Nevada and Illinois, with more on the way in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Maryland. The Toledo project ultimately will generate 50 full-time jobs, according to Mr. Kadens.
“To come back 20 years later, and create good jobs — it makes an impact,” he said.
HMS Managing Director Shakil Siddiqui said his company plans to spend as much as $15 million on either the Detroit Avenue site or a second facility on Lint Avenue. He expects the project will create about 30 jobs.
“I’m a very conservative person, and I would not really have gone into this business if it was recreational,” Mr. Siddiqui said. “We’re not smoking pot. We’re providing funds to create great material.”
The multimillion-dollar investments promised by AgriMed, GTI, and HMS are typical of medical marijuana companies nationwide, said Carrie Roberts, a consultant who advises cultivators. The application process alone can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and because the industry is so new, unexpected roadblocks often emerge.
For those reasons, the two dozen state licenses in Ohio will most likely go to businesses with robust financial plans and experience in the medical-marijuana industry, Ms. Roberts said.
“A best practice is making sure that you not only have the financing that meets the minimum threshold but to have something in reserve for all those unknowns,” she said. “We’ve seen businesses go under because they don’t expect the hurdles that lie ahead.”
In its heyday, the factory on Spencer was celebrated as a model for the industry, an elegantly designed facility incorporating all the latest brass-making technology. Now, neighbors say, squatters camp near the building and rats scurry beneath a prominent “For Lease” sign.
As she parked her car around the corner from the warehouse, Traci Nickelson, 48, shrugged at the prospect of a marijuana facility in the neighborhood.
After all, she said, it could hardly worsen the quality of life in an area so crime-ravaged that restaurants are reluctant to deliver pizza there after dark.
“If it’s for medical use, I wouldn’t have a problem with it,” Ms. Nickelson said. “It’s not a very good neighborhood anyway.”
credit:toledoblade.com